Before examining the reform process in each of our three countries, we examine here the different contexts in which these changes have taken place. Policies and institutions do not drop out of the sky; to some extent they are formed and reformed, in part at least, by structural conditions: the evolving social and political features that characterise a given society. Structural conditions provide the national, macro-level contexts for reforms, and vary over time and between countries.

In this chapter we analyse four broad contextual dimensions: the people and the economy; welfare regimes; government; and understandings of children. We have tried, where possible, to treat England and Scotland separately, though in some cases separate information is not available. The importance of the contextual dimensions will become apparent when we turn, in the following chapters, to consider the reform process and why it took the course it did in each country. Apart from contributing to the interpretation of national processes of reform and to understandings of cross-national similarities and differences, such contextual analyses caution against over-simplified ideas about the possibility of transferring policy and practice from one country to another. Without the right contextual conditions, policies do not travel well – indeed they may not be able to travel at all.

Enduring structural characteristics provide a context that helps to explain long-term continuities in national policies, spanning even periods of government by different political parties. Policy formation is not just a matter of assembling evidence and inferring from it what works, nor are policies influenced only by vested interests and other party political considerations. They are also a matter of mindsets, habitual ways of constructing problems and determining how to respond to them, understandings of the world that make certain courses of action seem self-evidently correct, and others unthinkable and unrealistic. And such mindsets are constructed within and through the influence of national contexts, structural forces whose capacity to govern our thoughts and actions must be recognised if we are to understand the societies in which we live. There may be a risk from this line of argument of overstating the power of context, seemingly allowing no space for agency and inducing a resignation as damaging as the naivety that flows from ignoring structure. Yet recognition of the significance of context does not justify the over-determined view that radical change is not possible in a country because its context is immutable.