ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of policy and its impact on the process of comprehensive reorganisation. It is a narrative account, based mainly on secondary sources, which illustrates the interplay between national politics and local developments. The chapter introduces several themes to be pursued later, in particular the role of local education authorities in the process of educational change. It concerns tracing the shifts in governmental policies towards comprehensive reorganisation. The chapter also seeks to develop a perspective on the key phase of reorganisation in the period 1965-74, by dealing with a longer time span. It discusses that comprehensive reorganisation in the 1960s and 1970s was but one phase in a continuing process of educational reconstruction in Britain that began in the nineteenth century. In 1958 there were 279 secondary technical schools in England and Wales, with a total of 95,239 pupils, around only four per cent of the total number of secondary school pupils.
