ABSTRACT
Looking back from the vantage point of the mid-1990s, one of the most striking things about the English education system is how little it has changed since 1964. I have argued in an earlier book, Education in the Post-War Years, that the form taken by English schooling into the 1960s was already largely determined by the historical residue, by a preference for established practice and procedures which tended to inoculate education and educators against radical change. If ever one was to look for a significant restructuring of English education it would surely be during this most recent thirty years, a period which has seen both economic and social transformations. Yet it is impossible to avoid the judgement that much of the landscape of English education today would be immediately recognisable to a visitor whose most recent acquaintance with it was in 1964, and some of its key features are almost unchanged.
