A number of sociological paradigms have informed the study of British primary education. In the 1950s and 1960s, educational sociologists undertook largesample, quantitative research which drew upon structural functionalism (Halsey et al., 1961; Douglas, 1964). The political arithmetic which they generated served to provide scientific support for the egalitarian policies of Labour governments, facilitating, for example, the implementation of the Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) called for in the Plowden Report (1967). The functionalist orthodoxy came under increasing criticism from phenomenology (Schutz, 1967), from symbolic interactionism (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and from ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). This emerging paradigm focused more on the process of schooling than on the aggregations of 'input' and 'output' factors in education. It generated much debate, but not much research. In fact, there already existed a number of classroom-based studies of primary and elementary schools which were more akin with social psychology (Jackson, 1968) and anthropology (Rist, 1970), although Rist's seminal study operationalised what appeared to be a neoWeberian analysis of the school, using the concepts of both social class and ethnic status. The qualitative study of the primary school was beset by criticism: from functionalists came charges of subjectivity; from neo-Marxists came accusations of