ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the first year of the battle for Croxteth Comprehensive: November 1980 to November 1981. It presents the set of conditions and sequence of events that led to the closure of Croxteth Comprehensive. The choice of Croxteth Comprehensive in particular for closure can be seen as the combination of a number of factors. Some of them were due to general conditions in Liverpool and directly traceable to structural and environmental pressures on the city: to financial pressures, to its social geography, and to its particularly steep decline in live births during the 1960s. Factors which conditioned the political decision to close Croxteth Comprehensive ranged from structural pressures on the entire British economy through the contingencies of local Liverpool political personalities. Educational reorganization was forced upon Liverpool in the late 1970s through three general conditions: economic, political, and demographic.
