ABSTRACT
It is one of the paradoxes of the Education Reform Act 1988 that even though it was assumed that ‘the pursuit of egalitarianism is now over’ (Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education), the effect of the legislation has been to promote greater public concern about the unequal performance of different groups of children in the school system and onwards. Social inequalities now receive considerable public exposure from the publication of school performance tables, the breakdown of National Test results into gender categories and, for example, the publication of Ofsted reviews such as that by Gillborn and Gipps (1996) and Gillborn and Mirze (2000) on the achievement of ethnic minority pupils, and Arnot et al. (1998) on recent research on gender and educational performance.
