ABSTRACT
The Conservative Government’s educational ‘reforms’ of the 1980s and 1990s sought deliberately to introduce market relations into educational services at all levels. The ‘LEA monopolies’ of schooling (Flew, 1991) were eroded by the introduction of a grant-maintained sector, by the provision of assisted places to widen access to independent schools and by the creation of City Technology Colleges. The sometimes voluntary and sometimes enforced delegation of financial management from LEAs to schools put LEA services in a competitive relationship with other providers of, for example, advisory, training and personnel services, for which schools would now pay directly. In some authorities, LEA departments became indeed service providers for other sections of the same LEA (Morris, 1994).
