ABSTRACT
It was Margaret Thatcher who said, after the 1987 general election, that she planned to go further in educational policy making than ever before and she necessarily casts a long shadow over any analysis of the governance of education during the period immediately before she came to office as Prime Minister. She went on to enact the 1988 Education Reform Act, which many commentators have seen as being a benchmark, transforming irredeemably the educational landscape in Britain. But the deeper reality of this period was that the years 1974-9 witnessed transformations in attitude, in public rhetoric and to a lesser degree in the day-by-day detail of policy making sufficient for us to conclude that this, and not the 1980s, was the era which saw the real anticipation of Blairite and New Labour educational policy making. This chapter will seek to identify and analyse the key developments in educational policy making during the period which saw Reg Prentice, Fred Mulley and finally Shirley Williams hold office at the Department of Education and which culminated in the initiative by Jim Callaghan to establish unprecedentedly direct Prime Ministerial involvement in the making and direction of educational policy.
