Introduction

With its prioritisation of ‘education, education, and education’, the incoming UK Labour government of 1997 emphasised the potentially crucial role that the education system might play in the service of meeting wide-ranging government objectives. However, these objectives have varied widely from concerns about economic productivity to health, citizenship and social mobility, and it has never been entirely clear in policy, theory or practice whether the education system is the answer to the problem of social immobility and entrenched disadvantage, or part of the problem. Perhaps much depends on what we mean by ‘education’, how we view the role of education in the lives of individuals, what objectives we set the education system and how we set out to implement these objectives.