Preference or choice? Parents, LEAs and the Education Act 1980

Summary

In 1979 a Conservative Government was returned at the general election and two Education Acts followed in quick succession. The first, the Education Act 1979, repealed the Education Act of 1976 and thus removed governmental pressure for comprehensive reorganization. The second, the Education Act 1980, set out to achieve a new balance between the rights of parents to choose their children's schools and the necessity for LEAs to manage these same schools efficiently at a time of falling rolls and severe economic constraint. In 1983 the Information for Parental Choice project at the NFER set out to investigate the implementation of this second Act and to discover the parents’ responses and reactions to it. The project's report (Stillman and Maychell, 1986¹) starts by recounting the post‐war background to this Act and moves on to relate the history and logic behind it to the reality of what now happens in practice.