This paper uses data drawn from two projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of England and Wales. It covers the years 1990-94 and examines the effects of the Education Reform Act, which allowed state schools to "opt out" or leave the control of their Local Education Authority (LEA) and still receive funding. Such schools are designated grant-maintained (GM) schools and are autonomous, incorporated institutions that own their land and buildings and manage their own budgets and personnel. The report includes interviews with the policy's political advocates, with public critics, with civil servants responsible for taking forward legislation into administrative action, and with LEA officers in local authorities directly affected by the policy, and it includes a field-based study of two local education markets to assess the impact of GM schools on adjacent maintained and independent schools. The paper is divided into five sections. It begins with a brief consideration of the poetics of policy analysis and explores the idea of a policy's "nature history." The second and third sections consider the origins of GM schools and their growing pains and troubled early years, whereas the fourth section examines the later stages of these schools' development and subsequent transformation. The last section discusses the policy's contemporary significance. (RJM)