ABSTRACT
Both the joy and the pain of getting to grips with policy studies is its manysidedness as a knowledge ‘region’. Even when we delimit our view to sociological approaches and education, we face the prospect of grappling with a complex aspect of social life using a discipline that is itself weakly horizontally structured. We offer here some suggestions for reading around and more deeply into a range of issues, based as much on what we know has helped our students as judgements of what has ‘moved the field’. Getting the events of the past sixty years into perspective is undoubtedly helped, in our view, by having a working grasp of antecedent nineteenth-and early twentieth-century events in the education system. Among those that are highly readable and accessible, we would place Sanderson (1985, 1994), Aldrich (1996), Jones (1997) and Jones (2003). Also, Mackinnon et al. (1996) provide a most useful summary of reports, legislation and the overall shape of the education system. For those who need a general textbook on modern Britain within which to context education, Abercrombie and Warde (2000, 2001) may suit.
