Throughout the last decade there has been an unprecedented amount of activity in curriculum policy, and recent years have seen the acceleration of that activity following the Education Reform Act of 1988. This reader is a selection of work which addresses some of the more complex ideas and debates surrounding curriculum policy. The book is divided into three parts, the first section describes the background to recent curriculum policy, the second section looks at a variety of ways of constructing the curriculum, all of which have an impact on policy, while the third section offers a series of critiques on current policy, in particular the immediate impact of the ERA and of vocationalism, of market forces and strong central control.