Lindsay Paterson is professor of education policy in the School of Social and Political Science at Edinburgh University. His main academic interests are in education policy, social mobility, civic engagement and political attitudes. He has contributed to many debates in Scotland since the early 1990s on the impact of education policies, and on the importance of policy implementation in achieving or modifying the aims of policy-makers. He currently (2018-21) holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in which he is using Scotland’s internationally unique series of surveys of school students between the 1950s and the 1990s to investigate the impact of education policy and social change in the second half of the twentieth century.