School choice from a household resource perspective: Preliminary findings from a north of England case study

Abstract

This paper seeks to widen the conceptual lens of school choice debate and analysis to account for multiple, intersecting economies, cultures, and infrastructures of daily life. Preliminary findings are presented in the case of primary school enrolment in the north of England city of Newcastle upon Tyne. The national context is one in which public service delivery has been influenced by the language of ‘choice’, notably a parent's ‘right to choose’ a school other than that nearest to their child's home, and ‘responsibility’ to exercise choice as self-determined consumer-citizens. At the metropolitan level this translates as market-led competitive enrolment and a tendency for more children to travel longer distances to school and for there to be greater variation in journey length, as some parents are able to use superior transport and personnel as leverage in their quest for a better choice of state school. Findings are presented from a multi-method pilot study combining daily diary, resource audit, and biographic analysis for a sample of 18 families drawn from two case study schools. One school (Town) attracts pupils from an area of low-income population, to which most children journey on foot; the other school (Woodland) attracts pupils from further away, situated within a largely middle-class area, to which most children are driven in their parent's car. The findings show how the market model assumes and rewards a particular mode of choice-making which fails to recognise that some parents seek less instrumentally for their child to be happy. Discussion combines theory, empirical findings, and critical analysis to expose the subtle inequities of school choice in relation to neo-liberal thinking.

Este articulo busca ampliar la mirada conceptual del debate de la elección escolar y análisis para tomar en cuenta lo múltiple; cruzando economías, culturas e infraestructuras de la vida diaria. Los hallazgos preliminares se presentan en el caso de la inscripción escolar primaria de la ciudad de Newcastle upon Tyne situada en el norte de Inglaterra. El contexto nacional es uno en el cual el servicio público de reparto ha sido influenciado por un nombre, el de ‘elección’; notable ‘derecho de elegir’, que tienen los padres, una escuela que no es otra que la que esta mas cerca de la casa del niño y la ‘responsabilidad’ de ejercer esta elección como ciudadanos-consumidores determinados por sí mismos. A un nivel metropolitano esto se traduce en una inscripción competitiva conducida por el mercado y una tendencia de que más chicos viajen mayores distancias al colegio; de aquí que hallan más grandes variaciones de la longitud de viaje, ya que algunos padres pueden usar un transporte superior y personal como apalancamiento en su búsqueda de una mejor elección de escuela estatal. Las conclusiones son presentadas de un estudio piloto con múltiples métodos combinando día a día auditorias de recurso y análisis biográfico de una muestra de ochenta familias partiendo de dos casos de estudio de escuelas. Una escuela (Town) atrae a estudiantes de un área de bajos ingresos de población a donde, la mayoría de los niños, van a pie; la otra escuela (Woodland) atrae estudiantes de muy lejos situado entre un área de clase media, a donde la mayoría de los niños son llevados en automóvil por sus padres. Los hallazgos muestran como el modelo de mercado asume y recompensa un modelo particular de toma de decisiones que falla al reconocer que algunos padres buscan menos instrumentos para hacer a sus hijos felices. La discusión combina teoría, hallazgos empíricos y análisis crítico para exponer las injusticias sutiles de la elección escolar en relación con el pensamiento neoliberal.

Keywords:

• school
• choice
• household
• everyday life
• class

Palabras clave:

• escuela
• elección
• casa
• clase
• educación

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the British Academy – SG-39344. The authors extend their appreciation to the Newcastle upon Tyne LEA for help in accessing school data; also to Mr Chris Brown for his valuable assistance in the field; and of course to the parents who gave up their time to participate in this research. Comments provided by the referees and also delegates of the Lisbon 2007 annual CWF conference are gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. OFSTED – the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (newly revised) came into being on 1 April 2007. It is the official body for inspecting schools in England.

2. Sample recruitment was by way of a short questionnaire distributed with the cooperation of the school (via school bags) – and an expression of willingness to be interviewed. This was a purposive quota rather than representative sample and it must be acknowledged that variations in recruitment strategies contributed to an element of bias. One of the problems with the means of recruiting our sample with the cooperation of a ‘gatekeeper’ parent liaison at Town was the bias this caused in steering attention to a more homogeneous (less ethnically mixed) sample than might otherwise have been recruited at the school gate. The parent liaison clearly had regular communications with a specific sub-population of families, notably lone mother households. This shows up in the disproportionate number of lone mother households in the Town sample.

3. Maximum distances to school of 12.4 and 10.7 km for two under-subscribed schools (LEA Primary 4 and LEA Primary 6) are extreme outliers. Explanations why one or two pupils may travel such long distances to under-performing schools remain speculative on the basis of the current data but suggestions include the impact of divorce/living with a grandparent where a house move or split-living arrangement spans two similarly deprived areas. In this case a longer journey to school is not used as part of a strategy of leverage to access a better performing school.