ABSTRACT
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of idea. The greater part of people lives is spent in dreaming over the morrow, and when it comes, it, too, is consumed in the anticipation of a brighter morrow, and so the cheat is prolonged, even to the grave. Observable, assessable features of organization and practice are viewed as operational outcomes of 'policy'. A simplistic notion of cause and effect seems to have invaded reason to the point where the legitimacy, coherency, cogency and defensibility of the intellectual scaffolding to legislative change are judged in terms of the utility of emergent systems and sub-systems at local authority and school level. The one-term in-service courses were an excellent introduction but the declining resource base in support of local policy initiatives has effectively limited provision in this sense. Treating both the Warnock Report and the 1981 Act as texts raises further difficulties.
