Brian Simon used the phrase 'site of struggle' to describe the class-based inequalities that were played out in the provisions for English compulsory education. In the nineteenth century, the growth of the state system for the working class alongside the predominantly middle-class independent sector simply confirmed existing class hierarchies with social mobility through secondary education only available to a select few. The 1944 Education Act abolished fees in all state-aided secondary schools in twentieth-century England and Wales but this did not mean that all pupils now received what had previously been described as secondary education. Indeed, for working-class girls and boys growing up in the 1950s, the experience of secondary education seems to have been aeons away from the ideals generated by the rhetoric of building a better future after the problems of wartime. Writing of education in Britain in the postwar period, Ken Jones has identified a longstanding conflict between the elitism endemic in British political and social life and any attempt to provide undifferentiated education spaces. 'For most students, and most teachers, schooling was about the basics of literacy, numeracy and socialisation. It was endured without enthusiasm; it was a place riddled with teacher-student antagonisms; it was something if not ... to be run away from, then at least to be left quickly behind'. More than 40 years on, the 1988 Education Act heralded league tables, Standard Assessment Tests and a National Curriculum designed to offer equality of opportunity to all children yet Simon also noted that the changes were as much about political differences as increasing the quality of educational provision. Conservative plans within the 1988 Act, he argued, were intended to 'develop a competitive hierarchic structure of schooling through establishment of a market system in education, and to strengthen the privatisation of the system'.