MA Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Marketisation in the English school system in 1988 and after
On 16th October, 1976, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, firmly called out for discussion by all parties, ‘parents, teachers, learned and professional bodies, representatives of higher education and both sides of industry, together with the Government’ (Callaghan, 1976) to address problems in the English educational system. He expressed unease with standards in schools and dubious new informal methods of teaching, among other things. In essence, his speech was an appeal for reform.
The Conservatives’ answer was the Education Reform Act of 1988, which promised that market forces would inject a new vitality into the system. Its aims were to:
raise standards, extend choice and produce a better educated Britain … by giving consumers of education a central part in decision making … (, by) freeing schools and colleges to deliver the standards that parents and employers want … (, by) encouraging the consumer to expect and demand that all educational bodies do the best job possible.
(Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker
2nd reading of 1987 bill in formulation for 1988 ERA
Hansard, 1 December 1987)
It would be useful to draw out various pertinent strands of the Act. First of all, the Local Management of Schools (LMS) scheme was a measure designed to enhance the independence of schools by diminishing Local Education Authority (LEA) control of schools. LEAs were seen to be overly bureaucratic, overly centralised and therefore inefficient. Under LMS, school governors were allowed to decide how to spend the delegated budget, which was newly introduced, and were responsible for the appointment, management and dismissal of staff. The whole point of LMS was ‘to decentralise decision making (from the LEAs) to school level’ (Levacic, 1995). Chubb and Moe (1990) would argue that such self autonomy is essential for school improvement and for schools to be most effective.
The main idea behind marketisation and the increase of competition is that schools will, given a mix of incentives, endeavour to raise educational standards in order to attract pupils and hence funding. To increase competition between schools, the ERA also prescribed open enrolment: it was made compulsory for schools to admit pupils up to their full capacity and LEAs could no longer restrict intakes of popular schools in order to protect falling rolls in less popular schools. Funding also became based on a formula strongly linked to student enrolment, and at least 75 percent of the Aggregated Schools Budget, i.e. the money delegated by the LEA to its schools, had to be allocated according to the number and the ages of pupils. Open enrolment and formula funding together meant that a quasi-voucher system was in place. Competition was also to be enhanced by the creation of grant-maintained schools and City Technology Colleges[1] (CTCs). Grant maintained (GM) schools were educational institutions with considerable autonomous powers separate from the LEAs, for example in the formulation and application of ‘their own selection procedures for a significant proportion of their intake’ (Gorard et al., 2003), as well as independence in asset and income management. These schools obtained their status as GM schools after a process of ‘opting out’ from their local LEA, which included an application to the secretary of state as well as a clear positive result from parental ballots. Successful schools would then receive their funding directly from central government instead of via the LEA. City Technology Colleges, built with the prime purpose of providing a good secondary school education for poor inner-city pupils, were to be financed partly with private resources, and were also to have similar autonomous powers as the GM schools. Such independence, it was hoped, would allow English schools the freedom from the bureaucratic, inefficient ‘visible hand’ of the LEAs to innovate and maximise educational quality.
It is important to note that the reforms of the ERA led not to an education free market, but to an education quasi-market, for which the distinguishing characteristics are ‘the separation of purchaser from provider and an element of user choice between providers’ as well as usually a high degree of government intervention (Levacic, 1995). In England and Wales, the government introduced a National Curriculum, which dictates the content of the curriculum in compulsory education, and testing on a grand scale, in order to inform parents and teachers what a child knows and understands, to indicate the achievements of schools generally, and to ensure the quality of the educational system. To ensure competition, leagues tables were to be compiled and published based on test grades obtained by pupils. Though such a mix of centralisation and decentralisation might at first glance appear to be purely the product of muddled thinking, it is in fact the result of struggle, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation over short and long term strategies and goals between the neo-liberals and neo-conservative elements within the New Right dominant during Margaret Thatcher’s years in power (Whitty, 1990). Also, it can be viewed, as Levacic (1993) suggested, as a clearly thought out introduction and application of the multidivisional ‘M’-form organisational model from business into education and the schools landscape, on the basis that the more flexible ‘M’ form would lead to a higher propensity for innovation, an important dynamic advantage over the ‘U’ form (Qian et al., 2003) that was pre-existing in the system.
After Thatcher, John Major in his six-and-a-half-year stint at 10 Downing Street showed a similar enthusiasm towards markets and competition in the school system. Major (1992) condemned orthodoxy around the pre-1988 comprehensive system for its ‘hostility to competition between schools and between pupils, and even in sport; hostility to all forms of testing; hostility to genuine parental choice … by some questionable dogmas that fly in the face of common sense’. In the White Paper Choice and diversity: a new framework for schools (DfE, 1992), and the 1993 Education Act therefore, it should perhaps be of no surprise that all secondary schools were eventually to be freed, upon successful application, to specialise in one or more curriculum areas such as technology and modern languages, or that LEAs would have an even more severely diminished and limited role in the new education system.
After the sound defeat of the Conservatives in 1997, the move towards more marketisation was not reversed and in fact seems to have hardly relented under New Labour. There has been, for example, an expansion of the specialist schools framework (Power & Whitty, 1999), such that successful applicants may now specialise in not just the original science, music, arts and technology, but also agricultural sciences, engineering and sports (Specialist Schools Trust, 2005). There are no more grant-maintained schools, because these have essentially been reinvented and renamed ‘foundation’ schools under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Also, the mechanisms with which schools may select pupils are now being ‘quasi-regulated’ with the introduction of new admissions and appeals rules as well as the appointment of school adjudicators (West & Ingram, 2001). State schools still continue to be funded largely on a pupil number basis, e.g. under New Labour’s ‘Fair Funding’ initiative in 1999. Recently, the educational marketplace has been expanding even at home, with the increasing emphasis on home learning by New Labour in what McNamara et al (2000) called ‘the Blairite project of Total Schooling’. The value of homework has been repeatedly emphasised, and funding has been poured into activities such as homework clubs, which extend the reach of schooling into the leisure time of children (Scanlon & Buckingham, 2004). Parents are also increasingly pressured to ‘invest’ more in educational resources, such as home computers, study guides, early learning materials and private home tutoring, for their children.
On 16th October, 1976, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, firmly called out for discussion by all parties, ‘parents, teachers, learned and professional bodies, representatives of higher education and both sides of industry, together with the Government’ (Callaghan, 1976) to address problems in the English educational system. He expressed unease with standards in schools and dubious new informal methods of teaching, among other things. In essence, his speech was an appeal for reform.
The Conservatives’ answer was the Education Reform Act of 1988, which promised that market forces would inject a new vitality into the system. Its aims were to:
raise standards, extend choice and produce a better educated Britain … by giving consumers of education a central part in decision making … (, by) freeing schools and colleges to deliver the standards that parents and employers want … (, by) encouraging the consumer to expect and demand that all educational bodies do the best job possible.
(Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker
2nd reading of 1987 bill in formulation for 1988 ERA
Hansard, 1 December 1987)
It would be useful to draw out various pertinent strands of the Act. First of all, the Local Management of Schools (LMS) scheme was a measure designed to enhance the independence of schools by diminishing Local Education Authority (LEA) control of schools. LEAs were seen to be overly bureaucratic, overly centralised and therefore inefficient. Under LMS, school governors were allowed to decide how to spend the delegated budget, which was newly introduced, and were responsible for the appointment, management and dismissal of staff. The whole point of LMS was ‘to decentralise decision making (from the LEAs) to school level’ (Levacic, 1995). Chubb and Moe (1990) would argue that such self autonomy is essential for school improvement and for schools to be most effective.
The main idea behind marketisation and the increase of competition is that schools will, given a mix of incentives, endeavour to raise educational standards in order to attract pupils and hence funding. To increase competition between schools, the ERA also prescribed open enrolment: it was made compulsory for schools to admit pupils up to their full capacity and LEAs could no longer restrict intakes of popular schools in order to protect falling rolls in less popular schools. Funding also became based on a formula strongly linked to student enrolment, and at least 75 percent of the Aggregated Schools Budget, i.e. the money delegated by the LEA to its schools, had to be allocated according to the number and the ages of pupils. Open enrolment and formula funding together meant that a quasi-voucher system was in place. Competition was also to be enhanced by the creation of grant-maintained schools and City Technology Colleges[1] (CTCs). Grant maintained (GM) schools were educational institutions with considerable autonomous powers separate from the LEAs, for example in the formulation and application of ‘their own selection procedures for a significant proportion of their intake’ (Gorard et al., 2003), as well as independence in asset and income management. These schools obtained their status as GM schools after a process of ‘opting out’ from their local LEA, which included an application to the secretary of state as well as a clear positive result from parental ballots. Successful schools would then receive their funding directly from central government instead of via the LEA. City Technology Colleges, built with the prime purpose of providing a good secondary school education for poor inner-city pupils, were to be financed partly with private resources, and were also to have similar autonomous powers as the GM schools. Such independence, it was hoped, would allow English schools the freedom from the bureaucratic, inefficient ‘visible hand’ of the LEAs to innovate and maximise educational quality.
It is important to note that the reforms of the ERA led not to an education free market, but to an education quasi-market, for which the distinguishing characteristics are ‘the separation of purchaser from provider and an element of user choice between providers’ as well as usually a high degree of government intervention (Levacic, 1995). In England and Wales, the government introduced a National Curriculum, which dictates the content of the curriculum in compulsory education, and testing on a grand scale, in order to inform parents and teachers what a child knows and understands, to indicate the achievements of schools generally, and to ensure the quality of the educational system. To ensure competition, leagues tables were to be compiled and published based on test grades obtained by pupils. Though such a mix of centralisation and decentralisation might at first glance appear to be purely the product of muddled thinking, it is in fact the result of struggle, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation over short and long term strategies and goals between the neo-liberals and neo-conservative elements within the New Right dominant during Margaret Thatcher’s years in power (Whitty, 1990). Also, it can be viewed, as Levacic (1993) suggested, as a clearly thought out introduction and application of the multidivisional ‘M’-form organisational model from business into education and the schools landscape, on the basis that the more flexible ‘M’ form would lead to a higher propensity for innovation, an important dynamic advantage over the ‘U’ form (Qian et al., 2003) that was pre-existing in the system.
After Thatcher, John Major in his six-and-a-half-year stint at 10 Downing Street showed a similar enthusiasm towards markets and competition in the school system. Major (1992) condemned orthodoxy around the pre-1988 comprehensive system for its ‘hostility to competition between schools and between pupils, and even in sport; hostility to all forms of testing; hostility to genuine parental choice … by some questionable dogmas that fly in the face of common sense’. In the White Paper Choice and diversity: a new framework for schools (DfE, 1992), and the 1993 Education Act therefore, it should perhaps be of no surprise that all secondary schools were eventually to be freed, upon successful application, to specialise in one or more curriculum areas such as technology and modern languages, or that LEAs would have an even more severely diminished and limited role in the new education system.
After the sound defeat of the Conservatives in 1997, the move towards more marketisation was not reversed and in fact seems to have hardly relented under New Labour. There has been, for example, an expansion of the specialist schools framework (Power & Whitty, 1999), such that successful applicants may now specialise in not just the original science, music, arts and technology, but also agricultural sciences, engineering and sports (Specialist Schools Trust, 2005). There are no more grant-maintained schools, because these have essentially been reinvented and renamed ‘foundation’ schools under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Also, the mechanisms with which schools may select pupils are now being ‘quasi-regulated’ with the introduction of new admissions and appeals rules as well as the appointment of school adjudicators (West & Ingram, 2001). State schools still continue to be funded largely on a pupil number basis, e.g. under New Labour’s ‘Fair Funding’ initiative in 1999. Recently, the educational marketplace has been expanding even at home, with the increasing emphasis on home learning by New Labour in what McNamara et al (2000) called ‘the Blairite project of Total Schooling’. The value of homework has been repeatedly emphasised, and funding has been poured into activities such as homework clubs, which extend the reach of schooling into the leisure time of children (Scanlon & Buckingham, 2004). Parents are also increasingly pressured to ‘invest’ more in educational resources, such as home computers, study guides, early learning materials and private home tutoring, for their children.
[1] The DFES on its website (http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/academies/ctcs/?version=1, accessed 21st August 2005) maintains that the Education Reform Act of 1988 provided the legislative framework for the City Technology programme, which involved the establishment of 14 CTCs and one college for the technology of arts from 1988 to 1993. However, plans for the development of CTCs may be traced back to 1986, when Kenneth Baker called for their pilot launch in urban areas (Baker, 2005), and when Solihull Local Education Authority agreed to support the establishment of the first CTC at Kingshurst (www.kingshurst.ac.uk/pages/backgrnd.htm, accessed 1st August 2005).
posted by the third wei | Tuesday, November 22, 2005
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