ABSTRACT
One of the major criticisms that sociologists of education have made of social democratic education policy is its tendency to neglect the significance of the content of education and concentrate on increasing access to élite styles of education. Indeed, this was one of the themes of the introduction to a collection of papers edited by Michael Young and myself in the mid-1970s (Young and Whitty 1977). By the time the book was ready for publication, however, we felt it necessary to add a postscript to discuss the significance of a break with this tradition on the part of the Labour government in the aftermath of a speech by Prime Minister James Callaghan at Ruskin College, Oxford, on 18 October 1976. It was this speech that launched what we now know as the Great Debate on education.
