ABSTRACT
In the light of the other, wide-ranging, reforms to the education system of England and Wales over the past two decades it is easy to underestimate the importance of the development of statutory appeal rights in respect of various forms of decision. Yet without effective mechanisms for redress of grievance, notions of parental ‘empowerment’, partnership or participation, which have become a feature of education policy in recent years, would have little meaning. It would be much more difficult, or in some cases impossible, to enforce the individual rights which governments have conferred on users of the education system as a means of reducing the dominance of education providers and contributing to their greater accountability. The only redress mechanism provided by the Education Act 1944, on which the modern education system was founded, namely the right of complaint to the Secretary of State, would have proved inadequate to meet parents’ expectations of effective remedies to infringements of individual rights-rights whose increasing assertion formed part of the emergent consumer culture in the education system under the post-1979 years of Conservative government (see Harris 1993).
