Throughout the post-war period there have been many attempts to reform the UK education system, often with an explicit intention to try and make it more productive. The list of education policy reforms that have been attempted over the last 50 years is quite extensive, and recently the UK (and in particular England and Wales) has introduced many innovative market-oriented reforms to its education system, in an attempt to raise standards. The most striking recent reform is that parents have increasingly been given much more choice in terms of the school attended by their children, and schools have been forced to be more accountable. Other notable reforms include a nationally prescribed curriculum, vigorous attempts to raise participation in post-compulsory schooling and the introduction of tuition fees for higher education. In this article the authors describe a number of the more important educational reforms that have been introduced in the UK during the last twenty years or so, and where possible they provide evidence of their impact. However, in the UK, although economists and others are increasingly able to inform policy-makers on the impact and efficacy of specific policy interventions, the evaluation of specific policies in a rigorous manner unfortunately remains relatively unusual. This is mainly because the design of policy interventions is often such that they are not amenable to economic evaluation. Here the authors highlight what one can view as robust findings on each policy intervention, and point to where more evidence is needed. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 5 footnotes.)