Parents, privilege and the education market‐place

Abstract

According to advocates of ‘marketization’ in education, market systems of school provision are fairer than those organized around catchment areas. Whereas catchment areas are said to privilege the wealthy and deny choice to the poor because they lead to a system of ‘selection by mortgage’, market systems are held to give all parents ‐‐ rich and poor alike ‐‐ the opportunity to choose a school for their children. This paper builds on existing research that points to the ways in which market systems privilege certain groups or classes of parents and children. It draws on data collected as part of an ongoing ESRC study into markets in secondary education to illustrate how class bias operates in a market system of provision and how immigrant families with middle‐class backgrounds may also be disadvantaged in the market‐place. Three broad categories of families are identified ‐‐ the Privileged, the Frustrated and the Disconnected ‐‐ defined in terms of their position in relation to the education market; and the stories of three families are used to show how parents experience and engage with the system differently according to their levels of material resources and the nature of their cultural capital. In focusing in some detail on individual parents and on how they experience the system, the paper adopts a different approach to that which predominates in the literature on parental choice. In that literature, the authors argue, parents tend to appear only as ‘cardboard cut‐out’ figures who seem to operate in a vacuum, unaffected by the material or sociocultural context of choice making. It is suggested that marketization might encourage a revival of cultural deprivationist or ‘blame‐the‐victim’ explanations of differential educational outcomes. The paper draws on an alternative tradition of explanation, focusing on the interaction between different family orientations to schooling and the structure and culture of provision. In particular, Bourdieu's work on social reproduction and Pahl's sociospatial analysis of social income differentiation are found to provide fruitful ways of conceptualizing the mechanisms of distribution of educational inequality in a market system of school provision.