Management of Social Inequalities in Hungarian Education Policy

This study is an overview of Hungarian education policy in the period between 1945 and 2015 through looking at the most important journals and data archives. The study focuses on the education inequalities in public education. While in the socialist period the educational policy was mainly under the Soviet influence, after the change of regime the main influencers were the European developed countries and international organizations. The seventy years covered by the study are divided into five periods, each period was determined by an education act and its mentality (Act of 1945, 1961, 1985, 1993 and 2011). Overall, we can say that while the socialist era of mainstream education policy has been dominated by the egalitarian policy, after the transition it disappeared from mainstream politics and supplementary policies came to the forefront. After 2011 a sharp change happened in education policy, which brought back the emphasis on the familiar socialist egalitarian policies.