The Education Reform Act introduced in England and Wales in 1988 brought about enormous changes in schools, both as management units and as educational institutions. This book is the first to look at the effects of the Act in all its aspects on the basis of empirical evidence gathered from schools over the first three years of the Act's implementation. It looks at how change is being achieved in the Local Management of Schools, the influence of the market on schools, the introduction of the National Curriculum and the place of Special Needs provision in the new education scene. These are areas which have hiterto been treated in isolation by researchers. In fact as each develops it has ramifications in other areas. Bowe, Ball and Gold preserve a sense of the complexity of this change process. They show too how the policies expressed in one way in the Act are a constantly changing series of texts whose expression and interpretation vary according to context in which the are being put into practice. This book should be of interest to all who want to know about educational reform in Britain. It should also be of interest to those in the fields of education policy, educational management and sociology of education.