Introduction

The focus of this chapter is on what is currently the period of compulsory schooling - that is, on education from five to sixteen years and thus on the primary (five to eleven) and secondary (eleven to sixteen) stages. It is difficult, though, to maintain this focus with complete precision. Policy changes, implemented from 1997 by the Labour Government, mean that most children begin their schooling at three or four and that these years are as closely regulated in their content and procedures as any other. Conversely, for increasing numbers (currently, about 40,000) of fourteen-year-olds, school is no longer the institution in which most of their learning is organised - vocational education, based in colleges of further education, or in workplaces, takes over. To add to the complexity, English secondary education has been redesigned on a principle of institutional diversity. In place of the largely non-selective, local-authority-controlled comprehensive system of the period 1965-90, there has developed a multiplicity of school types, all subject to government regulation in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment but widely different in status, in ethos, in the composition of the student population and in level of success. Post-sixteen, the principle of diversity retains its force. From 2015, participation in education or training up to the age of eighteen will become compulsory, but here, too, a wide gulf of status will separate academic provision, concentrated in school-based 'sixth forms' from the vocationally inflected courses provided in further-education colleges.