Specialisation and Selection in Secondary Education

Abstract

In the 1992 White Paper on ‘Choice and Diversity’, the British government identified specialisation rather than selection as the main direction for secondary education. Four years later, its latest Education Bill was promoting both. Yet it had earlier distinguished between them on the grounds that specialisation gave choice to parents whose demand for different kinds of secondary schooling had been suppressed in Local Authority ‘monopolies’, whereas selection gave (or returned) choice to schools. In this paper, the extent to which specialisation is the acceptable face of selection is explored through an analysis of government initiatives from the Assisted Places Scheme and its recent expansion to the current encouragement of schools to ‘select by ability or by aptitude for particular subjects’. It is argued that in the English system of secondary schooling, both the causal relationship asserted between choice and diversity and the likelihood of specialisation without selection are highly questionable.