  Recent investigations of how the median size of extragalactic radio sources
change with redshift have produced inconsistent results. Eales compared the
radio and optical properties of a bright 3C and faint 6C sample and concluded
that $D\propto(1+z)^{-1.1\pm0.5}$ ($\Omega_0 = 0$), with $D$ being the median
size of the radio sources at a given epoch and z the redshift. Oort, Katgert,
and Windhorst, on the other hand, from a comparison of the properties of a
number of radio samples, found much stronger evolution, with
$D\propto(1+z)^{-3.3 \pm0.5}$. In this paper we attempt to resolve the
difference. We have repeated the analysis of Eales using the virtually complete
redshift information that now exists for the 6C sample. Confining our analysis
to FR2 sources, which we argue is the best-understood class of radio sources
and the least likely to be affected by selection effects, we find
$D\propto(1+z)^{-1.2\pm0.5}$ ($\Omega_0 = 0$) and $D\propto(1+z)^{-1.7\pm0.4}$
($\Omega_0 = 1$). Our complete redshift information allows us to gain insight
into our result by plotting a radio luminosity-size (P-D) diagram for the 6C
sample. The most obvious difference between the 3C and 6C P-D diagrams is the
clump of sources in the 6C diagram at $D\sim 100 kpc, P_{151}\sim 5x10^{27}
WHz^{-1}sr^{-1}$. These clump sources have similar sizes to the emission-line
regions found around high-redshift radio galaxies, suggesting that the presence
of dense line-emitting gas around high-redshift radio galaxies is responsible
for the size evolution. We show that this explanation can quantitatively
explain the observed size evolution, as long as there is either little X-ray
emitting gas around these objects or, if there is, it is distributed in a
similar way to the emission-line gas: highly anisotropic and inhomogeneous.
