Policy

  • 1944 Tripartite system consisted of Grammar schools (higher status which they got into by passing the 11 plus exams), Secondary Modern schools (for those who failed) and technical schools (where skills for industry were taught).

  • In the 1960s, the Labour government decided to replace this system with comprehensive schools which were all-inclusive and didn’t require any exams to join.

  • The process of marketisation of education begun in 1988 by the conservative government - 1988 Education Reform Act

  • The act introduced league tables (which ranked the schools locally) and open enrolment which made schools available to everyone. This made schools need to compete for customers (parents) which turned the education system into a parentocracy in order to get more funding from the government. This is because a funding formula was introduced which meant that the more pupils a school had, the more funding they received from the government.

Critics:

  • Will Bartlett - the open enrolment system leaves room for abuse - The schools may silt-shift (avoid recruiting working-class kids) and cream-skim (try to recruit middle-class kids). Therefore it is divisive.

  • Gillborn and Youdell - The competitiveness that marketisation encourages leads to educational triage - Teachers categorise their students into the students who will perform well without help so receive little attention, the students who receive a lot of support to perform well, and the students who are totally neglected as the teachers believe they will fail no matter what. - They refer to this as the A*-C economy

  • Stephen Ball - Myth of parentocracy - parents cannot simply choose whichever school they want their kids to go to.

New Labour 1997-2010

  • Continued marketisation of education

  • Introduced more specialist schools - offered funding for schools that would convert to specialised schools (sports, arts, etc)

  • Increased qualification choices by promoting vocational qualifications.

  • Higher education was expanded which led to greatly increasing numbers of pupils moving on to university

  • In order to fund the increasing numbers of people going to university, they introduced tuition fees which began at about £1000 per year which rose in conservative government.

After criticisms of the marketisation:

  • Compensatory education was introduced - policies for helping children from poorer backgrounds

  • Education Action Zones - providing more funding, resources and business sponsorship in deprived areas

  • Education Maintenance Allowance - provided a cash payment for low-income students in post-16 education

Critics:

  • Paul Trowler - The reforms did little to reduce the social-class inequality attainment gap - education reforms are not able to reduce wider inequality, only reducing wider inequalities can reduce the attainment gap.

  • Sally Tomlinson - focusing on performativity leads to over emphasis on qualifications/exams rather than developing children’s personalities through humanising processes.

  • Stephen Ball - commodification of education - business profiting from the provision of education resources and staff - gradually becoming privatised.

  • Alex Molner - Cola-isation of schools -

Educational policy and inequality

2010 Academies Act - made it possible for all state schools to become academies.

Education policies in Britain before 1988:

  • Industrialisation increased need for educated workforce

  • In 1880, school became compulsory for kids aged 5 to 13

  • the type of education a child received depended on their background - middle-class children received academic education which prepared them for office work and higher payed professions while working-class children were taught basic numeracy and literacy which they needed for factory work.

  • Therefore the school system hardly changed pupil’s ascribed status.

  • 1944 Education Act - Introduced Tripartite system which allocated children into three school sections according to their performance in the 11 + exams.

  • The system consisted of Grammar schools and Secondary Modern Schools and Technical schools (which were only available in some areas)

  • The Tripartite system reproduced class inequality rather than being a meritocracy which was intended and it legitimated class inequality through the ideology that ability is inborn.

  • From 1965 the Comprehensive school system was introduced in many areas.

  • Comprehensive school system = Tripartite system and 11 + exams abolished and replaced by schools open to everyone in the area.

  • However, as the Local Education Authorities for each area decided whether to do so or not, there were many areas left with the old system still in place, maintaining that divide for many children.

Theories of the role comprehensive schools

Functionalist:

  • social integration - by bringing children of different social classes together BUT a study done by Julianne Ford confirmed that there was little social mixing between different classes largely due to streaming

Streaming = the allocation of schoolchildren into groups according to their age and ability.

  • Meritocratic system - fair selection of roles in workforce

  • Also meritocratic as it gives pupils a longer time to develop and prove their abilities unlike the tripartite system

Marxist:

  • reproducing and legitimating class inequality + not meritocratic

  • myth of meritocracy justifies class inequality - making it seem like the individual rather than the system

Marketisation

Marketisation has:

  • reduced state control over education

  • increased both competition between schools and parental choice of schools

Policies that promote marketisation:

  • Publication of league tables and Ofsted inspection reports - they both provide exam performance results and information that they need to choose the best school.

  • Open enrolment

  • Specialist schools

  • Formula funding - funding based on amount of pupils

  • Schools able to become academies

  • schools needing to compete to attract pupils

Through the marketisation of schools, the power shifter from the producers (teachers and schools) to the consumers (parents) - it becomes a parentocracy

Bartlett explores how Cream-skimming and slit-shifting is encouraged through marketisation.

Gerwitz: Parental choice

Gerwitz identified three main types of parents:

  • privileged-skill choosers - Those who had economic and cultural capital. They knew how school admissions worked, had more time to visit schools and skills to research the options. Their economic capital also meant that they could afford to move their children around the school system e.g. paying for transport to get to the best school.

  • Disconnected-local choosers - The poorer parents who had very limited school options due to afordability which meant that the closest school was often the only option. They were also less knowledgeable about school admissions procedures and less able to adapt to the system to their advantage.

  • Semi-skilled choosers - Were ambitious to give their children a good education but still had little knowledge about the school options due to their lack of cultural capital.

Gerwitz’s study shows that parentocracy is a myth. This myth both reproduces and legitimates class inequality by making the system seem fair.

New Labour policies which reduced inequality:

  • Some deprived areas were designated as Education Action Zones which received extra resources

  • The Aim Higher Programme which rose the aspirations of groups of young people that are under-represented in higher education

  • Education Maintenance Allowance which provided students from low-income background with payments.

  • Increased funding for state education

BUT critics such as Melissa Benn argue that their commitment to marketisation contradicts their attempt to reduce inequality which she refers to as the ‘New Labour Paradox’. e.g. they simultaneously introduced EMAs to encourage poorer students to stay in education while introducing tuition fees for higher education.

Government policy 2010 - present:

Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government 2010-2015

  • academisation - they converted over two-thirds of secondary schools into converter academies

  • continued with compensatory education (providing extra support for disadvantaged kids)

  • scrapped the Education Maintenance Allowance - they introduced the pupil premium instead.

  • pupil premium = schools receive extra funding for each disadvantaged pupil - a school will receive approximately £1000 a year for every pupil that has a household income low-enough for them to be receiving free school meals and for every pupil that is in care or has been adopted from care.  

Critics:

  • Stephen Ball - fragmented centralisation - academies and free schools are fragmented into a range of different standards of schools all with different management approaches

  • Timo Hannay - there is very little difference between the performance of convertor academies (schools that choose to become academies) and community schools (comprehensive schools that have not converted to academies) despite academies receiving extra funding

Conservative government 2015-2024

  • Replaced the Child Poverty Commission with the Social Mobility Commission

  • The percentage of year 11s getting five or more A*-C GCSEs was no longer used as a measure of school attainment - They replaced it with Attainment 8 and Progress 8.

Critique: still doesn’t take socioeconomic factors into account.

  • Margaret Thatcher planned (ended up being dropped) to introduce new grammar schools which would require ‘tutor-proof’ 11 plus exams and would be obligated to take in a proportion of low-income children