ABSTRACT
Some newspapers publish weekly sections devoted to education, though these, too, are much reduced from what they were even 10 years ago. Public interest in education was growing, and not just because the media debate was increasingly vigorous and polarised. But the media wished to subsume almost every educational issue into the progressive-traditional framework: for example, it was thought desirable to give parents more choice of schools and the private sector more opportunities to run them, because both would bring schools 'back to basics'. Politicians, working to their own ends, encouraged journalists and media commentators to report education. By the end of the 1980s, the media narrative was almost wholly focused on an apparent battle to the death between 'traditionalists' and 'progressives' and, after the Conservatives' centralisation of educational power, it had an increasingly political dimension.
