Sociology Flipped Learning — Education Policy & Inequality

Sociology Flipped Learning — Education Policy & Inequality

• educational policy: the plans & strategies for education introduced by the government, together with instructions & recommendations to schools & local authorities

  • e.g., 2010 Academies Act

• most policy is a response to these issues

• equal opportunities

• selection & choice

• control of education

• marketisation & privatisation

Educational Policy in Britain Before 1988

• there were no state schools before the industrial revolution

• education was available to a minority

• provided by fee-paying schools or by the churches & charities

• before 1833, the state spent no public money on education

• industrialisation increased the need for an educated workforce

• the state made schooling compulsory from 5-13 in 1880

• the type of education received depended on class background

  • middle-class children were given an academic curriculum to prepare for them professional careers or office work

  • working-class children were given a schooling of numeracy & literacy needed for routine factory work & to instil an obedient attitude

Selection: The Tripartite System

• from 1944, education was influenced by meritocracy

• the 1944 Education Act brought in the tripartite system

  • children were selected & allocated to 1 of 3 different types of schools

  • based on aptitudes & abilities

  • identified by the 11+ exam

• grammar schools: offered an academic curriculum & access to non-manual jobs & higher education

• secondary modern schools: offered a non-academic practical curriculum & access to manual work for those who failed the 11+

• technical schools existed in few areas

• the tripartite system reproduced class inequality by channelling the classes into different schools with different opportunities

• also reproduced gender inequality by requiring girls to get higher marks to get into grammar schools

• legitimised inequality through the ideology that ability is inborn

  • ignores that children’s environment greatly affects their chances of success

The Comprehensive School System

• introduced in many areas from 1965 onwards

• aimed to overcome the class divide

• 11+ was to be abolished alongside grammar + secondary modern schools

• it was left to the local authority to decide whether to go comprehensive or not

• so, the divide remained in many areas

– Two Theories of the Role of Comprehensives

• functionalists argue comprehensive schools promote social integration 

  • bringing children of different classes together

• an early study by Ford found little social mixing between working-class & middle-class pupils because of streaming

• also see the system as more meritocratic by giving pupils a longer period to develop & show their abilities

• marxists argue the comprehensives are not meritocratic, but reproduce class inequality through the continuation of streaming & labelling

• by not selecting children early, this creates the myth of meritocracy that justifies the class inequality being reproduced

Marketisation

• marketisation: the process of introducing market forces of consumer choice & competition between suppliers into areas run by the state

• created an education market by

  • reducing direct state control over education

  • increasing both competition between schools & parental choice of school

• has become central in government since the 1988 Education Reform Act

  • introduced by Thatcher

• from 1997, New Labour has followed similar policies

• from 2010, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government took marketisation even further

  • created academies + free schools

• neoliberals & the New Right favour marketisation because it will improve schools’ standards

– Parentocracy

• policies to promote marketisation include

  • publication of league tables + Ofsted reports

  • business sponsorship of schools

  • open enrolment

  • specialist schools

  • formula funding

  • schools being allowed to opt out of local authority control

  • schools having to compete to attract pupils

  • introduction of tuition fees for higher education

  • allowing parents and others to set up free schools

• David describes marketised education as parentocracy: rule by parents

• in this market, power shifts away from the schools to the parents which encourages diversity, gives parents more choice & raises standards in their view

– The Reproduction of Inequality

• despite the claimed benefits, it may have increased inequalities

• Ball & Whitty note how marketisation policies reproduce class inequalities by creating inequalities between schools

– League Tables & Cream-Skimming

• publishing league tables ensures that schools that achieve good results are more in demand

• Bartlett argues this encourages

• cream-skimming

  • good schools can be more selective

  • recruit high achieving, mainly middle-class pupils

• silt-shifting

  • good schools can avoid taking less able pupils who are likely to damage the reputation with poor results

• the opposite applies for schools with poor league table positions

• reproduces the same results

– The Funding Formula

• schools are allocated funds by a formula based on how many pupils they attract

• popular schools get more funds & can afford better-qualified teachers + better facilities

• unpopular schools lose income & find it difficult to match the resources of their rivals

• the Institute for Public Policy Research found that competition-oriented education systems (like Britain’s) produce more segregation between children of different social backgrounds

Gewirtz: Parental Choice

• marketisation benefits middle-class parents whose economic & cultural capital puts them in a better position to choose good schools for their children

• Gewirtz studied 14 London secondary schools

• found that differences in how far they can exercise choice of secondary school

• identified 3 types of parents

• privileged-skilled choosers

  • mainly professional middle-class parents who used their economic & cultural capital to gain educational capital for their children

  • prosperous, confident & well-educated so could take full advantage of the choices

  • they knew how the school admissions systems work

  • had the time to visit schools & the skills to research them

  • economic capital meant they could afford to move their children to get the best deal out of it

• disconnected-local choosers

  • working-class parents with restricted choice due to lack of economic & cultural capital

  • found it difficult to understand school admissions procedures

  • less confident in dealing with schools

  • less aware of choices

  • less able to manipulate system

  • attached more importance to safety & quality of school facilities than to league tables

  • distance & cost of travel were major restrictions on choice of school

• semi-skilled choosers

  • mainly working-class

  • ambitious for their children

  • lacked cultural capital & found the education market difficult to make sense of

  • frustrated at the inability to get their children into the good schools

• Gewirtz concludes that in practice, middle-class parents possess cultural & economic capital & have more choice than working-class parents

The Myth of Parentocracy

• marketisation reproduce & legitimises inequality by concealing the true causes & justifying its existence

• Ball believes it only gives the appearance of parentocracy 

  • makes it appear that all parents have the same freedom of choice

  • middle-class parents can take better advantage of marketisation

New Labour & Inequality

• New Labour introduced a number of policies to reduce inequality

  • designating some deprived areas as Education Action Zones

  • Aim Higher programme

  • Education Maintenance Allowances: payments to students from low-income backgrounds to encourage them to stay on after 16 to gain better qualifications

  • introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, literacy & numeracy hours + reducing primary school class sizes

  • city academies were created

  • increased funding for state education

• Benn sees a contradiction between these policies & the commitment to marketisation: the New Labour paradox

  • despite introducing EMAs to encourage poorer students to stay in education, they also introduced tuition fees for higher education that may deter them from going to university

  • New Labour governments neither abolished fee-paying private schools nor removed their charitable status

Coalition Government Policies from 2010

• Conservative-Liberal Democrat government accelerated the move away from an education system based on comprehensive schools run by local authorities

• policies strongly influenced by neoliberal ideas about reducing the role of the state in the provision of education through marketisation & privatisation

• David Cameron stated the aim of the education policy was the encourage ‘excellence, competition & innovation’

• cuts were made to the education budget

Academies

• from 2010, all schools were encouraged to leave local authority control & become academies

• funding was taken from local authority budgets & given directly to academies by central government 

• academies had control over their curriculum

• by 2012, over ½ of all secondary schools were academies

• some are ran by private educational businesses & funded directly by the state

• the Coalition government removed the focus on reducing inequality by allowing any school to become an academy

Free Schools

• funded directly by the state

• set up & run by parents, teachers, faith organisations or businesses

• supporters claim they improve educational standards by taking control from the state & giving it to the parents

• free schools give parents & teachers the opportunity to create a new school if they are unhappy with the state schools in their area

• Allen argues that in Sweden, where 20% of schools are free schools, they only benefit children from highly educated families

• others claim free schools are socially divisive & that they lower standards

  • Sweden’s international education ranking has fallen

• charter schools in the USA have been criticised for appearing to raise standards but only doing so by strict pupil selection & exclusion policies

• evidence shows that free schools in England take fewer disadvantaged pupils than nearby schools

  • in 2011, only 6.4% of pupils at Bristol Free School were eligible for FSM compared with 22.5% of pupils across the city as a whole

Fragmented Centralisation

• Ball argues promoting academies & free schools led to both increased fragmentation & increased centralisation of control over educational provision

• fragmentation

  • the comprehensive system is being replaced by a patchwork of diverse provision

  • much involves private providers

  • leads to greater inequality in opportunities

• centralisation of control

  • central government alone has the power to allow schools to become academies or for free schools to be set up

  • funded directly by government

  • rapid growth has reduced role of elected local authorities in education

Coalition Policies & Inequality

• the Coalition government also introduced policies aimed at reducing inequality

• including

• free school meals for all children in reception, Year 1 & 2

• pupil premium: money that schools receive for each pupil from a disadvantaged background

• Ofsted found in many cases, the pupil premium is not spent on those it is supposed to help

  • only 1/10 headteachers said it had significantly changed how they supported pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds

• as part of the government’s austerity programme, spending on many areas of education has been cut

  • spending on school buildings by 60%

  • many Sure Start centres were closed

  • the EMA was abolished

  • university tuition fees tripled to £9,000 a year

The Privatisation of Education

• privatisation: the transfer of public assets such as schools to private companies

• there has been a trend towards the privatisation of education both in the UK and globally

• education becomes a source of profit for capitalists

• Ball calls this the education services industry

• private companies in the ESI are involved in an ever increasing range of activities in education

  • building schools

  • providing supply teachers

  • work-based learning

  • careers advice

  • Ofsted inspection services

  • running local education authorities

• large-scale school building projects often involve public-private partnerships where private sector companies provide capital to design, build, finance & operate education services

• such contrasts typically last for at least 25 years

  • during, the local council pays a monthly lease & a management fee out of public funds

• many activities are very profitable

• Ball argues companies involved in such work make up to 10x more profit than on other contracts

• however, local authorities are often obliged to enter into these agreements as they are the only way of building new schools

  • lack of funding from central government

Blurring the Public/Private Boundary

• many senior officials in the public sector now leave to set up or work for private sector education businesses

• these companies bid for contracts to provide services to schools & local authorities

• two companies set up like this hold ⅘ national contracts for school inspection services

• Pollack notes that this flow of personnel allows companies to buy insider knowledge to help win contracts, as well as side-stepping local authority democracy

Privatisation & the Globalisation of Educational Policy

• many private companies in the ESI are foreign-owned

  • e.g., Edexcel is owned by the US educational publishing & testing giant Pearson

• according to Ball, some Pearson GCSE exam answers are marked in Sydney & Iowa

• Buckingham & Scanlon argue the UK’s 4 leading educational software companies are all owned by global multinationals

• many contracts for education services in the UK are sold on by the original company to others e.g., banks, investment funds

• some UK edu-businesses work overseas

  • e.g., Prospects has worked in China, Macedonia & Finland

• private companies are exporting UK education policy to other countries & then providing the services to deliver the policies

• so, nation-states are becoming less important in policy making 

  • shifting to a global level & is often privatised

The Cola-Isation of Schools

• private sector is penetrating education indirectly e.g., through vending machines on school premises

• development of brand loyalty through displays of logos & sponsorships

• this process is called the cola-isation of schools

• Molnar argues schools are targeted by private companies as they, by nature, carry enormous goodwill & can thus confer legitimacy on anything associated with them

  • product endorsement

• the benefits to schools & pupils are limited

• Ball says 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

• Beder argues UK families spent £110,000 in Tesco in return for a single computer to schools

Education as a Commodity

• Ball concludes that a fundamental change is taking place where privatisation is becoming the key factor shaping educational policy

• it is increasingly focused on moving educational services out of the public sector controlled by the nation-state to be provided by private companies instead

• education is being turned into a commodity to be bought & sold

• marxists e.g., Hall see Coalition government policies as part of the long march of the neoliberal revolution

  • academies are an example of handing public services over to private capitalists

• the neoliberal claim that privatisation & competition drive up standards is a myth legitimating turning education into a source of private profit

Policies on Gender & Ethnicity

– Gender

• in the 19th century, females were largely excluded from higher education

• under the tripartite system, females had to score higher on the 11 plus than boys to get into grammar schools

• since the 70s, policies such as GIST have been introduced to reduce gender differences in subject choice

– Ethnicity

• policies aimed at raising the achievement of MEG children have gone through phases

– Assimilation 

• policies in 60s and 70s

• focus on the need for MEG pupils to assimilate into mainstream British culture to raise achievement

  • e.g., helping those who are EAL

• related policy of compensatory education

• critics argue some minority groups at risk of underachievement e.g., African Caribbean already speak English & the real cause of their underachievement is poverty or racism

– Multicultural Education

• through 80s and 90s

• aimed to promote achievements of MEG children by valuing all cultures in the curriculum to raise self-esteem

• Stone argues black pupils do not fail for a lack of self-esteem

• critical race theorists argue MCE is tokenism

  • picks out stereotypical features of minority cultures for inclusion, but does not tackle institutional racism

• New Right argue MCE perpetuates cultural divisions

  • education should promote a shared national culture & identity

  • pro-assimilation

– Social Inclusion

• focus of late 90s

• e.g.,

  • detailed monitoring of exam results by ethnicity

  • amending Race Relations Act to place legal duty on schools to promote racial equality

  • help for voluntary Saturday Schools in black community

  • EAL programmes

• Mirza sees little genuine change in policy and argues it educational policy takes a soft approach focusing on culture, behaviour & the home rather than the structural causes

• Gillborn argues institutionally racist policies continue to disadvantage MEG pupils

  • e.g., ethnocentric curriculum, assessment & streaming