Markets in public policy: The case of the United Kingdom education reform act 1988

This article contains a summary of the findings for a recently completed ESRC-funded project (R000238031). The purpose of the project was to examine the extent to which the introduction of educational markets gave rise to changes in the social composition of secondary schools in England and Wales. Using official statistics for this purpose, from the introduction of the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA88) onwards, we measured changes over time in the tendency for pupils with particular socio-economic characteristics to cluster in particular schools (termed segregation). We considered a variety of reasons for the changes and regional differences in segregation that we encountered, and also began to relate these to changes in school output figures (i.e. public examination results). The project therefore moved from description and measurement to exploration and explanation. It also raised unforeseen methodological and research-capacity issues.