ABSTRACT
David Reynolds discusses how the use by schools of sociologists as consultants to help improve educational outcomes can reduce traditional barriers to mutual benefit. There seems little doubt that the nature of the theoretical and empirical material on offer from sociology of education is itself partly responsible for this state of affairs. The correspondence theory of Bowles and Gintis and various other reproduction theories strongly emphasised the economic, political and cultural constraints upon the educational system. Much of the sociology of education or the social psychology of education simply involved study of the economic, political and structural factors outside the schools, not the schools themselves and their individual processes. Teachers have often tended to perceive problems practically and pragmatically, yet sociology of education for them often seemed to question the ends of education as well as the means.
