ABSTRACT
Analysts refer to policy frameworks as linking ideologies, political preferences groups and institutions to programmes of reform, often claiming to aim at greater equality. We have chosen to begin our account by examining those which lay behind the Education Act, 1944 for two main reasons. First, in selecting a piece of legislation that clearly ‘made a difference’ to the provision of British schooling we hope to emphasise both the historical and geographic dimensions of policy frameworks which are constituted in specific historical conditions and in particular sites. Second, the 1944 Act also illustrates their continuity, for not has it only provided the structure within which the very great majority of families, students and teachers have experienced schooling in Britain over the last six or so decades, but it still exerts a powerful influence on the institutional features of the contemporary British educational landscape.
