EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

1 In 2008, 15 per cent ofacademies and communitytechnology colleges wereestimated to use partial selectionby aptitude in subject, comparedwith less than 1 per cent ofcommunity and voluntarycontrolledsecondary schools.See Anne West, Eleanor Barhamand Audrey Hind, SecondarySchool Admissions in England:Policy and Practice, EducationResearch Group, London Schoolof Economics, 2009, p.18, www.risetrust.org.uk/Secondary.pdf.2 Jens Henrik Haahr, ExplainingStudent Performance: Evidencefrom the International PISA,TIMSS and PIRLS Surveys, DanishTechnological Institute, 2005,p.150, www.ec.europa.eu/education/pdf/doc282_en.pdf.Governing bodies may have an enhancedrole, but their statutory responsibilities extendprimarily to Whitehall, not to parents or thewider community. There is no requirement forschools to consult parents before converting toacademy status and while maintained schools arerequired to have at least three parent governors,academies must have only one. In fact, academiesonly have to have three governors in total, hardlya model of accountability to the local communitywhen, at the same time, the ability of localauthorities to plan for and support fairnessand quality across the board has been fatallyundermined. Academies also use selection byaptitude more than community and voluntarycontrolledschools, 1 so as academies spread, sowill selection; and by definition parents’ ability tochoose will be constrained.So if parents do not stand to benefit fromchoice and voice, will children benefit fromimproved quality of provision and attainmentlevels? The evidence suggests not. A 2005 metastudy by the Danish Technological Institute forthe European Commission considered threeinternational surveys of students’ skills, PISA,TIMSS and PIRLS, and found that:‘More differentiated school systems are associatedwith higher variance in student performance.…Students’ socio-economic background mattersmore for their performance in more differentiatedschool systems than in less differentiated schoolsystems. Or in other words: Less differentiated,more comprehensive school systems are moreefficient in adjusting for students’ socio-economicbackground and thus in providing equal learningopportunities for students.’ 2Markets have a multiplier effect – they do notredress the different resources and capabilitiesthat people bring to the table, they amplifythem. This is partly because markets rest onderegulation and choice, and when choice issupreme an equal ability to understand andnavigate the system is a precondition of fairoutcomes. But social capital is not and will neverbe evenly spread. So the increasingly clutteredlandscape of multiple school types and complexadmissions processes will continue to work to thebenefit of those parents with the understandingand wherewithal to engage most successfullywith the system. In other words, as a result ofthe superior social capital of the better-off, aneducational market simply becomes a mechanismfor them to bequeath their advantages to the nextgeneration.Furthermore, market logic requires thatschools are differentiated hierarchically notlaterally, in order to provide incentives. Or toput it more starkly, for educational marketsto operate effectively their own internal lawsdeem it desirable that some schools – andhence some children’s learning opportunities– are worse than others. As a result, our schoolsystem becomes unavoidably characterised bycompetition and struggle. Winners and losersare created as parents and children are forced toengage with the system as consumers pursuingrelative advantage, rather than as citizens witha crucial wider role to play as co-producers ofeducation in a collective project.Under the Conservatives’ market model,vital services provided centrally by educationauthorities for all local schools and particularlyvalued by those serving disadvantagedcatchments, such as educational welfare andethnic minority achievement, become unviable asbudgets are dispersed. At the same time, evidenceis emerging that local authority budgets are beingtop-sliced to pay for the costs of the academyscheme – resources being taken away from themajority to benefit the minority. We might callsuch a system educational Darwinism. If it is fair,it is the type of fairness propounded by those whobelieve that it is right and inevitable that only thestrong and able will succeed.The USA and Sweden have experimented withschool models akin to the academies and freeschools now being championed by the CoalitionGovernment. Not only is there evidence of fallingstandards in both countries, recent studies havealso pointed to greater racial and socio-economicsegregation between schools, as well as greaterdifferentiation in attainment between childrenfrom different backgrounds.In 2010, Swedish education minister BertilOstberg warned the UK against adopting hiscountry’s free schools model:‘We have actually seen a fall in the quality ofSwedish schools since the free schools wereintroduced. The free schools are generally20 | www.compassonline.org.uk