Providing access to quality general education is one of the priorities of Russian educational policies. The National Foundation for Workforce Training has launched a monitoring research project to evaluate the accessibility of quality general secondary education in high schools and basic professional training institutions. This research was a part of the joint project «Reform of Education System» of the Science and Education Ministry of the Russian Federation and of the World Bank. The research was carried out by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Science in 2004–2006. The present article describes the principal results of this research.