British Public Schools

Policy and Practice

Geoffrey Walford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032253459
• eBook ISBN: 9781000580150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

First published in 1984, British Public Schools is a collection of empirically based articles written by sociologists of education who have conducted research into public schools. Studies are presented on why parents sent their children to public schools, on the experiences of pupils and teachers, on aspirations and attitudes of pupils towards higher education, on the increasing emphasis of schools on examination successes, and on the relationships between public school education and educational and occupational successes. This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of sociology of education and education.

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The Political Arithmetic of Public Schools

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003282778-2

A.H. Halsey, A.F. Heath, andJ.M. Ridge, University of Oxford*

The English public schools question is a debate about how small numbers exercise large influence over British life. It never goes away because crucial interests of class and status, power and advantage, familial continuity and social integration are at stake. The dispute, which has deposited a voluminous literature on the British reproduction of generations, is predominantly ideological. Our intention is not primarily to contribute to it from an ideological standpoint as adversaries, though we do in fact believe that the public schools have been an instrument of social injustice arid educational narrowness from the time when the Victorians invented them. Our task rather is to analyze the phenomenon sociologically, including the ideological debate surrounding it, and with special reference to that particular set of methods which are known as political arithmetic — essentially the use of survey and headcounting to throw empirical light on value-laden social issues. Our first contention, in other words, is that the political arithmetic or sociological method can be used to test empirical claims while remaining independent of the value position we hold.

But what is the phenomenon? Perhaps because the literature has been so overwhelmingly ideological there is not and never has been a precise sociological definition of public and private schools. Ideological interest has spawned a loaded vocabulary, including such terms as ‘independent’ (favoured by contemporary advocates of these schools who are embarrassed by the ‘image’ of the public school as socially divisive and inegalitarian,¹ or ‘commercial’ (favoured by the critics to emphasize the essential market basis of these schools).² Sociologically the issues are a special facet of the analysis of class formation and reproduction; organizationally the debate is about political as distinct from market supply of scarce goods; ideologically it is a dispute about the balance between liberty, equality and fraternity. All the issues have been sharpened by the resurgence of market liberalism associated with the 1979 and 1983 Conservative governments.

* We are indebted to Monica Dowley of Nuffield College, Oxford, for her labours on the DES statistics used in this chapter.

As political arithmeticians we shall begin with the arithmetic of the balance between the public and the private sectors of education. Then, sketching the background of attempts at reform in the twentieth century, we shall analyze the numbers sociologically. Finally, we shall draw some conclusions as to how far our evidence can be used to clarify the original political dispute. The evidence, we would stress in advance, cannot bear the weight of every element in the debate. Our intention, while recognizing the full range of issues, is to make clear what the evidence does and does not enable us to assert sociologically. Our contention is that what we are able to say is a firm basis for shifting the terms of political argument and bargaining.

The Arithmetic of Private Education

The shifting balance between the state and private sectors of education can be shown most simply by the historical trends in their relative shares of the country’s pupils. Glennester and Wilson estimated that there were 21/2 million pupils in private schools in the 1850s. A century later, in 1951, this had shrunk to 564,000 (480,000 at independent schools and a further 84,000 at the direct grant schools), representing 9.2 per cent of the school population, a share which continued to decline to 1978 when it was 5.8 per cent. But then in the following years some sign of reversal appeared raising slightly both absolute numbers and proportions. In 1981 they were 499,000 and 6.2 per cent.³

Overall, the historical fact is of small proportions in marketed schooling over the century following the first major intervention of the state through the 1870 Act, and of decline to 1978. But this is by no means the whole story. A full account would have to recognize that the market covers an enormous heterogeneity of activity and competitive enterprise of widely varying character and quality.

At the apex of a heterogeneous hierarchy are the great and famous public schools. Their definition has shifted as the context of state and other private provision has developed. Even the financial and legal definitions have been ambiguous because the boundary of control and financial support between the state and the market has not only shifted but has been drawn so as to allow mixed territories, notably the direct grant schools, with their funding from the fee-paying market and from government...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: British Public Schools
• The Political Arithmetic of Public Schools
• The Demand for a Public School Education: A Crisis of Confidence in Comprehensive Schooling?
• Debs, Dollies, Swots and Weeds: Classroom Styles at St Luke’s
• Public Schools and the Choice at 18 +
• The Changing Professionalism of Public School Teachers
• Parents, Sons and Their Careers: A Case Study of a Public School, 1930-50
• Evaluating Policy Change: The Assisted Places Scheme
• Images of Independent Schooling: Exploring the Perceptions of Parents and Politicians
• Contributors
• Index