Social class and educational attainment: a comparative study of

between social origin and educational attainment and the role that different national educa-tional policies may have played in shaping these variations. The findings show that country vari-ation in the association between origins and attainment was mostly or entirely due to variations in overall levels of attainment. Moreover, inequality was the highest where the proportions attaining a particular threshold were the highest—upper secondary school or higher in Scotland. The authors propose a refinement of Raftery and Hout’s theory of maximally main-tained inequality that takes into account that the trajectory of inequality is not linear: inequali-ty can widen in the initial phase of expanding opportunity, en route to an eventual contraction, because the most advantaged groups are the first to exploit any new opportunities that policy changes offer. The results show that country differences in educational policy have not yielded different changes over time in the association between origin and educational attainment. Sociology of Education 2007, Vol. 80 (October): 330–358 330 Whether educational policy can makea difference to social-class inequali-ties in education has been widely debated in the sociology of education and remains, and is likely always to remain, an unresolved question. On the one hand, there has been a general tendency to conclude from research on educational expansion in Europe and North America in the past half century that, in most places at most times, educational policy has contributed relatively little, if anything, to reducing social inequali