Fee-Paying Schools and Educational Change in Britain: Between the State and the Marketplace

This book examines the history of access to private education in order to shed light on the wider question of the interaction of state, society and schooling. Although the research is organised historically, much of the analysis is concentrated upon contemporary political struggles, and used to evaluate the posibility of creating a unified educational system. Can private and maintained schooling be merged into a new and different whole? Or is the inevitability of selected access to different kinds of educational resources an immovable obstacle to such ambitions? This book is a thoughtful and scholarly contribution to the debate on the changing character of the British educational system.