ABSTRACT
Policy studies come in all shapes and sizes. This one arises from our collective experience of being teachers and researchers in British schools and universities over the past 40 years, along the way becoming sociologists under the influence of Basil Bernstein at the Institute of Education, University of London in the 1960s and 1970s. We confess as much upfront because the initial experience was seminal and the influence lasting. It gave us the deepest respect for a number of notions that: theory without research was nothing and vice versa; the ‘isms’ of social science were places where people banded together for company, as much as sources of warmth as light; and that who and what we were emerged from the labyrinthine interactions of class and identity. We were what we knew, how we said it, how we recognised, responded to and exercised knowledge and control. Our common experience was of rising through education and we were passionate about its inequalities.
