Education And The Market Place

Terence H. McLaughlin, David Bridges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780750703482
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135719753
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of essays debates the application of market principles to and within the context of education. The contributors are all leading figures in their field, presenting their ideas in an accessible style to the lay reader. Throughout, the educational and public policy issues raised by the application of market principles to education are closely examined.

Chapter 1
Education and the Market Place: An Introduction

David Bridges and Terence H.McLaughlin

In the United Kingdom the administrations of Conservative Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major have shared a conviction that almost any function of society—from the economy to health care, from telephones to the custody of criminals—may be enhanced if these functions are performed under conditions as close as possible to those of the market place. As several of the chapters in this book will illustrate, these same policies have been viewed with favour in many parts of the world.

The main conditions required to satisfy this ideal have included:

• the breaking up or weakening of state or other monopolies so as to provide a choice of service provider for customers and competition between providers;
• the removal of state support and subsidies from providers, so that there is a ‘purer’ form of competition allowing whichever provider is genuinely the most efficient to succeed;
• the provision of reliable information to consumers (e.g., in the form of accurate and comprehensive descriptions of goods or comparative data about the costs and performance of competing service providers); and
• the creation of real opportunities for choice and an appreciation of that opportunity for choice among consumers.

Of course a commitment to the creation of these conditions has also required other social and political changes in the United Kingdom. It is doubtful that these changes could have been introduced in the public service sector for example if the government had not first significantly weakened the power of the trade unions. The selling off of the state monopoly of the mining industry to the private sector could not have proceeded before the power of the National Union of Mineworkers had been attacked, and indeed the issue of privatization was central to their struggle with the government. Nor were, for example, the health workers’ unions or the teachers’ unions in any real position by the end of the 1980s to mount concerted or sustained opposition to government policies.

The changes also required a significant shift in the population’s ideological thinking about, for example, the locus of responsibility in society for the care of the sick or the elderly, the provision of transport to rural areas or of training and continuing education. What had hitherto been regarded as the rather noble and civilized institution of the Welfare State was systematically disparaged in many political quarters as the ‘nanny’ state supporting a ‘dependency culture’. In its place were offered the new entrepreneurialism, the ‘enterprise culture’, the promise that wealth created at one level of society would eventually filter down to the benefit of all and, in rather uneasy partnership with this public celebration of self-interest, a reaffirmation of the family as the central locus of social care and responsibility.

It was Kenneth Clarke who was entrusted to carry these policies into three major departments of state: Health and Social Security, Education and then the Home Office, and he did so with zealous enthusiasm. Many of us in education and elsewhere had become persuaded in the 1970s of the importance in the educational change process of, for example, a careful basis of consultation; of enabling those who would have responsibility for carrying change through to contribute creatively to the shaping of that change and to feel some ownership of it; of the need to support people in the change process with training and consultancy; of the importance of formative evaluation in monitoring the effects of change and modifying the development in the light of this information. If Kenneth Clarke had heard of this collective wisdom on educational innovation he clearly chose like his predecessor as Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, to ignore it. Had he thought at all in these terms he would no doubt have concluded that even if such approaches might engage the support of those who had to operate a changed system, it would be at the price of some considerable subversion of the original agenda. Instead, his approach to educational reform was consistently based upon (i) the accruing of regulatory power to his own office (the main function of successive Education Acts); (ii) the undermining of any groupings that might present serious political opposition (the unions, the local education authorities); (iii) the division of the service sector he was addressing into units standing in competitive relations with each other; and (iv) the offering of financial incentives to those who led the way in taking on the new ideology and operating conditions (e.g., grant maintained schools or in the case of the Health Service trust hospitals). In a context of high unemployment and low job security many employees at all levels were understandably ready to put any allegiance to the former order second to their need to establish themselves in the new one.

The main manifestations of the application of this policy to the education system reflect closely the four conditions with which we started. They include:

• the breaking up of ‘the LEA monopoly’ of schooling through the introduction of grant maintained schools and continued support for independent schools through an assisted-places scheme;
• the publication of more and comparative information about school performance with a view to informing consumer choice, with parents seen as the consumers;
• the provision for greater flexibility in school admissions so as to allow greater opportunity for parents to send their children to the school of their choosing;
• provision for members of the business community to bring their approaches and skills to the management of schools as school governors;
• the opening up of a whole range of services traditionally provided by LEAs to competition from private agencies, including privatized agencies from other LEAs—these have included everything from school cleaning, catering and gardening, through advisory and support services to personnel, payroll and architectural services;
• the opening up of school inspection to a variety of agencies competing for work on the basis of competitive tendering; and
• the introduction of elements of competitive tendering into higher education (which was already operating to some extent in a market as far as student choice of course and institution was concerned).

Simultaneously there has been a welter of government and independently inspired initiatives directed at the school and further and higher education curriculum and intended to prepare the next generation to operate with familiarity and commitment in the new market environment: the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative in schools, mini-enterprise projects, schoolbusiness partnerships and in higher education the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative.

With all these developments has come the new educational vocabulary of ‘customers’ and ‘service delivery’; of ‘marketing’ and ‘promotion’; of ‘the chief executive’ and the ‘business plan’; of ‘cost control’ and ‘quality assurance’. What are we to make of all this—we parents, we governors, we teachers and headteachers, we citizens and taxpayers, we pupils and students, the citizens of tomorrow? Has the education system at last been brought to sanity and the real world? Will it be reinvigorated and made more effective by the application of market principles? Or is all this an ideologically-led perversion of a system which needs to be governed by quite different economic and social principles?

This book provides a variety of responses to these questions from people who, for the most part, work inside the education system and have experienced these changes at first hand. Their responses are a mixture of enthusiasm and scepticism, hope and disenchantment, pragmatism and principled protest tempered by a sustaining professional commitment to do the best possible job as they conceive it for the pupils of today and tomorrow in whatever political environment is provided.

We begin this volume with a look back in time, to the provision of public education in the period 1833–1944. This is not just a ritualistic nod in the direction of history. A lot of the arguments about the necessity or otherwise of state provision of education hark back to the nineteenth century and the gradual extension of the role of the State in educational provision alongside and perhaps at the expense of provision by the churches, by independent foundations and by private subscription. Philip Gardner describes the movement away from the nineteenth-century principle of separate, self-contained and unrelated subsystems of schooling towards the principle of a single, national, educational system, from a system dominated by market supply to a system dominated by central provision and regulation. He observes with particular poignancy the transfer of working-class allegiance from a growing system of private schools supported by the wages of the working classes to a state system in which the fulfilment of individual opportunity for all seemed possible.

Part 1 of the collection addresses different applications of market principles in practice. Geoff Morris and Donald Naismith both write as recently retired directors of local education authority services which have spearheaded many of the recent structural changes. While he was chief education officer in Cambridgeshire Geoff Morris pioneered the delegation of financial and other managerial responsibilities to schools, placing many of his own authority’s services in a new relationship with schools, which could now choose what services they wished to buy from whom. Rosalie Clayton acknowledges in her chapter that Cambridgeshire schools were thus especially well equipped to take on the further responsibilities which fell to them with grant maintained status. Morris describes the impact of recent legislation on LEAs and the ways in which they have adapted to new market conditions. Central in the adaptations is the establishment out of old LEA services of new ‘agencies’ selling their services not only to schools but also (for example in the case of finance, personnel and information technology) to the authority itself or to others among its departments. Morris acknowledges the positive benefits which have come out of the new relationships with schools: the increased awareness of the need for efficiency, financial management of a high order and a ‘close-to-customer’ approach to the people the authorities exist to serve. At the same time, however, he observes two areas of the traditional LEA function which are inadequately served by the new educational market. The first of these is support for the individual who is getting poorly or unfairly treated by the system; the second is strategic planning. There remains, though government does not seem yet to recognize this, an important function for local government in both these areas.

Under Donald Naismith, Wandsworth LEA earned a reputation as an enthusiastic supporter of the government’s educational initiatives and often paved the way in its own practices for what was subsequently to become government policy. He remains an advocate of the educational voucher as the means to give all parents equal access to a genuine choice of school inside or outside the state sector and he writes in particular on the basis of a recent study visit to see such a scheme in operation in Russia.

Rosalie Clayton and Peter Downes write as headteachers managing schools in the new market environment. Rosalie Clayton led her school buoyantly into its current grant maintained status convinced of the potential and challenges which ‘self-determination’ would offer. Describing her experience she slips easily into market analogies:

The process of becoming grant maintained has similarities with the risks of floating a company on the stock market. The initial flotation depends, to a large degree on its reputation and ability to create shareholder confidence in the company and its future. The survival of the company after that is dependent on keeping its shareholders and customers happy.

Clayton describes the process of becoming grant maintained, the issues this raised and her experience of making grant maintained status work. Among the benefits she claims are tighter control over overheads (and hence a capacity to focus expenditure on teaching and learning) and a closer relationship between the school and parents. She shares some of Morris’s concerns about the wider planning role of the LEA but believes that such problems can be solved in a spirit of cooperation between local self-managing schools. The role of the LEA is therefore, in her view, redundant.

Peter Downes acknowledges the discomfort of what he believes to be the majority of headteachers with the application of the concept of the market place to the school sector. However he also puts forward a more positive and perhaps acceptable interpretation of what it might mean in practice. He suggests for example that marketing does not mean trying to sell a product but being increasingly sensitive to the needs of the customers; recognizing that the days when schools had predetermined packages and immutable practices to offer pupils have gone. Schools must present themselves properly to parents and to the local community. He explores the implications of these and other expectations for the role of the headteacher and then finally poses the dilemma the head is in in recognizing a responsibility both to his or her own school and (with reference, again, to strategic planning and to ‘the wider good’) to the broader system of which the school is a part.

David Bridges focuses on the relationship between parents and school inside and outside the market model and reviews some of the competing conceptualizations of that relationship—of parents as: bystanders, supporters, partners, governors, coeducators and customers. He examines both the issues of principle underlying these different views and the evidence of the impact of the development of different relationships on children’s learning. He argues that attempts to put parents in the role of customer for an educational service provided by the school is a retrogressive step in the light of the evidence from, and arguments for, a relationship based on a collaborative partnership in the education of a child.

The last two chapters in Part 1 consider some different issues. These are to do with the relations between the business community and schools. Peter Roberts writes as a head who for over fifteen years has developed close and supportive relations between his school and the local business community. He acknowledges the need of schools for funding and resources additional to that which comes from the local authority or government and hence the vulnerability of schools to commercial exploitation. He describes some of the different kinds of relationships which his own and other schools have established with local and national companies and the benefits which can be derived from them by both parties. He considers the question ‘By what criteria should we assess whether business influence upon schools is exploitative rather than beneficent and supportive?’ and argues in particular for local sustained partnerships in which schools take a proactive stance and affirm their own values with confidence.

Sheila Harty (a former ‘Nader raider’ for those readers who remember the David versus Goliath battles between this famous consumer leader and major American corporations) looks at this whole matter from a transatlantic perspective and with a plainly articulated scepticism. She highlights the intense interest among sales and marketing divisions of major corporations and of ‘hucksters’ acting on their behalf in the captive audience of pupils in schools, the extraordinary steps which corporations are taking to reach that market and the risks to pupils and to professional educational principles that these incursions represent. She offers some practical principles intended to govern schools’ response to this predatory behaviour.

It will be clear from the discussion of the issues which is to be found in Part 1 of this book that the professional and public debate about the application of market principles to educational provision raises serious and complex issues of social, economic and political principle. There are issues concerning individual freedom and choice, social equity, notions of the public good, the location of responsibility for the care and education of children, the rights and duties of parents, of children and of the wider community; there are issues concerning the role and responsibilities of the State and the claims of the values of individualism and of community; and there are issues concerning the way in which we can or should resolve the many conflicting claims and imperatives of these different principles.

It is to these issues, which have a wide-ranging philosophical resonance, that we turn in Part 2 of the book. The contributors here are mainly writers in the field of philosophy of education, though Gerald Grace’s roots are in the sociology and politics of education.

Colin Wringe returns to Adam Smith and ‘The Wealth of Nations’ for one of the two visions of the market place which he explores, but he argues that Smith and his followers failed to recognize circumstances in which the unrestricted operation of the free market or dependence on it is unlikely to prove beneficial: when activities are inherently detrimental to the public interest or subversive of essential social institutions; when market transactions are unsuitable for the distribution of necessities which individuals are unable to meet through no fault of their own or which are beyond the means of ordinary individuals; and when individuals are unqualified to judge their own needs or the quality of the services being offered. Starting from these principles, Wringe argues that education is inappropriately treated as a market commodity but should return to its status as a public service.

John White’s attack on the application of market principles to education is built around a discussion of the influential writing of the American duo, Chubb and Moe, who seek a minimal role for the State in the determination of the curriculum, in the ownership of schools and in the allocation of children to schools. In all these areas, they argue, the market should rule. After a discussion of the claims of parents and children to be the relevant consumers in the context of curriculum decisions, White argues (in line with the Conservative government in this respect) that the rights of decision here lie not simply with those who happen to be pupils or parents but with citizens and hence the State. As far as ownership of schools is concerned, White’s position is that the crucial consideration is not who owns the school but whether the school conforms to certain criteria of adequacy, and it is up to the State to enforce these. On choice of schooling, White expresses some sympathy for an element of parental choice, but on the grounds that parents are educators. This yields certain parental responsibilities rather than ‘consumer rights’.

Gerald Grace’s contribution to this volume also brings an international perspective to the discussion drawn from his own experience in New Zealand and his arguments against a policy document on education produced for the incoming Labour governm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chapter 1 Education and the Market Place: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Schooling, Markets and Public Agency 1833–1944
• Part 1 Examining Particular Applications of the Market Principles in Practice
• Part 2 The Debate in Philosophical and Educational Terms
• Notes on Contributors