ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon how the two main political parties in Britain, the Conservative and Labour Parties, have viewed the independent sector of schooling since the 1944 Education Act. It elucidates the images of independent schooling that encourage parents to pay fees and that persuade political parties to pursue particular education policies. Although parents and political parties may be misguided in their understanding of educational realities, these failings are small in comparison to how British social science has understood independent schooling. All surveys reveal that most pupils in independent schools have fathers with middle-class occupations whereas the majority of pupils in maintained schools have fathers with working-class occupations. The private sector's function of class reproduction is complicated not simply by its own internal divisions, and the relationship of the class structure to those cleavages, but also by movement into and out of independent schooling across generations.
