The fortunes of the education service in Britain have been intimately bound up with the vitality of the local education authorities, particularly in the decades following the 1944 Education Act. The passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act saw the LEAs in serious—perhaps terminal—decline.

First published in 1992, Policy and Power in Education sets out to map the contours of this decline in power. It relates these changing fortunes not only to the social and political environment in Britain but also to wider developments in the industrialised world. It argues that post-colonial decline, economic retreat and insular self-satisfaction combined with basic structural flaws in the LEA system threaten its very existence in the last decade of the millennium. The capacity of the system to reform itself into more responsive modes is left as an open question in the face of ever tightening constraints from the Thatcherite tendency in government. The associated challenge to the curriculum is also explored, with the suggestion that an over-prescribed and specified curriculum will prove to be maladaptive against rapidly changing conditions for the twenty-first century. New paradigms of learning are described, while the broadly irrelevant search for utopias on the left is also sceptically reviewed.

Harold Heller, at the time of the first publication, was Director of the Centre for Adviser and Inspector Development.

Peter Edwards was formerly Chief Education Officer for Berkshire.