Geography of the 'New' Education Market

Secondary School Choice in England and Wales

Chris Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351739573
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This title was first published in 2000. A series of major reforms during the 1980s and 1990s have led to the transformation of the Education System in England and Wales. The new system is now based on market principles in schooling resources. Parents now have the opportunity to state a preference over the school they would like their children to attend. This fascinating book sets out the new geographies of education, focusing on the spatial organization of the new market system. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it examines patterns of competition and choice based on pupil home postcodes and relates these to the decision-making process of parents. It also makes comparisons between different LEAs and schools in urban and rural areas, analyzing the constraints created by space and geography. In considering the effectiveness and impact of this new form of provision, the book plays an important role in understanding and appreciating the impact of the education market upon social mobility and community structure.

1

Introduction

Introduction

Since 1979 there has been a marked shift in the education system of England and Wales, and, in particular, in the provision and organisation of compulsory schooling. The most influential changes were the Conservative Government's 1988 Education Reform Act and the succeeding series of Acts, Charters and White Papers which created a form of ‘market’ system for the delivery of education and the organisation of provision. One of the key components of this shift was the introduction of Open Enrolment, which gave parents ‘the right to express a preference as to where they would like their children to go to school’ (Department for Education, 1992, p.28). Very quickly this was trumpeted by Government Ministers as ‘parental choice’, choice implying empowerment to the individual, when in fact the policy was simply a desire to improve education standards and simultaneously reduce the number of surplus places in the system. The arrival of a new Labour Government in 1997 has done very little to alter the course of change and has indeed fully supported the continuation of ‘parental choice’.

Programs of school choice have been introduced in many countries such as in the US (Cookson, 1994), New Zealand (Lauder and Hughes, 1999), The Netherlands (Dronkers, 1995), Belgium (Vandenberghe, 1999), Sweden (Lidström, 1999), Canada (Manzer, 1994) and Scotland (Adler et al., 1989). While differences may exist in the extent marketisation of public education has occurred in those countries (Whitty, 1997; Teelken, 1999), it still remains that England and Wales provides a set of reforms on one of the largest scales. ‘Parental choice’ has been introduced across the whole of England and Wales at both the primary and secondary level, alongside a number of key mechanisms meant to install a market-based system of delivery.

Such transformations of education provision parallel significant shifts in the provision of other public welfare services, such as housing, health care, social care and pensions, which are increasingly dependent upon private resources and market mechanisms. Politically, the New Right has argued that neo-liberal policies are necessary to keep pace with new demands upon the Welfare State. But, as a result there is a general concern that such an approach to welfare provision is socially divisive, thus creating a climate such that 6 the issue of the influence of markets on public sector welfare provision and in education in particular is one of the most important research topics of the 1990s’ (Bowe et al., 1992, p.24).

The objectives of the ‘new’ education market are now being achieved by making schools more accountable as well as increasing competition between them by allowing parents to indirectly choose the ‘good’ schools and weed out the ‘poor’ ones. In effect this has involved the creation of a quasi-market (Bartlett, 1993) within which parents and children are the consumers, the schools the producers, and the commodity being exchanged is the education. In other words, there has been a ‘shift away from collective-welfare orientation… towards an individual-client orientation’ (Adler, 1993, p.2).

This commodification of education has drastically altered the nature of compulsory education, particularly secondary education. The reforms to the organisation of schooling have given parents greater responsibility to ensure that their children receive the highest levels of education in particular schools. Consequently, the stakes have increased creating situations, reported in the broadsheet newspapers, of ‘The Great School Lottery’ (The Independent, 1997a, p. 14), ‘School squeeze leaves children without places’ (The Independent, 1997b, p. 15), and ‘The admissions nightmare’ (The Independent on Sunday, 1997, Which School? p.7), and which has led to the formation of new ‘tactics’ to get the school of your choice, ‘Bending the school rules’ (The Sunday Telegraph, 1996, p. 18), ‘Tricks to get into the right school’ (Daily Telegraph, 1996, p.14) and ‘Parents who move house to be top of the form’ (Weekend Telegraph, 1996, p. 16). The media's portrayal of choice in education has always been careful to select examples, and areas, on which to base their stories. However, our understanding of the ‘new’ education market is still rather limited and, typically, confined to the boroughs of London.

Within academia the central focus has been on Open Enrolment and both the process of school choice and the outcome of such decisions (see for example Ball et al., 1995; Glatter et al., 1997b; Gorard and Fitz, 1998). The key issues have been whether parents have real choice in the ‘new’ education market, and if so, whether all parents have this choice, how the decision-making process for school choice operates and how it varies between parents, and what the consequences are for schools and their intakes. The greatest debate has been as to whether the education market is equitable, or, specifically, if ‘cream-skimming’ (Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993) within the market has arisen. In Whitty's own review of research on school choice in England, the USA and New Zealand, ‘the academically able are the ‘cream’ that most schools do seek to attract. Such students stay in the system longer and thus bring in more money, as well as making the school appear successful in terms of its test scores and hence attractive to other desirable clients’ (1997, p. 14). Detailed research by Ball (1993) and Gewirtz et al (1994) have shown how different parents perceive and engage with the market in a variety of ways, which in turn produces different outcomes reflecting social class divisions. However, more recently, research examining the ‘new’ education market across England and Wales has suggested that the market, in fact, is creating more homogenous school intakes, i.e. greater integration of pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds (Gorard, 1998; Gorard and Fitz, 2000).

These two, very different, perspectives of equity, or fairness, in the market place reflect the process-side and the product-side of the market. Even though the research appears to illustrate two different scenarios there is every possibility that they could exist alongside each other. A crucial element to research in this field is to combine these two elements of equity together, and then to decide if equity in one, and inequity in another, might still produce a socially ‘just’ system of education provision (Smith, 1994; Hay, 1995).

Another important feature of these two research perspectives is their methodological distinction. On the one hand, process-side research tends to be small-scale, ethnographic and limited to a small number of Local Education Authorities (LEAs). But, on the other hand, almost conversely, product-side research has been large-scale, empirical and across many different LEAs. Once again, to further an understanding of ‘parental choice’ in the ‘new’ education market, both, the decision-making process, and the final choice of schools, requires research to consider the market at many spatial scales in order to link together the findings of the process-side and the product-side of the market. A geographical approach to such research provides the means to consider the many spatial scales of the education market.

A Geographical Perspective and Research Methodology

The geography of education has been a relatively underdeveloped area of research (Bradford, 1990) but clearly has a very important role in any understanding of variations in education provision and performance across space, and in particular the dimensions of school choice and competition. For example, Bradford (1990) has illustrated the place that the geography of education has within geography (Figure 1.1), bringing together key components of economic geography, social geography and political geography.

Figure 1.1 The place of the ‘geography of education’ in geography

Source: Bradford (1990, p.4)

Within research into the ‘new’ education market there have been many attempts to consider a geographical perspective (see Adler et al., 1989; Gewirtz et al., 1994; Glatter and Woods, 1994) but few have primarily set about their research with this as their main objective. For example, Gewirtz et al. (1994) discussed the importance of context and considered a socio-spatial model of analysis as a way of conceptualising the hidden constraints upon the market. However, their methodology did not incorporate the geography of the education market at the outset, and consequently, has never fully considered the education market in rural or even suburban locations. The general inclination of such research has been to incorporate geography as a way of understanding and organising the findings. This has clearly been useful, and this research argues that the geography of the education market provides the ideal means of conceptualising the processes and patterns that emerge. However, it is also necessary, in order to produce a full geographical appreciation of the market, to undertake a geographical methodological framework to which the processes of choice and competition, and the varying constraints that underpin these processes can be considered at several spatial scales, ranging from the Local Authority level down to the individual household.¹

This research was carried out in England between 1995 and 1997, a period when the 1988 reforms were well established but finishing just before the introduction of a new Labour Government. The majority of research in England and Wales on school choice occurred at the beginning of the reforms and hence, it could be argued, only represented the initial start-up period of an education market. Gorard (1997), on the other hand, chose to examine the fee-paying sector in education in order to provide evidence of an ‘established’ education market.

As this is a geographical examination the analysis presented here focuses on three different spatial scales of the education market: the LEA, the education market place, and the consumers (i.e. parents). Consequently the research is based on three different sources of information, respectively. Much of the analysis considering the context to the reforms – the ‘geography of education’ – uses data published by the Department for Education and Employment at the level of the LEA.

The research examining patterns of competition and choice at the scale of the education market place is unique and innovative. Primarily it uses the home postcodes of all pupils transferring in the 1995/96 academic year between primary and secondary school in eight LEAs. These postcodes are introduced into a Geographical Information System (GIS) in order to undertake a spatial analysis of movement of pupils in the market place. The eight LEAs are representative of areas in England with very different geographies, such as London Boroughs, the deindustrialised Metropolitan Boroughs of the north and the west midlands, more affluent suburban counties, and more rural isolated county authorities. These areas of detailed study presented here provide the most extensive coverage, to date, of the impact of market reforms on schools in England and Wales. For instance, most research on ‘parental choice’ has only been conducted in London Boroughs, arguably very different to other areas of England and Wales.

The third main source of data provides information at the level of the consumers. This is based on a large-scale survey of parents whose children transferred to secondary school also in the 1995-96 academic year. As the focus of enquiry gets more detailed then so does the geographical coverage. The parents’ survey focuses on the decision-making process of more than 200 parents with children at eight schools from the LEA sample outlined above. The schools were selected based on the market characteristics that they exhibited in the analysis of competition derived from the pupil postcodes.

The methodological framework for this research was carefully constructed in order to provide as comprehensive and significant a review of the impacts of market-based reforms to secondary schooling as possible. It ensures that comparisons can be made between areas while maintaining a good deal of detail in the analysis. Similarly, it tries to encompass the impacts of the market reforms at many spatial scales, such as at the level of institutions, the level of market competition, and at the level of the individual in the market place.²

Aims and Objectives

The primary aim of this research, therefore, was to develop a link between geography and educational research with particular reference to the ‘new’ education market and ‘parental choice’ at the secondary school level. It also aimed, from a geographical perspective, to detail the principal components of the education market that aid and constrain parents’ choices of schools, by critically discussing the many education markets that exist. The third main aim was to focus upon the social equity and ‘cream-skimming’ debate that is currently of great importance to the future of these reforms.

Within these three broad aims there were a number of objectives that this research attempted to achieve:

• to conceptualise the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Quasi-markets and Educational Reform
• 3 The Geography of Education and the Education Market
• 4 The ‘Lived’ Market Place
• 5 Competition and Choice: Eight Case Studies
• 6 The Geography of ‘Parental Choice’
• 7 Social Equity in the ‘New’ Education Market
• 8 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index