Ideology, marketisation and equality of opportunity in education policy

Overview

Recall questions on New Right and social democratic ideology in post-1988 policy, New Labour's hybrid approach, cream-skimming and silt-shifting, Ball's myth of parentocracy, debates about rising standards and a narrowing curriculum, and how far policy has improved equality of opportunity by class, gender and ethnicity, including multicultural and anti-racist approaches.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Which features of post-1988 policy show New Right ideology most clearly?

   Model answer

   Competition between schools, parental choice, published performance data, diversity of provider and the stripping back of local authority control all follow the New Right belief that a market disciplines producers better than a bureaucracy can.

2. 2

   Where can social democratic ideology be traced in post-1988 policy?

   Model answer

   It is visible wherever the state is used to compensate for disadvantage: targeted funding for poorer pupils, early-years intervention with families, financial support to stay in education after sixteen, and programmes to widen university participation.

3. 3

   Why is New Labour's education policy often described as a hybrid, and why do critics call it contradictory?

   Model answer

   It kept the market machinery of league tables, choice and diversity while bolting compensatory funding onto it; critics argue the two pull against each other, because a competitive market advantages exactly the families that the compensatory schemes are meant to catch up with.

4. 4

   A government expands the number of independent, directly funded schools and publishes more performance data. Which ideology is at work, and how would a social democrat object?

   Model answer

   This is New Right thinking, that competition raises standards; a social democrat would object that the market rewards schools with the most advantaged intakes and widens the gap it claims to close, and that only targeted state investment reduces inequality.

5. 5

   Explain cream-skimming and silt-shifting.

   Model answer

   Cream-skimming is a school selecting the pupils most likely to produce good results, while silt-shifting is offloading or discouraging pupils likely to depress them; both let a school improve its published position without improving its teaching.

6. 6

   Why does Ball describe parentocracy as a myth, and how can house prices act as selection?

   Model answer

   Because only parents with money, transport, time and confidence can act on a formal right to choose; where an oversubscribed school admits by distance, families able to buy homes nearby secure the places, so the school selects by parental income without ever setting a test.

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