It was one of the major planks of the Blair government's legislative programme that it would set a limit on school class sizes for the youngest children. Whilst the objective of reducing class sizes no doubt has much to recommend it from the point of view of raising educational standards, it is also inevitable that parental choice of school, already emasculated, will be limited even further. It is particularly likely to be borne out in practice wherever governing bodies and Head Teachers are insufficiently aware of the ramifications of all the other rules and regulations enacted alongside the '30 pupil' limit. Nevertheless, it will be argued in this essay that, if Head Teachers and governing bodies are prepared to persevere with the small print of the Act and the extraordinarily convoluted regulations and departmental Codes of Practice, circulars and guidance issued along with it, then there is a case for saying that the new infant class size limit can - when coupled with other changes in the law introduced by SSFA 1998 - sometimes be used as a tool both to increase the devolution of power down to individual schools and to improve parental choice.

Students have proved increasingly willing to challenge academic judgements in court, and the passage into English law of the Human Rights Act 1998 is likely to have a major bearing on future challenges. The Act will make it unlawful for a public authority (including both a university and the courts) to act in a way which is incompatible with many of the provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights (and the Protocols attaching thereto). It will also permit a victim of such unlawfulness to bring proceedings in an appropriate court or tribunal, whether in the High Court as part of an application for judicial review or as an ordinary civil action for negligence or breach of contract. The court will have the power to grant whatever remedy it considers to be just and equitable, including an award of damages where it feels such an award to be appropriate. This could have significant consequences for the use of the Visitor in chartered universities as the final arbiter in disputes over academic judgments. For the Visitor does not conduct hearings in public and often fails to follow any recognised procedure. It may even be doubted whether the Visitor can be said to be truly independent of the institution against whose decision the student is appealing. In future, therefore, universities may have to be prepared to justify any marks awarded in the public forum of the courtroom.