School Choice in an Established Market

Stephen Gorard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138342972
• eBook ISBN: 9780429800092
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1997, this study examines the trend towards markets in UK schools, with a particular focus on fee-paying schools in South Wales, by outlining the varied economic and political arguments both for and against increased parental choice and exploring parents' real reasons for using fee-paying schools. Stephen Gorard destroys the cosy myth that fee-paying schools are large, successful, charitable institutions catering chiefly for a select group of privileged families. Instead, he reveals them as typically privately owned, coeducational and with fewer than a hundred pupils, based in a poorly-converted residential site with few facilities. It is the first book which allows children's voices to be heard fully in the context of debates on the choice of a new school. Gorard has gathered the voices of parents and children via observation, interview and survey, comparing them directly and revealing stark differences in the perception of each generation.

Part One
INTRODUCING THE RESEARCH

Introduction

Selection of a new school is a fundamental and life-changing process for all children, whoever makes the selection and however the choice is made. It is a continuing concern of social science research, since the conditions under which the process is played out are forever changing. Previous research has naturally tended to concentrate on the schooling of the majority, and the influences and implications pertinent to compulsory state-funded education. Given the existence of fee-paying schools in the UK, it is understandable that some previous work has also addressed the related issues of who uses these schools, and why they elect to pay again for something which is provided free at the point of delivery. However, perhaps through a concern with the schooling of elites, such work has focused on a very different kind of fee-paying school to the majority of those available today, which are either small businesses run for profit, or even smaller religiously motivated concerns. Therefore although reference has been made in earlier studies to a “market” in education, most have been content to consider only a part of the full range of schools available in their chosen focus area. Earlier work has also tended to concentrate on differences in educational opportunity and outcomes for individuals, in terms of occupational class, gender, and ethnicity. More recently, a new direction in school choice research has emerged, which adds to the earlier mixture a more detailed investigation of the processes involved in choice, played out at the level of the family. This new direction required a re-evaluation of the methods used in investigations by social scientists, and has led to a melding of what were previously seen as competing research paradigms. In addition, the long-term effects of changes in national educational policy are rarely predictable, since they are implemented at a local level, often alongside other reforms with which they interact. Nor are the effects readily apparent even a year or so after implementation (e.g. McPherson and Willms 1987). It is therefore only now, one school generation after the Education Reform Act 1988, that its true effects can be seen in what is now an “established market”. This is the background against which this book appears.

The programme of research on which this book is based was carried out at the School of Education, University of Wales, Cardiff, between 1994 and 1996 (Gorard 1996_a). It is an investigation by survey and follow-up interviews, with both parents and children, of the process of choosing a new school. It represents a new approach to the study of school choice, focused on the long-established market for fee-paying schools in Wales. The study involved 794 families and 33 schools in South Wales. All of the families were just making, or had just made, a choice of a new school. The schools represent the range of all school types in the region, both state-funded and fee-paying. The parents and their children were surveyed separately, so that most families made two returns, with an overall response rate of 79%. The survey instrument included questions on the families and their characteristics, how they go about choosing a school, and what their reasons were. Semi-structured interviews were then held with the parents of some of these families, using an interview schedule based upon themes raised in the survey. A picture of the schools themselves was built up from official publications, visits, observation of lessons, interviews with selected staff, and analysis of the literature sent to prospective parents. The data so obtained was analysed in terms of its content, and coded by categories which emerged from the survey, or which were grounded in the data itself.

In general the work is seen as significant on three counts. Its timeliness in the light of recent educational reforms, and so its relevance to the marketing and management of schools and the indications it gives of the longer term effects of supposed markets in state-funded education. The lack of previous research concerning proprietary and grass-roots fee-paying schools, which are outside the major private school associations, along with the distinctiveness of the fee-paying sector in Wales as compared to England (this is the most substantial survey ever undertaken of the fee-paying school sector in Wales, and one of the largest of its kind in the UK). The use of sampling techniques and methods of analysis which are rare in this field, making the results more generalisable to a larger population, more reliable, and ultimately more revealing than in much previous choice research. The blend of large scale survey, and semi-structured interviews, as well as the inclusion of children as participants in their own right, uncovered some aspects of the family micro-politics of choosing a school that have not been previously addressed in the literature.

In summary, this is a study of the process of choosing a new school. Recent educational legislation, the increased marketisation of education, and demographic and economic trends, invite further development of earlier work on school choice, and make a “snapshot” of the situation particularly appropriate at present. The success of the legislation concerning parental choice of schools will depend to some extent on how the schools and their clients respond, and this is one of the issues addressed by this study. According to Tomlinson (1994), a market experiment is being tried out in the “laboratory” of education. The policy which is being tested is largely based upon an economic model of “rational choice theory” (Boyd et al. 1994), which although growing in use in other social sciences, has been little studied in educational research.

Following the 1980 Education Reform Act which introduced the notion of parental choice as a central part of education policy via the Assisted Places Scheme (APS), the 1988 Education Reform Act introduced Local Management of Schools (LMS), Open Enrolment, Grant Maintained Schools (GM), City Technology Colleges (CTCs) and league tables of school performance (Lowe 1988). Now, parents may also send their children to schools in education authorities where they are not resident. The Parents Charter 1991, and the 1993 Education Act all helped to create, or strengthen, market forces in education (Douglas 1993). Within a funding system for schools which is per capita based, school survival in the state-funded sector is thus increasingly subject to the vagaries of parental choice.

It is, therefore, important to undertake research into what parents want from schools for a number of reasons. Firstly, such research can show educationalists and policy makers what the likely long-term effects of the recent reforms will be. It can indicate whether parents have a broad consensus about an “ideal” school, generally all wanting the same type of school, or whether choice and diversity are indeed linked (see Glatter et al. 1997). It can demonstrate whether the current performance indicators for schools are the appropriate ones - the ones that parents actually use in making a choice - or whether they are simply the easiest to quantify and publish. Above all, if improvement of standards via increased choice is to take place, it must be shown both that parents can recognise high standards in schools, and that schools can respond to parental influence. At present, unfortunately, as some recent research notes, “too often, schools are taking action to influence parental choice based on unsupported assumptions about what parents want from schools, and why they choose them” (Coldron and Boulton 1991 p. 169). Schools do not seem to be seriously interested in discovering what will attract parents (Smedley 1995), and there is insufficient study of parents’ perceptions of what makes a school good, and how they judge it (Echols and Willms 1995).

The research questions

This study partly arose from the personal experience of the researcher working in one of the fee-paying schools in Wales. The school was in a poor state of repair with falling pupil rolls and increasing debt. Although it supposedly selected students at intake by academic ability, participated in the Assisted Places Scheme, was a member of the Headmaster’s Conference and had become one of the most expensive schools in Wales with a very low pupil to teacher ratio, nevertheless the public examination results were poor - worse than the national average for all schools at A level in fact. The question naturally arose - why are parents and the Local Educational Authority and the government paying so much money to send children here? What is the school offering? Are there other schools like it? Did the parents really know what it was like before they chose it? These, and similar, questions became the foundation for the research reported here, although the scope and nature of the project naturally evolved over time.

Below is a list of the research questions which prompted the study, and which are addressed in this book. Perhaps the largest, most all-embracing question, however, is - whether there is a discernible pattern in the relationship between the types of schools available, the families who use them, the way they choose them, the reasons they give for doing so, and the responses of the schools?

The process of choice

How do families select schools?

What role do the children play?

Are there common reasons for school choice?

What are the links between these reasons?

Market forces in education

How much choice is there?

How much diversity is there?

How much do families really know about the schools?

Does what parents want make sense educationally?

Are market forces leading to improvement?

Fee-paying schools

Why do families elect to pay for education?

What kind of families are they?

What type of schools are there in the private sector?

Why is the private sector in Wales so small?

Why are private schools generally so small?

Is private schooling better than state-funded education?

Do different types of families use different schools?

The work is primarily an empirical study of a region of schools and their users, driven by the kind of questions outlined above. It is the outcome of a gradual maturation in the approach to studying school choice in the UK. The study builds slowly, with deliberately simple steps to a rounded picture of an entire system of regional schooling with results that will surprise the complacent, and to grounded models of family choice that may well be applicable to other sectors of education, perhaps even to other public services, in which choice is relevant. The findings of previous studies of school choice are used to define potential choice criteria, which form the basis of the questions for the survey, which are then analysed to create underlying choice factors, and linked by models of the choice process to stories from the interviews. The results are finally placed back in the context of the previous work from which they sprang, and compared to the actual provision of the schools chosen by the participants. Instead of relying upon a prior theoretical position, or attempting to explain the position by means of metaphors which are impossible to refute empirically, the study is designed to be deliberately simple. Simplicity should make the results easier to understand, so enabling criticism and encouraging progress.

The organisation of the book

The book is arranged in four sections. The introductory section contains a brief consideration of the concept of markets in education, a review of some past research into the workings of the market and a critique of the methods used in some of this previous research. The second section outlines the methods used in the research on which this book is based, describes the types of schools encountered in the established market and the families who use them, and lists the key results from a large-scale survey concerning the process of choice. The third section uses stories from selected participants in the study and shows how the process of choosing a school is played out at the level of the family. The final section is a summary of the findings and their implications for policy-makers and educationalists.

1 Markets in education

Introduction

This chapter examines the trend towards increased “consumer” choice in school education, considering arguments both for and against this as a policy in the context of recent changes in this respect in the UK. Its objective is to establish the need for further work in the area of school choice, and to explain the difficulty of predicting the likely outcome of marketisation for the UK state-funded school provision. The chapter is in three main parts, starting with an outline of some of the varied arguments that have been used to promote choice in education. There have been at least three different strands in the push for greater “consumer” choice. One of these stems from the view that market forces will have a beneficial effect on the provision of what is seen as public service industry (e.g. James and Phillips 1995). Another is that allowing greater freedom of choice will end the reality of selection by mortgage, and give even the most disadvantaged sections of society a fair chance of using the best schools. The third strand is, perhaps, the simplest of all. It does not matter what the intended effects of a choice programme are, choice is a good thing by definition, according to views such as the libertarian perspective of Erickson (1989). Since the state only intervenes in the home life of a child - its clothing, shelter, and food - in case of neglect or abuse, it should behave in the same way with education. Description of these interwoven strands is followed by discussion of some of the criticisms of these arguments, and the chapter concludes with a brief critique of economic rational choice theories and their relevance to the marketisation debate.

Choice in education

There is some evidence that recent increases in population movement have led to more changing between schools in many children’s lives (Van Zenten 1995), so there are more choices of school to be made than in the past, and choice of schools looks set to become more and more important in the future. There are good theoretical arguments both for and against increased control of school choice for the individual, and it is unlikely that the debate on this issue will be decided by theory alone. Some education writers quite reasonably take a political stance on this issue but many of the reasons given, even, or perhaps especially, by politicians for the recent legislation in the UK, are educational. In this light, the recent reforms in the UK, as elsewhere in the world, can be seen as a massive educational policy experiment, although the UK is perhaps in a minority in using an entire generation of the nation as its “guinea pigs”. It is too early to tell what the full effects will be, but it is beginning to look as though the reforms are likely to be both less effective than originally suggested by some, and less damaging than feared by others.

Although this chapter is chiefly concerned with parental choice of state-funded schools in the UK, several other liberal democratic states have introduced legislation relevant to increased school choice in the last 15 years (OECD 1994). These schemes are all different in important respects, and highlight the need to distinguish between market theory as a general concept, and each version of its implementation in education. In the USA for example, choice of school can mean selection from several mini-schools on one site, or between educational programmes affecting entire states (Levin 1992). Many of the supposed advantages and disadvantages of market forces that have appeared in the UK can be seen as arguments for or against the specific set of legislation enacted here, rather than dealing with the concept of choice per se.

All school choice schemes, however, have given the de jure role in choice to the parents alone, without much obvious consideration of the alternatives. Although parents may be beneficiaries of the custodial role and income-generating potential of their child’s education, and the majority may genuinely have the best of altruistic intentions, it does not necessarily follow a priori that they have the necessary competencies to decide on an appropriate school. Should parents really have the right to select a school that protects a minority sub-culture for example, and so deprive the child of a more normative education? Should they be able to select a school based around a narrow and fundamentalist religion, and risk the charge of indoctrination? And what happens if parents do not value any kind of schooling? Children from rural families used to be regularly kept away from school, during harvest and other crucial agricultural periods, by their parents, as evident from this complaint by an earlier Amish farmer, “once he goes to school and gets a little education, he’s no good on the farm any more” (Coleman 1990 p. xii).

Closer to home, pressures to keep children out of school, or to leave early, are not merely due to poverty, and the need for the child to help in the family business (Gorard 1997_a). In Wales, one writer claimed that “the main reason was the lack of appreciation by parents of [education’s] importance for the future welfare of their children” (Evans 1971 p.262). Another pressure comes from not wishing to over-educate children, or prepare them for a type of job that would require leaving the rural area in which their family lives. Truancy, still worse in Wales than England according to one account (Reynolds 1990), is perhaps condoned, and maybe even encouraged by some parents. Where do they fit into an economic model of rational choice theory, and can a free market be fair to their children?

“Life contingency” is a concept originally used in occupational choice, to explain why people may make a choice for reasons other than its manifestly desirable qualities (Ginzberg et al. 1951), but it can also be seen to apply to the much newer field of school choice. Thus debate about the value of school choice is really about whose values should apply, and can only be answered by deciding on an answer to the preliminary question - what is the problem that choice is a solution to? A large number of reasons have been used to argue for, or justify, the increase of parental choice of schools. A few are strictly educational, some are economic, but many are based upon notions of justice, equality, or equality of opportunity.

Justice for all

Perhaps the first, and most obvio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Part One Introducing the Research
• Part Two Researching the Established Market
• Part Three The Process of Choice
• 10 What are they paying for?
• Part Four Whither Market Forces in Education?
• 11 Conclusions and implications
• Bibliography