Researching the impact of education policy: difficulties and discontinuities

During the 1980s, a range of policies were introduced that sought to reform the British education system along market principles. The scale and range of policy legislation has been matched by heightened sociological interest in education policy and has generated a number of empirical investigations and critical analyses of the effects of such policies at ‘ground’ level.

This paper looks at some of the resulting analyses and argues that they contain a number of difficulties, both in themselves and in relation to existing explorations and explanations within the sociology of education. Although this paper does not seek to resolve these issues, it argues that they need be addressed if we are to enhance our understanding of the relationship between education policy and the degree of continuity and/or change in educational processes and outcomes.