Governmental attempts in England and Wales, from the 1940s onwards, to achieve a high quality education system by establishing a ranking order and hierarchy of school prestige and selecting pupils according to their academic aptitude, ran counter to efforts by individuals, minorities, LEAs communities, groups, teachers and schools to escape low status institutes and their drive to achieve more productive schooling and significant certification. These forces and interplay are what propel the 'pendulum syndrome' along the axis between centralisation and decentralisation. This book focuses on educational policies and trends between the year 1941 and 2002. The failure of strong central intervention to maintain ranking order and hierarchy of schools in the early stage was replaced by employing market principles as a remedy to achieve the same goals but by different means in the later stage. Elements that were centralised in the 1940s were decentralised from the end of the 1980s, while those elements that were decentralised in the earlier period have now been centralised.