ABSTRACT
Varying degrees of central control over school curricula have been a common experience of school systems. The circumstances and nature of the control continues to generate international interest (see Naish, 1990). In Britain the late nineteenth-century elementary school codes, backed by a rigorous inspection system, went some way towards establishing official oversight over the curriculum though, as Her Majesty's Inspector Matthew Arnold complained (see the above quote), at a cost. But the government did not go so far as to interfere in the choice of textbooks, and indeed relinquished their control through the codes in the 1920s. Sixty years on, the Education Reform Act of 1988 was of a different order of intrusion, however, and constituted the most forceful piece of central intervention in the curriculum in the history of education in England and Wales.
