In this book we address key questions relating to admission to secondary schools, but we recognise that though education determines every child's future chances, it sits within a still broader social policy context. If radical social reform is the outcome, intended or not, of the processes and changes we have considered here, or the broader processes of reform of which they form a part, it will be important for focus to be maintained on the values and claims which attach to these reforms, individually and collectively. It seems to us that fundamental claims and values are far too rarely made explicit in relation to government policy in the modern era, yet all such policies do have some such justificatory values, even if recent reformers may be unwilling to specify them. While we have tried to remain focused on one very specific policy area, we hope that the task we have undertaken here, of engaging simultaneously in immanent critique of a range of competing approaches while scrutinising them also against background democratic and constitutional norms, offers a rigorous process for the scrutiny of current and future policy reforms relating to schooling, both individually and as a whole.

In writing this book we have tried to ensure that the points we have raised are supported by reasoned argument and analysis, and we want to avoid lapsing too far into speculation or assertion here in the Preface. We feel it necessary, however, to project forward our thinking on some important themes that have been central to the approach we have adopted and to point, very briefly, towards planned legislative developments relevant to school admissions that have occurred since the completion of the main typescript.

Through the 2010 Academies Act and the 2011 Education Act, the Coalition government has now put in place a structure and system of secondary education where entry to school will be largely determined at a meta level by the ambitions and views of the Secretary of State for Education and at a micro level by individual headteachers and college leaders, and, if an Academy chain, by the guidelines and goals set by the particular charity, organisation or company involved, albeit within the strictures (such as they are) of the 2012 School Admissions Code.