ABSTRACT
In Britain, during the period of so-called social democratic consensus following the Second World War (CCCS 1981), all but a small minority of children were educated in state schools maintained by democratically elected local education authorities (LEAs). From the 1940s until the mid-1970s, one of the emphases of social democratic policy was on state intervention to ensure access and entitlement to a standard model of education for all, together with a degree of positive discrimination in order to enable disadvantaged groups to take advantage of it.
