ABSTRACTContemporary educational policy is centrally concerned with local management of schooling; a practice apparently supported by and following easily from John Stuart Mill's views on liberty and representative government. This paper argues that contemporary practices of local management of schooling are conservative rather than empowering, and that Mill's actual proposals result in an unresolvable paradox in this area. It is then argued that if the State is conceptualised as a relatively autonomous body seeking to secure conditions conducive to accumulation of capital, and if ‘promoting the general welfare’ is formulated in a manner which would not lead inexorably to a free‐market capitalist State, then Mill's ideas can provide guidelines for a radical form of democratisation and devolution of power in relation to local management of scho