Local links, local knowledge: choosing care settings and schools

Abstract

This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity. The processes by which working‐class parents in one study chose care settings and schools could be seen as less skilled, less informed, less careful than the decision making of many of the middle‐class respondents. However, this is not an argument that the authors advance, noting instead that the practices and meanings of choice are subject to significant social, cultural and economic variations in terms of who gets to choose, who gets their choices, and what, how and why people choose when they are able to. The authors argue that there are alternative sets of priorities in play for the working‐class respondents, involving attachments to the communal and the local.

Notes

1. We are unable to discern any differences in the interview data related to the setting in which the interview took place.

2. The interviewers for the middle‐class project include Carol Vincent, Stephen Ball, Sophie Kemp and Soile Pietienkin; for the working‐class project, Annette Braun, Clare Frost and Carol Vincent.

3. The overwhelming majority of respondents across our two studies were women, but we did speak to a small number of men (14 in the middle‐class study and 16 in the working‐class study) and so have retained the term ‘parent’ here in our discussion of the families.

4. A considerable body of research in the UK, USA and elsewhere argues that quality provision in terms of early years education and care has important benefits in the child’s later life, particularly where children from disadvantaged families are concerned (e.g. Heckman & Masterov, 2007; Berlinski et al., 2008; Sylva et al., 2008; Wossmann, 2008).

5. For the two remaining families out of 70, there was not enough information to categorise their choice‐making.

6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for offering us the phrase and encouraging us to clarify the point.