ABSTRACT
The changes to primary schools, associated with the rise of the quasi-market and the decline of the public service in education, and the meaning of these changes, are difficult to ascertain. This is due to the lack of information about the workings of state schools in previous decades, indeed this is one of the issues at the centre of this book. There is no difficulty reading about what schools should be doing at any time but there is a problem in finding out what they did do. The intended and unintended consequences of a shift into a quasi-market based education system have configured educational research responses to the reforms of the late 1980s but one of the main difficulties in researching this area is the lack of comparative data.
