ABSTRACT
The teachers' are concerned with perpetuating the main liberal educational policies which we have described, and the system of teacher and school freedom and authority which sustains those policies. Policies as perceived by the newer interest groups which formed in the 1960s emerge very differently from those of the established groups. The continuous assumptions were, therefore, sustained by an authority and power network not easily paralleled in any other area of public life. For example, the health service, the social services and social security policies have been more susceptible to externally conditioned organisational and policy changes. This chapter describes the interest groups which substantiated the continuous educational policies. It shows how changes in social attitudes towards education were mediated through other, and new, interest groups, and the extent to which the parliamentary process both recorded and conveyed, as well as helped substantiate, some of the major changes in policy.
