Educational policies theorists

Gerwitz

study of 14 London secondary schools, differences in parents’ economic and cultural capital lead to class differences in how far they can exercise choice of secondary school. 3 types of choosers: privileged skilled (m/c, use educational and economic capital, understand system), disconnected-local (restricted by lack of educational and economic capital), and semi-skilled (w/c, ambitious for children but lacked capital and found it difficult to navigate system)

Ball (parentocracy)

marketisation gives the appearance of a ‘parentocracy’, however, parentocracy is a myth, making it seem that all parents have the same choice of what school to send their children to, but in reality they don’t

Allen

research from Sweden, where 20% are free schools, shows that they only benefit children from highly educated families

Green et al

in year 1, 12% of pupils were entitled to free school meals in free schools, as against 24% in the surrounding neighbourhood

Leech and Campos

m/c parents can afford to move into catchment areas

Bartlett

cream-skimming and silt-shifting

Ball (free schools)

promoting academies and free schools had led to both increased fragmentation and increased centralisation of control

Ball (globalisation)

some Pearson GCSE exam answers are now marked in Sydney and Iowa

Ball (cola-isation)

a cadbury’s sports equipment promotion was scrapped after it was revealed that pupils would have to eat 5,440 chocolate bars just to qualify for a set of volleyball posts

Molnar

schools are targeted by private companies because ‘schools by their nature carry enormous goodwill and can thus confer legitimacy on anything associated with them’. They are a kind of product endorsement

Beder

UK families spent £110,000 in Tesco in return for a single computer for schools

Buckingham and Scanlon

UK’s four leading educational companies are all owned by global multinationals

Pollack

flow of personnel allows companies to buy ‘insider knowledge’ to help win contracts, as well as side-stepping local authority democracy