This paper deals with the limitations of educational policies in the French-speaking Belgian community, which were studied in the light of Amartya Sen’s theory of human capacity. The authors suggest that public action in the educational field reflects a shift of emphasis in equal opportunity policies: these have no longer been focusing on the redistribution of educational resources as they used to, but rather on the need to obtain equal results and on determining the individual, collective and institutional factors promoting the use of educational resources by all pupils alike. The authors show, however, that these policies are still far too flimsy and ambiguous to be really able to speak about a “capacitating” educational policy.