ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a generally critical reading of the education policies which currently are defining the work contexts of teachers in the UK and which, in our view, hinder the task of promoting equity and equality in the education system. In the economic expansion and social optimism of the early 1960s it was widely believed that the educational system could be changed in such a way as to provide both greater equality in society and economic efficiency. State management of education in the interests of justice and equality had to be supplanted by a consumer choice, cost-efficiency and the individual opportunities to pursue freely chosen differentiated interests in a differentiated system of schooling. The chapter shares Lauder's view that if notions of opportunity, choice and diversity are to be at all meaningful in a democratic system of education and Physical Education.
