ABSTRACT
The initial assumptions favoured a bipartite or tripartite system of secondary schools, even though multilateral and comprehensive schools were not officially proscribed in the Act. The movement to establish comprehensive schools in the 1950s was very much a grass-roots affair, with no encouragement, and often fierce opposition, from the Conservative Government, in power from 1951 to 1964. It can be argued that the meretricious agenda of the 1988 Education Reform Act was in many ways a tribute to the remarkable resilience of the comprehensive ideal. The Education Secretary himself argued in an article in the New Statesman and Society that socialists must now 'come to terms with the concept of specialisation': selection is not, and should not be, a great issue of the 1990s as it was in the 1960s. The Conservatives have bequeathed to New Labour a sharply divided system of secondary state schools.
