MA Further discussion and recommendations

Further discussion and recommendations

Thus far in this report, I have in Chapter 1 given a brief account of the market based reforms in England since 1988 and in Chapter 2 attempted to fit the case for school markets into Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP) framework as well as identify the ‘anomalies’ that threaten the coherence of the ‘markets for schools’ SRP. Then in Chapter 3, the idea of countervailing power as an addition to the protective belt and a solution to the monopoly power ‘anomaly’ was described, and a typology with which to facilitate its identification was suggested.

To ascertain the effectiveness of countervailing power as a curb on monopoly power, suggesting the typology is hardly sufficient. Indeed, the discussion of countervailing power in this report has only been exploratory and is really a first step. There is therefore a need perhaps to not only exhaustively identify all possible forms of countervailing power, but also to examine the effectiveness of all these various forms.

Some studies, including Power & Clark (2000), Vincent & Martin (2000), and Ranson et al (2004) which were mentioned earlier, have been carried out on several of the phenomena that I have identified as sources of countervailing power. These are case studies and good work by sociologists with which to begin to understand this phenomenon and evaluate its efficacy. At first glance though, it appears that not one of the school adjudicator, the ‘storming parents’ or the Parent Teacher Association is wholly desirable: as discussed above, the use of the first is too restrictive, the second is too threatening in a civil society and the third, in particular circumstances, may be alienating. Hence, on the face of it, it seems not only that it is difficult to be as optimistic about monopoly power in the schools market as Galbraith was for the 1950s American economy, but also that countervailing power may not be such a useful addition to the protective belt of the SRP.

However, given that these are small-scale case studies, which are highly context specific, and possibly unrepresentative, their findings and conclusions are difficult to generalise and thus should only remain as a starting point to comprehend the mechanisms of countervailing power. What would be necessary to more fully measure the effectiveness of countervailing power could be the large scale, well-resourced, quantitative randomised experiment that has been used to evaluate the education maintenance allowance by Middleton et al (2004).

In this report, Lakatos’ MSRP framework has been a very useful tool with which to organise aspects of the drive towards markets in schools: the arguments for markets, the evidence, the counter-evidence, the strategies that proponents of markets use to put forth their case and to refute their opponents, etc. The MSRP framework has more commonly been used to compare divergent SRPs, as per Lakatos’ (1978a) own comparisons of the Newtonian and Einsteinian research programmes, or Blaug’s (1980) Keynesians versus the monetarists. It may also be intellectually stimulating and potentially fruitful to attempt a similar comparison in the field of education: to contrast the SRP of ‘markets for schools’ with that of the pro-comprehensive and anti-market socialists perhaps typified by members of the Socialist Workers’ Party and left wing academics so prevalent among sociologists working in education, such as Ranson, Gillborn and Vincent. As a central-right inclined student of economics, it would be useful, at least for myself, to attempt to identify the hard core of the latter SRP, in a bid to comprehend why meaningful dialogue between the two groups has thus far seemed so difficult to achieve.