This provides an informed look at British education policies over the last sixty years, since secondary schooling for all first became established, and offers a valuable review of recent key policy initiatives. Comprehensive schools have largely replaced a system based on academic selection. Now, under choice and competition policies, all schools are subject to the rigours of local education markets. This work tackles key questions about the impact on and experiences of school students and their families, and the life chances obtained after schooling by using two incisive approaches: - Basil Bernstein’s work on the realization of power and control in and through pedagogic discourse and social reproduction - the view that control of education is always about control of learner identities and is unavoidably class based. This is a major new contribution to the debate about the extent to which education is a force for change in class divided societies. The top team of authors powerfully re-establish social class at the centre of educational analysis at a time when emphasis has been on identity and identity formation. The approach is enthusiastic, ensuring that education policy remains interesting to the reader, making this is an important resource for students, policy analysts and policy-makers.