School Markets and Locality: an Exploration of Difference in the English Education Market Place

Abstract

Over the last two decades there has been a radical restructuring of schooling in Britain. Two key features of these reforms have been the application of market-force principles to the provision of education and the introduction into schools of management practices more usually associated with the private sector. The restructuring, heavily inspired by public choice theory, is based partly upon the contention that giving school managers the freedom to manage and subjecting schools to the disciplines of the market will result in higher standards. Moreover, it is assumed that where schools under-perform in a devolved system of educational governance, this can be attributed to deficient management at the school level. Findings from research into school effectiveness and improvement are used in attempts to lend credibility to this view. In this chapter, I want to suggest that policies that focus on a combination of markets and managerial devices as the route to raising the performance of schools ignore the complex, varied and sometimes subtle interplay between schools and the social, material and discursive environments within which they operate. I will argue that what managers and teachers do, or can do, in schools are necessarily heavily influenced, and constrained, by the nature of the school’s locality and by dominant educational discourses.

This is a revised and extended version of ‘Can All Schools Be Successful?: An exploration of the determinants of school “success”’, published in the Oxford Review of Education, 1998, 24 (4).