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The Contradictions of Education Policy: Disadvantage and AchievementAuthor(s): Alma Harris and Stewart RansonReviewed work(s):Source: British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 5, Education Policy and SocialJustice (Oct., 2005), pp. 571-587Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of BERAStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032647 .Accessed: 12/07/2012 11:56

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British Educational Research Journal Vol. 31, No. 5, October 2005, pp. 571-587 ROUTLEDGE Routledge taylor & Francis Group

The contradictions of education policy: disadvantage and achievement Alma Harris* and Stewart Ranson Institute of Education, University of Warwick, UK

In England, New Labour's Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners is presented as the most radical for a generation, addressing systemic weaknesses and enabling a new social democratic settlement to secure education in the public sphere. In this article the authors test these claims against proposals in the Strategy that acknowledge and seek to address the failure of the polity to 'break the link between class and achievement'. The article highlights a number of inherent contradictions in the Strategy and argues that the central proposals of choice and diversity are unlikely to reduce the gap between disadvantage and achievement. The article concludes that until the principles of justice and democracy are restored to a constitutive settlement of education as a public service then the bond of class and inequality will simply be reproduced rather than challenged by education policy.

Introduction

The bond between social class and educational achievement is a particularly powerful and resistant one. In England, successive governments have sought to sever the link through policy making aimed at structural intervention to generate a more equitable educational system. Circular 10/65 (DES, 1965), which heralded the introduction of comprehensive education in the 1960s, aimed to provide 'equality of opportunity' within a new school system designed to ameliorate class disadvantage. It formed a key moment in the constituting of the social democratic settlement that pursued social justice based on redistribution. An age of 'professional knowledge', it was suggested, would deliver the good society for its clients. The Conservatives 1988 Education Reform legislation pursued a different notion of the good society. A polity of individual rights, it was argued, would better achieve equity and social mobility, while competition and customer choice would deliver better public services.

Since 1997, New Labour has developed a 'third way' between these perspectives. This approach has generally rendered taboo two presuppositions that were taken for

*Corresponding author. Director, Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/05/050571-17 O 2005 British Educational Research Association DOI: 10.2307/30000004

572 A. Harris and S. Ranson

granted in the social democratic settlement. The first is that poverty and class are inextricably associated with educational failure and that life chances continue to be dominated by class structures (Halsey, 1972; 1974; Mortimore & Blackstone, 1982; Ball, 2003). Taking up the perspective of the National Commission on Education (NCE, 1996), New Labour promoted the belief that good schools can defy expectations and 'succeed against the odds'. The NCE report argued that 'taking account of these factors [of disadvantage] shows that there is plenty of scope for the school to make a difference. Schools with similar intakes do not promote the progress of their pupils at the same rate' (NCE, 1996). Almost a decade earlier the school effectiveness movement had made the same point, that the relative effectiveness of the school is a significant variable in subsequent educational attainment (Reynolds, 1986). The second presupposition of an earlier generation was that structural reform of the school system was necessary to address the failures caused by poverty and to secure some equality of educational opportunity. Yet in its White Paper, Excellence in Schools the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE, 1997), carried into legislation a year later, New Labour argued that processes of improving standards mattered more than structures. It noted that 'The preoccupation with school structure has absorbed a great deal of energy to little effect. We know what it takes to create a good school' (DfEE, 1997, p. 6).

With the launch of the Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2004)-which was presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State on 8 July and submitted as a bill to Parliament in November the same year-it would appear that New Labour has retreated on both of its initial precepts of education policy. While celebrating New Labour's achievements since taking office in 1997 such that 'opportunity has been opened up at every stage of life', the Strategy acknowledges the need for change, in the context of transformations in society and economy and the realisation that 'we have not yet broken the link between social class and achievement. No society can afford to waste the talent of its children and citizens'. The Strategy, furthermore, proposes a fundamental restructuring of schools which presents a significant threat to the future of comprehensive education. Concerned about the fracturing of public education, in particular of disadvantaged youngsters disengaging from services and the fragile commitment to state education of the middle classes, New Labour is currently attempting to establish a new social democratic settlement for the public sphere.

This article offers a commentary on the current policy debate about disadvantage and achievement and discusses the capacity of New Labour's Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners to address the historic alignment of class and achievement so clearly identified. We suggest that not only will 'choice' continue to reproduce the inequities of the neo-liberal marketplace and strengthen the traditional hierarchies and boundaries of class, race and gender (Ball, 2003), but also that 'diversity' signals a return to clearly segmented education provision with selection as the central allocation mechanism. In short, we argue that while the policies of choice

The contradictions of education policy 573

and diversity appear to champion and reinforce equal opportunities, in practice they are simultaneously and actively reducing the scope for forms of collective action most likely to address the structural predicament of class and educational opportunity.

Success against the odds? Reviewing policies aimed at tackling underachievement in some of the country's poorest schools, it is apparent that the school effectiveness and school improvement research fields have guided much of the policy formation in the past decade. The predominant message from both fields is that that all schools have the potential to improve and that there are certain internal conditions that are conducive to raising performance (Hopkins, 2001; Harris, 2002). Both fields have also increasingly recognised that socio-economic factors are a powerful influence upon a school's ability to improve (Reynolds et al., 2004). But the government has been equally keen to promote a view that all schools can improve performance irrespective of the communities they serve and that 'success against the odds' is possible for more than a handful of schools in disadvantaged communities (NCE, 1996). While recent school improvement research has challenged this position by arguing for context-specific improvement strategies (Hopkins, 2001; Harris & Chapman, 2004), the dominant school improvement discourse, the officially endorsed one, continues to place an emphasis on 'performativity'. This form of school improvement is founded upon the twin pillars of accountability (inspection, test scores, league tables) and standards (target setting, monitoring, raising achievement plans). It assumes that the 'problem' of improvement is one that is essentially internal to the school and one which the school itself can solve. Even though this approach to school improvement has dominated the educational landscape for well over a decade, it has been argued that expected increases in school performance have not necessarily followed (Thrupp, 2005). It has also been argued that this approach to improvement has adversely impacted upon many schools in disadvantaged communities, where progress is most sought. This is because of the pressures and demands that 'official school improvement' places upon these schools coupled with the distraction of constant scrutiny and critical feedback (Whitty, 2002; Ball, 2003).

New Labour has, however, invested substantially in forms of intervention designed to assist schools in 'challenging circumstances'. Programmes such as 'Excellence in Cities' (EiCs), the 'Schools Facing Challenging Circumstances' (SFCC) initiative, 'Educational Action Zones' (EAZs) and, most recently, the 'London Challenge' have all provided additional resources, external support and specific programmes of intervention for schools in the most difficult contexts. However, external programme evaluations show that some initiatives aimed at helping schools in disadvantaged contexts have had variable and patchy success (Reid & Brain, 2003, West et al., 2003). Part of the reason for this variability inevitably resides in the complexity and difficulty of the terrain but it can also be attributed to the adherence to a 'top-down' model of improvement with its


standardised, common packages of intervention. Recent government policies and initiatives, aimed at tackling the 'underachievement and disadvantage' equation, have still not been sufficiently differentiated to match the diversity of school need and have tended to ignore the structural inequalities that persist and prevail. In short, the contextual constraints and factors that impinge so heavily upon schools are not being adequately addressed in the current policy and practices aimed at assisting schools in challenging circumstances (Harris et al., 2005; Lupton, this issue). Consequently, the structural relationship between poverty and underachievement is often being reinforced rather than dismantled.

In addition, it is assumed that schools in disadvantaged areas simply need to aspire to perform like other schools in order to achieve success. Evidence suggests that the 'marketisation' of education has resulted in schools in disadvantaged contexts becoming less able to raise their performance (Ball, 2003). In short, a combination of market individualism and control through constant and comparative assessment (i.e. league tables) has demoted certain schools to the lower echelons of performance, indefinitely. The reason for this partly resides in the neo-liberal world of competition and marketisation where affluent parents have the informal knowledge and skill to be able to use marketised forms to their own benefit through sets of informal cultural rules. As Apple (2001, p. 73) explains:

in marketised plans, more affluent parents often have more flexible hours and can visit multiple schools. They have cars-often more than one-and can afford driving their children across town to attend a 'better school'. They can as well provide the hidden cultural resources such as camps and after school programs (dance, music, computer classes etc.) that give their children an 'ease', a 'style' that seems 'natural' and acts as a set of cultural resources.

Conversely, parents and families in poor and disadvantaged communities are less able to 'work the system', leaving more and more students in high poverty areas grouped together in the same school, thus creating the kind of intake mix that has been shown to significantly influence a school's ability to improve its performance (Thrupp, 1999).

Although some schools in difficult circumstances have been successful in raising attainment (Reynolds et al., 2004), a significant number are not making the progress expected of them. Many of the major external intervention programmes and current policies have been unable to reverse the educational fortunes of schools serving disadvantaged communities. There is also evidence which suggests that parental choice, as exercised by middle-class parents, has exacerbated the plight of these schools, leading to the homogenisation of the social composition of pupils. Recent evidence shows that while some schools in disadvantaged contexts are able to 'raise their game', others simply cannot because of the impact of parental choice combined with the powerful socio-economic forces that persist and prevail (Harris et al., 2005).This scale of continuing underachievement in areas of disadvantage was charted recently by the Chief Inspector (Bell, 2003) in a speech to mark the tenth anniversary of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) report Access and achievement in urban education (1993). The gap is such that 32%


of children whose parents have 'routine occupations' are likely to leave school with five good General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) passes compared with 81% of children from more advantaged homes. The Chief Inspector was forced to conclude, much as the report a decade ago did, that 'the rising tide of educational change was not lifting the boats in disadvantaged areas' (Bell, 2003). This message was repeated in his Annual Report, which noted that while 'improvement in schools with the highest levels of social disadvantage has been greater than that of any group of schools', nevertheless 'the gap between the average achievement in the highest performing schools and the lowest continues to widen' (Ofsted, 2003, para. 79).

Thus, although some progress has been achieved, the size of the gap in performance and the comparatively slow rates of improvement present a less than comforting picture (Gray, 2004). It seems that levels of disadvantage still account, in part, for poor attainment and this relationship is stubbornly resistant to policy intervention. This conclusion is reinforced by a substantial international corpus of research into the nexus between poverty and education which demonstrates that, while the attainment levels of poor children have increased over time, the gap between the majority of children from low-income families and their more affluent peers persists throughout schooling (Teese, 2000; Power et al., 2003). It is clear that many schools in disadvantaged areas perform below the national norm and that these patterns of performance are well established and continue. In summary, the more socially disadvantaged the community served by the school, the more likely it is that the school will underperform (Rainwater & Smeeding, 2003).

Research also shows the cumulative effect of attending less effective schools. As Gray (2004, p. 306) points out, part of being disadvantaged seems to be about having the misfortune to end up attending 'poorer' institutions more than chance would predict. It remains the case that certain groups of pupils consistently fail to reach their potential while other groups of pupils consistently succeed and that children from low-income families do not on average overcome the hurdle of lower initial attainment (Power et al., 2003). So the odds, it seems, are 'still stacked against schools in poorer areas' in so far that social class differential remains a powerful indicator of subsequent educational achievement (Gray, 2004, p. 1). As the Chief Inspector concluded in his Anniversary Lecture, quoting from the 1993 Access and achievement report:

Most schools in disadvantaged areas do not have within themselves the capacity to sustain renewal ... Beyond the school gate are underlying social issues such as poverty, unemployment, poor housing, inadequate health care and the frequent break up of families. Education by itself can only do so much to enable individuals to reach beyond the limiting contours of their personal and social circumstances and succeed ... [the] message remains a strong one. It makes a call for collective and concerted action across and beyond the education service in a local area.

While the Strategy celebrates New Labour's achievements since taking office in 1997 such that 'opportunity has been opened up at every stage of life' (p. 6), it also acknowledges the need for change, in the context of transformations in society and


economy and the realisation that 'we have not yet broken the link between social class and achievement. No society can afford to waste the talent of its children and citizens' (p. 6). The introduction to the Strategy recognises the continued failure to combat the powerful effects of disadvantage on educational attainment. It notes:

We fail our most disadvantaged children and young people-those in public care, those with complex family lives are those most at risk ... Internationally our rate of child poverty is still high, as are the rates of worklessness in one-parent families, the rate of teenage pregnancies and the level of poor diet among children. The links between poor health, disadvantage and low educational outcomes are stark. (Introduction, para. 24)

Yet despite the recognition of the prevailing powerful relationship between class structure and educational failure, it is our contention that the Government's Five Year Strategy is unlikely to close this gap chiefly because of some of the inherent policy contradictions it contains. We will outline and discuss these contradictions in turn but initially provide an overview and analysis of the Strategy.

New Labour's Five Year Strategy: choice, customisation and corporatisation

The Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (DfES, 2004) promoted itself as the most radical education reform agenda for a generation. It interprets the present needs of education in terms of its analysis of the inherited post-World War II welfare settlement that created mass public services now in need of reform:

a monolithic model ... providing a basic and standard product for all', administrative differentiation between public services such as health and education, and a mistaken belief that ability was confined to a particular group. While the comprehensive movement challenged such elitism 'the debate was still about types of school rather than standards. (DfES, 2004, p. 10)

The introduction to the Strategy discusses how reforms following Prime Minister Callaghan's Ruskin College speech in 1976 and a new regime of governance in 1979 sanctioned the state intervening in the curriculum (the National Curriculum) and in evaluation of teaching practice. Nevertheless, the Strategy argues, these reforms only began the process of change, leaving the focus on 'a sort of basic minimum standard' that every school ought to provide (p. 3).

Underlying this analysis about the limitations of a mass education system resides a deeper argument about the contemporary juncture of the public sphere, elaborated by the Schools Standards Minister at a DfES/Demos/OECD conference in May 2004 (Miliband, 2004; see also Miliband, 2003). He proposed that 'it is the most important time for public services since the creation of the welfare state after 1945. Now as then the power of collective action is being tested: to liberate individual potential, or be damned for costing too much and delivering too little' (Miliband, 2004). 'At stake is the prize of a public realm that promotes opportunity and security' (Miliband, 2004) and the proposed way forward is to learn from the private sector, which is seen to have grasped the need to progress from mass production to


co-production (Boynton & Victor, 1998). This strategy of co-production, of customising public services, is seen to provide a way through the polarised debate about whether central planning or market solutions can best improve public services.

The Strategy embodies this agenda of customisation, arguing that if the education service is to respond to the concerns it identifies of 'disadvantage in the early years', 'too few excellent schools', and 'too many disenchanted pupils getting into trouble and dropping out in the 14-19 years' (Summary, p. 1), then it must take up the challenge of addressing the structural flaws in the system. These underlying problems remain 'the failure of learning to address specific needs', the 'compart- mentalising of services and fragmentation of funding' together with 'centralisation of governance squeezing innovation and entrepreneurship' (Summary, p. 1). The Strategy aims to create:

a new sort of system .... The central characteristic [of which] will be personalisation-so that the system fits to the individual rather than the individual having to fit to the system .... And the corollary of this is that the system must be both freer and more diverse- with more flexibility to help meet individual needs; and more choices between courses and types of provider, so that there really are different and personalised opportunities available. (DfES, 2004, p. 10)

The Strategy develops a dual approach to customising an outmoded education system to fit the needs of the individual. One dimension is to introduce choice for pupils and to personalise learning to meet their needs. This is gauged to respond in particular to the needs of disenchanted and underachieving young people, especially amongst the disadvantaged. The second dimension is to customise provision for parents by further developing choice in the structure of schooling. This is gauged to respond to the fragile confidence of middle-class parents in the quality of secondary school. In July 2004 the Secretary of State for Education expressed concern about the drift of middle-class parents from the state sector, which has risen to 20% in some urban areas and higher in London. 'There is a significant chunk of them who go private because they feel despairing about the quality of education. They are the people we are after' (Clarke, 2004). This duality in the Strategy, held in tension by the theme of choice, encompasses, we propose, two very different programmes of reform-the customising of learning and the corporatising of schooling-coded with different informing principles in response to different class interests.

Customising learning

One central dimension of the government's strategy of customisation is a vision that puts the wishes and needs of children and learners at the centre. The Schools Standards Minister, setting out his vision of 'choice and voice in personalised learning' in his 2004 lecture, argued that in every phase of learning there should be a stronger voice for children in the development of policy and the design of services to meet their needs. This belief, elaborated in the Strategy, is that if schools can do more to tailor or personalise what is taught they are more likely to motivate and get the most from each pupil, especially 'groups of children who have traditionally underperformed'. The 'third way' of personalised learning, it is claimed, more than


state plans or market forces, will 'raise standards by focusing teaching and learning on the aptitudes and interests of pupils, tailoring learning to ensure that every pupil achieves the highest standard possible' (Miliband, 2004, p. 4).

So we need to do more than engage and empower pupils and parents in the selection of a school: their engagement has to be effective in the day-to-day processes of education, at the heart of the way schools create partnerships with professional teachers and support staff to deliver tailor made services. In other words we need to embrace individual empowerment within as well as between schools. This leads straight to the promise of personalised learning. It means building the organisation of schooling around the needs, interests and aptitudes of individual pupils: it means shaping teaching around the way different youngsters learn ... I believe it is the debate in education today. (Miliband, 2004 p. 3)

This practice of personalised learning, the Strategy proposes, will require schools to base their teaching on 'real knowledge of individual pupils', thus helping them to achieve (DfES, 2004, para. 5.9). This will depend on diagnostic assessment of each pupil's learning needs, and teaching and learning strategies that build on these identified needs, recognising 'that the multiple intelligences of pupils require a repertoire of teaching strategies' (Miliband, 2004, p. 4). This will encourage learning 'at a time and place and in a form which suits the needs of young people, with no artificial distinctions made, for example, between good learning and children's well- being' (DfES, 2004, p. 34). A broad and rich curriculum will be developed with more choice and a wider set of out-of-hours opportunities-including sports, clubs and residential activities through schools (DfES, 2004, para. 5.9). Personalised learning, it is further argued, will 'demand a radical approach to school organisation':

It means the starting point for class organisation is always student progress, with opportunities for in-depth, intensive teaching and learning, combined with flexible deployment of support staff. Workforce reform is absolutely key. The real professionalism of teachers can best be developed when they have a range of adults working at their direction to meet diverse student needs. (Miliband, 2004, p. 5)

For the government, an important further condition of personalised learning 'means the community, localised institutions and social services supporting schools to drive forward progress in the classroom' (Milliband, 2004, p. 6). The Strategy reinforces the expectation that schools should 'work more closely with parents in support of children's learning' (DfES, 2004, para. 5.8) Schools must also 'see themselves at the heart of communities, working well with parents and forging good partnerships to support vulnerable pupils' (DfES, 2004, para. 5.9) The Strategy emphasises the importance of primary schools forming networks of support, while for the early years inter service coordination to ensure learning, care and protection are encouraged.

Corporatising schooling

The second 'programme' within the Strategy purports to customise provision of (particularly secondary) schooling for parents, especially, as the Secretary of State


revealed, middle-class parents. The design in the Strategy to reassure the middle classes or to lure them back into the state sector focuses on a series of 'guarantees' of quality. The first promises a massive programme of sustained and rising investment in the secondary sector to secure quality of resources, buildings and facilities. This will include: 'guaranteed three year budgets', more 'new schools', 'every school to be refurbished or rebuilt to a modern standard over the next decade' and 'a sevenfold increase in schools capital budget since 1997 to modernise buildings, facilities and information technology' (DfES, 2004, Summary, p. 5). The second guarantee of quality is to promise access to 'successful and popular schools'. Existing successful schools will be allowed to expand their market share of places as the constraint of 'surplus places in other schools' is abandoned. New dedicated capital funding will enable such expansion and, in addition, successful schools will be able 'to establish and manage entirely new schools and federations' (Summary, p. 3). Additional academy schools-200 of them-will also be built, some to replace underperforming schools. A third guarantee seeks to reassure the middle classes by promising the style of tradition in the independent sector: school uniform, the strengthening of discipline and an encouragement to return to the school house system-a feature of private schools that was adopted in some comprehensive schools a generation ago.

Quality is inextricably associated in the Strategy with choice and independence: 'the central purpose is to raise the quality of education ... and to widen the range of real choices' (para. 4.1). Every school is to become 'a specialist independent school' with a mission to build a centre of curriculum excellence that provides families with a choice in secondary education based on their children's aptitude and interests (para. 4.14). We propose that this could herald the demise of comprehensive schooling, purportedly the outmoded unit of mass production condemned for its uniformity in an age requiring flexible specialisation. Selection by aptitude for the specialist curriculum is implied, which at present stands at 10% for schools with Specialist School status. The presentation of the Strategy encodes signs designed to appeal to middle-class parents, not only of tradition in style, but by proposing schools much like those to be found in the independent, private sector, ostensibly guaranteeing freedom from interference as well.

The state, in establishing a parallel independent sector for the middle classes, is also signalling a significant restructuring of the leadership and governance of education. The Strategy promises to offer freedom and autonomy for school leaders, the 'front line heads', governors and managers, affording them simple accountabilities and more secure streamlined funding arrangements to cut the bureaucracy and burdens on leaders. 'The people on whom the system depends, those at the front line, must be given the freedom to shape and reshape the offer to meet different and changing needs' (DfES, 2004, Secretary of State, Foreword). Schools will also be freed from the existing regime of inspection. In 'a new relationship with schools', Ofsted inspections will be 'halved', becoming 'light touch', while the local education authority (LEA) link adviser will be replaced by a single annual review carried out by 'a school improvement partner' (DfES, 2004, Summary, p. 5).


It is clear that the promise of such autonomy for school leaders presupposes a major restructuring of education governance that indicates the demise of the LEA. The LEA has been undergoing fundamental change in its role for over a decade. LEAs which had been the linchpin of the 1944 Education Act, planning and providing local education, began to transmute, following the 1988 education reform legislation and the local management of schools, from a 'civic provider' into an 'enabling authority' (Levacic, 1995; Ranson, 1997; Glatter et al., 1997; Riley 2000). Now the LEA, though retaining a duty as the 'strategic leader of local education', is to lose most of its powers and acquire a new role as 'a champion', or 'advocate' (Ranson, 1992) on behalf of parents and pupils in relation to 'a completely new kind of local system of governance'.

The role of traditional local government, associated in the Strategy with 'compliance and defensiveness', and with burdensome accountability, needs, the Strategy proposes, to be reconfigured with 'new energies' and 'smarter accountabilities'. What will be the distinctive characteristics of this new system of governance? The Strategy proposes that schools and services must be 'opened up to new and different providers and ways of delivering services' (Summary, p. 2). Such new providers might include 'parents groups ... able to sponsor schools, enabling successful schools to establish and manage entirely new schools and federations' (Summary, p. 4). Schools themselves are encouraged to form foundation partnerships and federations that will work together to raise standards but also take on new responsibilities, 'in areas such as provision for SEN, or hard to place pupils' (Summary, p. 4). Schools may draw into their partnerships 'employers, volunteers and voluntary organisations to maximise life chances of all' (Summary, p. 2). The business and private sectors, in addition to the churches, are perceived not only as extending their increasing control and provision of state schooling, but also as playing an emergent role in a new system of local governance, offering 'some local brokerage to make it work' (Secretary of State, Foreword) as well as coordination to ensure joined-up provision:

In order to manage this increasingly diverse and personalised system we need good leadership and professional standards at all levels. We also need collaboration and partnership so that diverse provision is not incoherent and bitty, and so that people can get seamless services. This cannot just be a partnership of state providers-the voluntary and community sector, business and private enterprises need to be a part of this partnership to provide joined up services. (DfES, 2004, Secretary of State, Foreword)

This reveals an emerging direction of change for the public sphere of education, for it suggests that control of education is seeping from the public to the corporate sector and that traditional forms of local governance are being steadily eroded (cf. Crouch, 2003; Ranson, 2003; Marquand, 2004). The growth of a corporate sector reflects two dimensions of change from a public service that traditionally has been described as a national service locally governed or administered. First, a growing number of schools are controlled by providers who bring exogenous interests to the public provision of education: defining the concern for school provision is an 'external' interest in


business, or profit, or a denominational interest. This dual ownership of schools, traditionally exemplified in the voluntary sector relationship between church and state, is now being extended to the business and private sectors. A public good now accommodates sectional interests whose principal end is not only the need of the citizen as such but the separate interests of the organisation. They are appropriately termed 'corporate' to capture this separate, organisational and financial entity, interest and accountability. A second dimension of corporatising of education provision is revealed in the rebuilding and renovation of schools through the use of private capital (to be discussed further below). Such finance can enable the corporate sponsors to gain a controlling influence over the practices of a school (Whitfield, 2001; McFadyean & Rowland, 2002). The corporate sector therefore is defined directly by the exogenous interests and accountabilities that are brought to the public sphere. This reinforcing of corporate interests is reinforced indirectly by the demise of the LEA, and thus the requirement to be accountable to a democratically accountable local government. The next section considers some of the policy contradictions within the Strategy that, we suggest, will make the stated aspiration of closing the disadvantage and achievement gap more difficult to achieve in practise.

Policy contradictions

There are three aspects in which the current education policy articulated in the Strategy appear to have some inherent internal contradictions. These are (i) competing concepts of choice, (ii) 'diversity and personalisation' and (iii) the relationship between independence and corporatisation.

Customisation: choosing learning and choosing schools

The Strategy proffers 'greater personalisation and choice' for pupils in their learning experience and for parents in their choice of school, as if these are the same kind of choices, and choices based on the same conditions and informed by the same underlying principles and presuppositions. One choice is for a profile of learning (an experience) while the other is a selection of a particular type of school (a social institution). The condition for one is variety and depth of staff and resources, while the condition for the other is an institutional system that constitutes diversity and thus the possibility of different types of school. Most significantly, the current manifestation of the idea of 'choice' presupposes different organising principles. The rationale for personalising student choices is the complexity of each individual's learning needs. The rationale for parental choices, on the other hand, involves the rights of individual families in a consumer society to pursue their acquisitive interests.

These are very different goods: the internal goods of excellence, in enabling the unique qualities of each to unfold over time, as against the external goods of competition in search of positional advantage in the market of educational opportunity. Internal goods depend on the virtues of character and disposition,


while external goods depend upon wealth, power and status. We argue that these two agendas are mutually contradictory. Enabling parental choices in an educational market will reinforce the competitive advantage of middle-class parents, reinforcing, as the research illustrates (Ball, 2003), an emergent hierarchy and segmentation of schooling. Such stratification will systematically reduce the capacity of many schools to provide the range of opportunities to respond to the complexity of personal learning and 'personalisation' envisaged in the Strategy.

Diversity and personalisation

The twin flagship policies of 'specialist schools' and 'personalisation' embody the aspiration for greater diversity within the system and within schools. The specialist schools policy places a strong emphasis upon distinguishing schools by subject specialism and reinforces 'choice and diversity' as the key drivers of school reform and improvement. Specialist status is currently held by 2000 of the 3500 secondary schools in England and will be increased by 450 schools per year over the next few years. The implication of this expansion not only means a major structural realignment of the system but signals the emergence of a new school system premised upon different types of school and different types of educational pathways through schools. While it is too early to rehearse the exact outcomes of this shift, certain consequences can be foreseen.

It has been argued that there is already a 'pecking order', with some specialist subjects being much more sought after than others (Glatter, 2004). In the future, to balance the range of provision across schools, as more achieve specialist status, will require some structural realignment and rationalisation. One could speculate that this might involve certain schools being encouraged towards certain subjects, rather than others. It also will mean that more subject specialisms will be needed to meet the increased demand and to maintain diversity across the system in the next few years. It is anticipated that more vocational specialist areas will be introduced ('New schools for skills', 2005), allowing those schools which are not yet specialist to be able to choose from the new specialist areas.

Looking at the other major policy driver, 'personalisation', it is suggested that the way to improve schools, particularly underperforming schools, is not parental choice but 'building the organization of schooling around the needs, interests and aptitudes of individual pupils'. The key word here is 'aptitudes'-this is the link between the specialisation and personalisation agendas. The combined message is one of matching aptitudes to a particular curriculum, pathway or school. If the Government is serious about aspiring 'to make universal the life chances of the most fortunate', it remains questionable whether this can be achieved through the combined processes of specialisation and personalisation.

Independence and public accountability

The Strategy proposes to constitute schools as independent institutions, thus signalling not only an end to the era of comprehensive schooling (Benn & Chitty,


1996; Chitty, 2004; Haydn, 2004) but also an end to local democratic control and accountability through the LEA. As highlighted earlier, independence is secured by removing the powers of local government to intervene in policy and practice of local education. Elected councils will no longer control the assets, budgets or policies that supposedly constrain the freedom of schools. Schools will also be able to draw upon the powers of the Education Act 2002 that enable them to reconfigure their governing bodies, they are no longer constrained to adopt the 'stakeholder' model of governance which requires them to secure participation from each of a school's constituencies-parents, teachers, the local authority and local communities. In the new foundation schools parents will still comprise one-third of the governing body, but only one parent need be elected. The remainder of governors would be appointed by the foundation in sufficient numbers to ensure the foundation governors constitute a majority of two, while they can increase their 'sponsor governors' from two to four. Adamson (2004) argues that this will significantly diminish the democratic rights of parents in relation to foundation schools, now the privileged model of schooling.

But who will fill the vacuum left by the LEA and increasingly the DfES? It is unlikely that the DfES wishes to govern 25,000 independent schools. The Strategy proposes that not only will 'new providers' of education enter the field, most possibly in the form of the private sector, but also there will be 'new co-ordinators and brokers of education'. It is clear that while some parents' groups or professional partnerships may play a part in a new phase of coordination, it is likely that the powers and responsibilities for local education will pass to the corporate sector- churches together with the business and the private sector. Private sector involvement in education has grown from 3% in 1979-80 to 7.5% in 1995-96 and 10% in 1998-99 and continues to increase (Institute of Public Policy Research [IPPR], 2001; Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Accounts, 2002). Beginning in the early 1990s, compulsory competitive tendering arrangements generated 'contracting out' or 'outsourcing' of services which LEAs would traditionally have delivered themselves. But private involvement continues to accelerate under New Labour (Hatcher, 2001; Whitfield, 2001; Rikowski, 2004), including: outsourcing and franchising services; school inspections under Ofsted; the corporate takeover of LEAs and schools; the creation of City Academies; and a number of teaching and educational services.

Following on from the Conservative government policy of 1992, the activity generating the most significant acceleration in corporate privatisation of the education service has been the PFI (Public Finance Initiative). For school building and rebuilding, the PFI has largely become 'the only game in town' (Parliamentary Select Committee, 2002). The buildings remain in private control until repayments are completed (typically 25-35 years or 7-15 years for equipment). The practice and prospect of PFI's remain subject to critical scrutiny (McFadyean & Rowland, 2002; Audit Commission, 2003; Pollock, 2004) and the purported efficiencies have often failed to materialise (Parliamentary Select Committee, 2002). The long-term contracts are inflexible, denying a defining characteristic of the public sphere of


capacity to revise policies and practices in response to changes in need and understanding of good practice. This growing regime of corporate regulation frustrates rather than supports public policy development. Most significantly, public-private partnerships, by strengthening over time the private regulation and management of public institutions, subvert the practice of public democratic accountability of the public sphere (Whitfield, 1999, 2000, 2001).

The Strategy proposes 'smarter accountabilities' to strengthen answerability for schools and local education. But are such accountabilities public accountability? These proposals are by definition ending local democratic accountability and potentially diminishing accountability at the level of the institution as schools may replace the existing 'stakeholder model' (that secures participation from each of a school's constituencies-parents, teachers, the local authority and local communities) with their chosen model of governance, which could include business and the private sector (Earley & Creese, 2003; Ranson, 2003; Ranson et al., 2003). We suggest that the erosion of public accountability at local and the individual school level is likely to diminish the opportunities for the disadvantaged to find 'a voice' in the new system of schooling in which the LEA will lose its present powers to intervene and change provision and practice.

Final comment

Throughout this article we have argued that the education policies outlined in the Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners are unlikely to reduce inequalities within the system. To understand the full implications of these tendencies, Apple (2001, p. 197) proposes a framework of 're-positioning', which is understanding any set of policies and practices from the standpoint of those who have least power. Looking at the repercussions of the current raft of education policies upon those with the least economic, social or cultural capital, it is apparent that the wholesale expansion of the marketisation of education is least likely to offer social mobility and equity to young people currently being educated in schools in our most disadvantaged communities.

Alternatively, we propose that the stubborn relationship between social disadvantage and underachievement is more likely to be broken through localised and community-based action rather than through the external, dispassionate and disengaged forces of competition, control and choice. Only through systems of local governance will young people in disadvantaged communities be recognised, heard and supported. Democracy matters for the improvement of schools. But we need forms of school improvement that are localised, contextualised and above all accountable to the local needs of the community and the young who live there (Harris & Chapman, 2004; Lupton, 2004, Lupton, this issue). To achieve this, local accountability systems and forms of governance are required, particularly in communities in poverty, to safeguard and protect educational interests and aspirations of those least able to do so. If we are serious about raising standards of achievement, for all rather than some, this can only be secured by a form of local government that represents and acts upon the voices of those in disadvantaged


communities, that redistributes resources in favour of disadvantaged schools and young people and which places its weight against market forces to reclaim education as a public good instead of a corporate commodity.

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Issue Table of ContentsBritish Educational Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 5, Education Policy and Social Justice (Oct., 2005), pp. 549-643Front MatterIntroduction: Education Policy, Social Justice and 'Complex Hope' [pp. 549-556]The 'Childcare Champion'? New Labour, Social Justice and the Childcare Market [pp. 557-570]The Contradictions of Education Policy: Disadvantage and Achievement [pp. 571-587]Social Justice and School Improvement: Improving the Quality of Schooling in the Poorest Neighbourhoods [pp. 589-604]The Growth of High-Stakes Testing in the USA: Accountability, Markets and the Decline in Educational Equality [pp. 605-622]New Labour, Social Justice and Disabled Students in Higher Education [pp. 623-643]Back Matter

education & complexity

Documents

secure education

social class

educational achievement

class disadvantage

education reform legislation

social justice

social mobility

new labours