ABSTRACT
Educational inequalities between children from different social classes have been a central political concern in Britain since before the Second World War. Various government-sponsored reports addressed this issue (such as those of the Hadow and Norwood Committees), leading up to the 1944 Education Act. This Act was a milestone in the development of policy to bring about educational equality between the social classes, but concern about educational inequalities continued to grow in the post-war period, reaching a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. And at that time other kinds of inequality, notably between the sexes and between majority and minority ‘racial’/ethnic groups, also became the focus of political attention, at both national and local levels. More recently, under the influence of Thatcherism, the salience of educational inequality as an issue in government policy has been reduced, in favour of a preoccupation with declining academic standards and a heightened concern with the contribution of education to economic productivity, manifested in the 1988 Education Act and subsequent legislation. However, educational inequality has by no means disappeared from the agendas of political parties, interest groups, and local authorities.
