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Abstract
The British government has placed the extension of school choice at the centre of its education reform programme for its third term in office. Those promoting choice make an appeal to a simple economic argument. Competitive pressure helps make private firms more efficient and consumer choice acts as a major drive for efficiency. Giving parents the ability to choose applies competitive pressure to schools and, analogously with private markets, it is assumed they will raise their game to attract business. This article subjects this assumption to the scrutiny provided by the theoretical and empirical economic evidence on school choice, and then uses the evidence to examine the potential impact of current policies to extend choice being proposed by the Labour government. The key question we address is whether policies that extend choice will improve educational outcomes and, if so, under what circumstances. We reach three main conclusions. First, increasing school choice will create losers as well as winners. Second, flexibility in the supply of school places is crucial to the success of a policy to extend school choice. Third, the role of peer groups partly determines the effects of school choice.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Denise Gossage and Alastair Muriel for their outstanding assistance with the literature, Romesh Vaitilingham for his very helpful comments and the Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC for their financial support.
Notes
1. A voucher is a publicly funded coupon that a student takes to the chosen school (state or private). When s/he enrols, the school receives revenue equal to the amount of the voucher (Hoxby, Citation2003a).
2. The situation is slightly different in the other UK countries, so we focus here on current policy in the English education market.
3. There is an extensive sociological literature on the processes, values and outcomes of school ‘choice’ (see, for example, Ball, 2003; Gerwitz et al., Citation1995; Reay, 2004; and Butler & Robson, Citation2003) which goes into much greater detail than we are able to here, given the focus of this article.
4. See: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/educationandinspectionsbill/ and http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/schoolswhitepaper/
5. Charter schools are those schools chartered by government or a government-appointed body to educate children in return for a publicly funded fee (Hoxby, Citation2003a).