Private Education for the Working Class
By Jonathan Walker on May 26, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/26/private-school-alienated-poor-pupils
This is a piece of research I contributed to last summer, when I was doing a placement at the Institute of Education and Sutton Trust, and which has just been published.
The climate within UK education policy appears to be swinging back towards opening up private school places to state school children and providing subsidised places for them. This is intended to be a move towards meritocratic social mobility for state school kids.
The Assisted Places Scheme which ran through the Thatcher days had, until recently, been heralded as a near perfect example of meritocratic policy.
This research shows that even when the places are made available and affordable for state school pupils, there are very apparent divides in the schools which make the learning experiences of the fee-paying and assisted-place pupils very different. Additional costs, such as school visits, serve to further compartmentalise the pupils into a hierarchy - those who can and cannot afford to go.
I’ll refer here also, as I have previously mentioned, to the theory of cultural capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu - even if purely financial class differences are veiled by assisted places, the differing cultural values of pupils and parents are still not only present but are active in shaping the experiences of the pupils - experiences which might not be positive for the assisted-place kids, even desite greater exam success.
I find this to be a fantastic piece of research because it is looking at the issue from a fresh perspective - that of the pupils themselves. School, though obviously a place to learn, is equally a place to socialise, to make friends and to have fun. This is overlooked in previous studies and this Sutton Trust study is illustrating that judging the success of a policy on purely statistical data is deficient in understanding the true ‘value’ of the policy for its recipients - the pupils.
Let’s place this discussion in a bit of a context.
- Social inequality has been rising in Britain, pretty much constantly, since Thatcher took power and relentlessly through New Labour. - http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/docs/inequality.pdf
- Research from the Sutton Trust, who prioritise the issue of social mobility, suggests that social mobility is also rapidly decreasing.
- The Assisted Places scheme did bring better exam success, and one would suppose, career success to those who took up private school places.
- The Assisted Places scheme also, however, left its working class pupils feeling alienated and out of place which has had lasting effects into adulthood.
So basically, whatever has been happening recently within education hasn’t been particularly conducive to social mobility, but are supported places into Britain’s elite private schools the answer?
Or, and I say this only to play the devil’s advocate, is this new research evidence that that the working classes can’t handle the pressure of being at the top?
Is such flirtation with the private sector by the state sector merely a more legitimate and acceptable form of educational inequality?
Your views?
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