Specialisation and Choice in Urban Education

The City Technology College Experiment

Geoff Whitty, Tony Edwards, Sharon Gewirtz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032270258
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000625981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1993, Specialisation and Choice in Urban Education explores how city technology colleges (CTC) have managed the task of selecting intakes representatives of their catchment areas and explore their impact on local schools. From their announcements in 1986, CTC have been presented both as a new choice of school for the inner city and as pointing the way to a more diversified education system. This account of their development uses interviews with key architects of the initiative to identify more clearly the objectives CTCs were designed to serve. It then draws on interviews and observation in CTCs themselves to discover how far these schools are becoming centres of innovation in school management, curriculum and approaches to teaching and learning. Throughout, the CTC policy is considered in the context of Government's broader political project to challenge 'welfarism' and to encourage entrepreneurship, competition, and choice. This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of education policy, sociology of education, and education in general.

Chapter 1 City technology colleges: the concept and the context

DOI: 10.4324/9781003291008-1

City technology colleges (CTCs) were first announced at the 1986 Conservative Party Conference. That conference was intended to display a government shaping its programme for a third successive term in office with its radical energies undiminished and with education now high on its policy agenda. Asked that summer what the education system would be like if she were to be re-elected, the Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher) had turned immediately to the misdeeds of ‘left-wing’ councils and the consequent need to establish, ‘particularly in inner-cities, alternative schools to those the local authorities are running’ (Guardian 10 July 1986). The canvassing of ‘alternatives’ from the Right of the party had included the state funding of schools outside local educational authority (LEA) control, and more radical proposals for schools to be run by ‘individual trusts’ so that they could be shaped and controlled by consumer demand (Hillgate Group 1986). Kenneth Baker’s first conference speech as Secretary of State for Education and Science was therefore expected to announce strong measures against the LEAs’ alleged monopoly, and so get underway a vigorous pre-election campaign for educational reform as a centrepiece in the party’s programme.

Although he avoided any reference to vouchers, the favourite neo-liberal mechanism for creating an open market in education, his main message was a promise to create conditions in which

Education can no longer be led by the producers – by the academic theorists, the administrators or even the teachers’ unions. Education must be shaped by the users, by what is good for the individual child and what hopes are held by their parents.

(The Times 8 October 1986)

These had become familiar themes in Conservative policy discourse, without having produced as yet any large steps in that direction. The creation of a ‘pilot network’ of twenty new secondary schools, to be called city technology colleges, was therefore given an enthusiastic welcome, both as a bold initiative in itself and as an indication of bolder measures to come.

THE CTC PROSPECTUS

In keeping with the enterprise culture, the promotional brochure which the Department of Education and Science (DES) sent out to launch the initiative had the appearance of a City prospectus, complete with a CTC logo (DES 1986).¹ CTCs were to offer ‘a new choice of school’ to parents in urban areas, ‘including the disadvantaged inner-cities’, where the ‘range and quality’ of education was seen to be most in need of improvement. The brochure included a map showing twenty-six ‘possible locations’ for the new ‘colleges’, mainly in the industrial conurbations. CTCs would constitute a new category of school – state-funded but independently run – which Mrs Thatcher came to call ‘state-independent schools’. They would be run by independent trusts, be free from any LEA control, and embody a unique partnership between government and business. Promoters (later known as sponsors) would ‘meet all or a substantial part of the capital costs’ (DES 1986: 8), but the Secretary of State would ‘pay the CTCs’ running costs in accordance with the number of pupils, at a level of assistance per pupil comparable with what is provided by LEAs for maintained schools serving similar catchment areas’ (DES 1986: 6). The new schools were to be run by governing bodies which were to employ the staff and be ‘free to negotiate pay and conditions of service’. Furthermore, teachers would not necessarily have to have qualified teacher status and governors would be ‘free to decide on staffing levels and on the balance between teaching and non-teaching staff’.

Because their funding depended on how many pupils they attracted, CTCs would be provided with an incentive to respond to consumer demand; their independent status, including their ability to hire and fire staff, would give them a certain capacity to respond. At the same time, however, their independence was to be constrained in two crucial ways. Most obviously, their curriculum emphasis had been pre-defined to give them a strong technological, scientific and practical bias:

CTCs will offer a curriculum in line with the Government’s policy for setting high standards in the maintained sector. There will be a large technical and practical element within the broad and balanced curriculum which the Government advocates for all pupils up to the age of 16. The importance of doing and understanding as well as knowing will be emphasised throughout.

(DES 1986: 7)

The promotional brochure included an ‘illustrative’ version of such a curriculum, which is examined in chapter 5.

The other major constraint on CTCs was to be on their admissions policies:

CTCs will be required, as a condition of grant, to aim at admitting pupils spanning the full range of ability represented in the catchment area. Pupils will be selected by the Head and the Governing Body on the basis of their general aptitude, for example as reflected in their progress and achievements at primary school; on their readiness to take advantage of the type of education offered in CTCs; and on their parents’ commitment to full-time education and training up to the age of 18, to the distinctive characteristics of the CTC curriculum, and to the ethos of the CTC…. [EJducation in a CTC will demand considerable effort from pupils and from their parents. A prime consideration in the selection of pupils will be whether they are likely to benefit from what the CTC offers. All will have some of the positive qualities which will help them succeed.

(DES 1986: 5)

This second constraint seemed to be an attempt to privilege particular kinds of children and parents: it meant that CTCs would not be a new choice for all inner-city children, but only for a particular subset of them. Not only would they have to live within a pre-defined catchment area, but also they would have to have the requisite aptitude, commitment and capacity to benefit from a CTC education. They would also have to have parents with the right sort of motivation to make an application in the first place and who could subsequently demonstrate at an interview their commitment to their children’s education up to the age of 18. Yet CTCs were also expected to be ‘fully representative’ of the community they served.

Given so many novel features of CTCs, commentators were quick to read great significance into an initiative of apparently modest scope. Baker’s announcement was judged by The Times (8 October) to have ‘unveiled a school revolution’. Having initially described it as ‘the centrepiece of a new deal’ (8 October), the Guardian then described the hostility which greeted it as ‘a row over symbols rather than reality’ (20 October). But symbols may contribute powerfully to the construction of reality. If commentators were indeed over-reacting to a ‘drop in the ocean of British education’ (as the Guardian put it), they were certainly encouraged to do so by the way in in which the ‘pilot network’ was initially promoted and publicised. As Kenneth Baker told the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) Education and Training Committee a few days after his conference speech, the careful targeting of resources on his new schools would point the way to what could be achieved once the LEA monopoly was broken:

it will be one of my objectives to ensure that the experience of CTCs is widely shared and widely used…. CTCs will not be islands of excellence, set in splendid isolation. They must be lights for others to follow. In this way we shall enrich the whole of the public education system.

This notion of CTCs as a prototype for reshaping the entire system appears repeatedly in contemporary reactions. They were described, for example, as ‘cuckoos in the nest’ of public education (O’Connor 1986); as ‘the spearhead of Tory hopes of resurrecting a semi-independent sector of schooling’ (Financial Times 27 February 1987); as embodying a return to academic selection and a divisive differentiation between types of school (Simon 1987); and as ‘part of a clearly-defined New Right strategy to destroy the state system of schooling as we know it and hand education over to the control of crude market forces’ (Chitty 1987: 67).

It is certainly possible to see in the CTC policy an attempt to encourage a ‘quasi-market’ in education. Many of its features prefigured those that were subsequently to be embodied in the Educational Reform Act 1988 which in turn put CTCs on a statutory basis. That Act contained the same apparent contradiction between devolution and constraint that characterised the CTC initiative. On the one hand, it extended some of the market-oriented characteristics of the CTC programme to other schools. All schools were to be given the incentive and a certain capacity to be more responsive to consumers via per capita funding and local management. A new sector of grant-maintained schools was introduced which, like CTCs, were to be independent of LEAs, funded by the central government and to which parents had to apply directly. In addition, open enrolment meant that parents could apply to schools outside their immediate neighbourhood – ironically leaving CTCs as the only schools with tightly controlled catchment areas. On the other hand, the introduction of a National Curriculum, together with national testing at ages 7, 11, 14 and 16, severely limited the extent to which schools could respond to market forces if the market were to demand other than what the government felt should be on offer.

THE CONTEXT OF THE INITIATIVE

Whatever the educational arguments for or against CTCs and the Education Reform Act, it would be naive to regard either of them as a narrowly educational initiative. In reading the policy discourse that surrounded the launch of the CTC programme in 1986, it seems clear that it was positioned within several policy sets that were becoming central to the Thatcher government’s overall strategy. That government’s explicit commitment to common policies across different policy areas has served to reduce the relative autonomy of education policy and made it easier to demonstrate a relationship between education initiatives and other favoured projects (Dale 1990; Edwards et al. 1992a). In the case of CTCs, these included government strategies for restructuring the workforce, for controlling the inner city, and for replacing planned provision of welfare with market-oriented provision. Thus, in seeking to make sense of the origins and the contradictions of the CTC policy, it is important to recognise its relationship to the broader economic, political and cultural projects being pursued by the Thatcher government as it prepared for and entered its third term of office.

The economic project

The CTC initiative was partly justified – or legitimated – as the product of a wider concern, that the education system was not meeting the needs of the economy. Five months before the launch of CTCs, Cyril Taylor, who was later to play a leading role in the CTC initiative, had published a pamphlet reporting the outcomes of a conference held by the Centre for Policy Studies, a leading right-wing think-tank. One of those outcomes was a call for ‘the setting up of 100 technical secondary schools funded by central government on a direct grant basis’ which would help to meet what Taylor (1986) identified as ‘the crucial need to improve training and vocational education’ and to rectify the damage done by the comprehensive system:

Are secondary schools … failing our nation? More and more people think so. The egalitarian ideals of comprehensive schools have not been translated into the provision of a trained workforce. Mixed ability teaching has meant that the half of the school population more interested in vocational training than in academic education have been inadequately catered for. That vocational skills are so little taught has to a large degree been responsible for young British school leavers finding it so hard to obtain work. For a whole lost generation little or no training investment has been made. No wonder we have lagged behind our industrial competitors.

(Taylor 1986: 24)

Taylor welcomed the existing Youth Training Scheme and Technical and Vocational Education Initiative as steps in the right direction, but argued that they were not enough because secondary schools were still not ‘providing relevant education for the half of their pupils who do not desire a purely “academic” curriculum’.

There are two broad strands to the economically grounded critique of the British education system. The first is that it continues to be permeated by anti-industrial and anti-entrepreneurial attitudes. This is the so-called British Disease which was supposedly caused by an anachronistic commitment to the classical literary curriculum of the Coleridgean and Arnoldian tradition (Mathieson and Bernbaum 1988) and, according to Correlli Barnett, by the welfare state. Welfarism, Barnett wrote, had produced ‘a segregated, sub-literate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging on the nipple of state maternalism’ (Barnett 1986: 304).

The other strand is the concern that the British education system is failing to produce a labour force appropriate for a changing world economic climate characterised by the inter-nationalisation of production. The concern of British industrialists here is that, because labour is so cheap in other regions of the world, particularly those bordering the Pacific, Britain needs to ensure that a significant proportion of its labour force is highly skilled. The perceived problem is succinctly diagnosed in a CBI document, Business in Education:

Britain will continue to have to compete internationally more on quality and ‘added value’ than on price. The UK is a relatively high cost source of labour, when compared with the Pacific Basin, for instance, where skilled workers are likely to he paid in the order of £25 a week, even when operating world-class capital equipment; … this makes it all the more important that the vocational education and training systems encourage and develop the abilities needed for product innovation, product quality, high level diagnostic skills and so forth.

(Confederation of British Industry 1988: 28, emphasis in original)

The vocational education and training systems are also seen to need to produce an adaptable workforce because of the unpredictability of the skill-demands generated by technology-driven growth. There is the added problem of the ‘demographic time bomb’. Between 1986 and 1994 the number of 16- to 17-year olds in the UK will have fallen by more than a quarter, from just over 1.7 million to just under 1.25 million. In some areas the shrinkage will be greater, with the inner cities expected to experience the largest reduction in school-leavers. Taken together, the demographic factor and changes in the nature of the production process threaten employers with a situation in which – ‘The [labour] market could switch fairly quickly from one favouring “buyers” to one where the “sellers” have the upper hand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 City technology colleges: the concept and the context
• 2 The emergence of city technology colleges
• 3 Resistance and adaptation
• 4 Choosers and chosen
• 5 Centres of innovation?
• 6 Disturbing the system?
• 7 New schools for new times?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index