School choice: our best hope for equitable access to education

nick cowen, 21 November 2007

The Conservatives have barely stuck their head above the parapet with their new education green paper but the backlash from the self-appointed champions of the disadvantaged has already begun. Fiona Millar attacks their policies as re-heated Thatcherism.
Admittedly, the Tories have left themselves open to this sort of criticism. Their policies are a bit of mishmash that combine suggestions for greater parent choice and hesitant supply-side reforms with centrally driven directives that threaten teacher autonomy every bit as much as the New Labour regime. These policies include targets to get every child reading by the age of 6 using synthetic phonics and more streaming by ability within schools. The problem, as we have commented before, is that no matter how well designed these ideas are, imposing them centrally often produces perverse consequences. The, originally Conservative implemented, National Curriculum is a case in point: centralisation leads to politicisation and the easy corruption of teaching by whatever ideologies are nested within Whitehall.

Leaving this particular problem aside, Millar takes on the school choice agenda, claiming that the Swedish school reforms, which the new Tory policy uses as an example, have led to social segregation:
‘there is little academic selection (covert or overt) in Sweden, which ensures a more equitable distribution of school places, and yet there is already evidence that this experiment is starting to lead to social segregation.’
There is an element of truth to this claim but it misses out much of the Swedish context. Before the Swedish school choice reforms in the early 90s, the pupils attending schools tended to reflect the people in the local neighbourhoods: in other words, people tended to attend their nearest school and there was very little selection on the basis of ability. This was fine for a great many families: if you lived in a good or reasonable area, you got a fairly good school whatever your academic background. If you lived in a bad area, however, you had very little option for attending a better school. Moreover, many neighbourhoods (particularly suburbs of Stockholm) were and continue to be segregated along ethnic lines, meaning ethnic minorities had very little access to mainstream Swedish culture via the school system.
The school choice reforms did not so much increase segregation as alter its dynamic. The boundaries between schools and between local neighbourhoods were lowered and new suppliers of education were allowed into the sector. The result is that many pupils previously placed out in the suburbs chose to make their way into schools with a mix of pupils that was more representative of the whole Swedish society. Hence segregation along ethnic lines has been decreased in Sweden by their school choice reforms. The only problem, and this what Millar is presumably referring to, is that there has been some increase in segregation along the lines of academic background. In other words, well-educated parents (regardless of ethnicity) are more likely to take advantage of the new set of choices available to their children and find them a school that offers them the best opportunities.
This remains an important issue in Sweden as swapping one sort of segregation for another is by no means ideal. However, despite this issue, the evidence suggests that school choice produced better education outcomes, not just for those attending the new independent schools but also those attending any school in a district that contains independent schools. Hence, any impact from segregation has been more than offset by other factors.
In Britain, we face a completely different context. Before the Swedish school choice reforms, barely any students in Sweden were privately educated. In the UK seven per cent of students are privately educated at fee-paying schools at the moment. This small proportion of students manages to claim around half of all places at top universities. And much as some on the left try to pretend this is all down to old school connections, in the main this is simply because independent schools, that are beholden only to the families they serve, tend to offer a better education and preparation for university level study. So not only is the UK far more segregated at the moment, the biggest divide is economic: between those that can afford higher performing independent schools and those stuck in the state sector.
It is in this context where school choice could be much more dramatically liberating and equitable than in Sweden. We are in a position where rich middle class families already have access to the best schools in the world. All school choice will do is offer some of that same power (via a state funded voucher) to poor pupils as well. By enforcing the same rules as in Sweden, where state-funded independent schools are not allowed to select on any grounds and must accept any pupils that put their name down to attend, access to quality education can become a reality for all.
Moreover, the ground has already been laid to tackle the problem already seen in Sweden: that only a minority of pupils take advantage of the system. Tony Blair’s final education reform (the Education and Inspections Act) created a number of posts for school choice advisors in every local education authority. These advisors are in a perfect position to help parents and pupils look over the options offered by both public and independent schools in their area.
Finally Millar claims:
Studies from the late 1990s onwards (in particular into the market model introduced in New Zealand) suggest that choice barely affected successful middle-class schools, other than to make them more oversubscribed and therefore disappoint more parents.
However, it made less popular schools with disadvantaged intakes more vulnerable to failure and led to social class and ethnicity becoming proxies for academic selection.
As our overview of the evidence found, the case in New Zealand is often used to pour cold water on school choice reforms. But this fails to note a major error in the way school choice was implemented there: there was no incentive or powers for new schools to open or successful schools to expand. Of course, if the supply is kept constant and stagnant by government control, then the middle classes will naturally use whatever influence they can to get whatever education is available, whether that means paying, moving house or getting their children to cram for entrance exams. It is only by enacting a supply-side reform and allowing new independent schools to open, as in Sweden, that the benefits of school choice can spread to every family.
So long as there is no unnecessary barrier for education providers to open and expand schools according to the choices of parents, we can create a decentralised education system where everyone has fair access to high performing schools.