David Budge reports on research into how the market approach has affected the way schools are managed. The “market” approach to education is causing governing bodies to concentrate on promoting a better image for their schools rather than improving learning standards and efficiency.
Competition between schools may therefore not produce higher quality education or a wider range of school types but encourage many heads and governors to pursue the same quarry - the desirable middle-class parent and child.
Three researchers have reached these conclusions after an intensive four-year study of secondary schools in two local education authorities that was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Rosemary Deem, of Lancaster University, and her colleagues, Kevin Brehony, of Reading University, and Suzanne Heath, of Manchester University, have also found that the introduction of the market philosophy can exacerbate the ideological divisions in some governing bodies and may even induce governors to oppose the ethos and values of their own school.
The researchers monitored the operations of 10 governing bodies and made a special study of three of them - “Cotswold”, a comprehensive of 1,400 pupils, most of whom were white and working-class; “Little Rivers”, a multicultural secondary modern of 600 pupils; and “Ashdene”, a largely white, suburban comprehensive of 1,200 pupils.
They attended every full governors’ meeting at each of the three schools during the four-year period and found that “the major emphasis was often on who might attend in future, rather than the quality of schooling offered to existing pupils. Indeed, existing pupils were often the subject of criticism (lack of examination success at Cotswold, behaviour and social class at Little Rivers, appearance at Ashdene).”
Cotswold had a governing body whose members were at war with each other. Two of its members were Conservative councillors who wanted to reintroduce a selective education system while the majority were supporters of comprehensive education who were loath to see their school as a business. Although Cotswold did not attempt to lure middle-class parents, it introduced a house system partly to improve the school’s image.
Little Rivers also tried many strategies to attract pupils, including a new brochure with illustrations of its buildings containing, as the headteacher admitted. “fuzzy drawings of the less attractive bits and photos of better bits”. It even considered transferring to another site in a better district although one governor warned that by moving, the school would be “ripping a coronary artery out of this area”. Another commented: “If you take a school from a low-income family area and put it into a middle-class area, you’re changing the animal. If our future is to be determined by whether our hall is big enough for antique fairs. . .”
The researchers suspect that there was also a hidden dimension to Little Rivers’ falling roll, that of ethnicity, which might have been a major factor in the school’s relative unpopularity with white parents.
Ashdene was frequently in dispute with its LEA over building programmes and intake numbers, and was very anxious about inadvertently changing its image, thus encouraging middle-class parents and pupils to move elsewhere.
There was also much discussion among the governors on whether buildings or teaching were most important to a school’s image. “Occasionally the issue of pupils’ appearance also surfaced,” the researchers report. “Fears were expressed by the chair that a pupil with an ‘extreme haircut’ might attract unfavourable publicity in the press and as a consequence pupil numbers would drop.”
Ironically, despite spending so much time on promotional issues none of the three schools was able to change its market position significantly.
This was partly because the governing bodies actually had less autonomy than they had been led to believe and were often presented with problems, such as under-resourcing, that were beyond their control. But the researchers clearly believe that lack of vision was another important factor. “None of the three governing bodies thought about the future of state education except in terms of how their school might be affected and none had much idea about what ‘the public’ wanted from education,” they conclude.
A full account of the research study, “Governors, schools and the miasma of the market”, appears in the current issue of the British Educational Research Journal. Copies of the journal are available from Carfax Publishing Company, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 3UE.
