Obviously, these points do not reflect watertight or mutually exclusive categories. Rather, they represent variations on the basic theme that sociolinguistic issues can legitimately be considered in an educational framework. We shall endeavour to justify this theme, and to demonstrate that attention given to education-related matters has an importance extending beyond the school. In this chapter, we follow the child, as it were, from home to school. We consider, first of all, aspects of pre-school life and language, then comment upon the home-school transition and, thirdly, treat aspects of school life itself. Following this, we introduce two social psychological models which we believe make theoretical sense of some of the important processes underlying the complex relationships among language, class and education. Finally, we attempt to indicate how future social pyschological studies in the educational context may inform sociolinguistics in general, and advance some modest pragmatic orientations for the classroom.