Tag: market reforms
What are Free Schools for?
Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess
As children start their lessons in the 24 Free Schools opening this week, a new experiment begins in English education. The founders and staff will have been working hard for this day over many months and no doubt all will wish the pupils and staff well. There has been a lot of politicalpassion on both sides of the debate, but what is the significance of the Free Schools experiment likely to be?
It is not an experiment because of the “free” part – Free schools will enjoy essentially the same freedoms as Academies do. It is an experiment because now anyone can propose to set up a school, and attract the same per-pupil funding from the state as other local schools. Anyone can propose … but the vetting process to check whether the applicants are “fit and proper” to run a school is…
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Revising the Draft School Admissions Code
Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess
From next week, officials in the Department for Education are going to be busy sifting through responses to the consultation exercise around the new School Admissions Code.
Two important issues in the proposed code relate to the priority given to school staff, and to random allocation. We believe that as they currently stand, these provisions will set back the goals that the Government has set for its education policy.
1. Prioritising the children of staff
Paragraph 1.33 of the code says: “If admissions authorities decide to give priority to children of staff, they must set out clearly in their admission arrangements how they will define staff and on what basis children will be prioritised.”
This suggests that admissions authorities are to be allowed to prioritise the children of staff, reversing the policy of recent Admissions Codes.
One group very likely to be included in…
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Copying Swedish Free School Reforms
England’s schools are currently facing the prospect of the most radical reform since the dismantling of selective schooling four decades ago with the Conservatives looking to replicate Sweden’s free school reforms. The work of Swedish economists used to support the argument that choice and competition has improved academic performance, is however less unambiguous than the …
School autonomy and pupil achievement
One of the stated policy motivations behind the move towards greater autonomy for schools from local authority control has been the claim that this is a route to improving academic standards. This might be through more efficient decision-making and resource usage or because autonomy is a necessary precursor to market-like reforms whereby schools are somehow …
School autonomy and social segregation
One major concern with policies that allow schools autonomy from local authority control is that they exacerbate inequalities in who gets to go to school where, i.e. pupils sorting or segregation. The extent to which pupils from low-income families are concentrated in certain schools can be indicative of inequalities in access to schools and the …
Changes in school segregation in England
Measuring and trying to understand the reasons for changes in school segregation in England is central to the evaluation of policies designed to increase choice and competition both in and since the 1988 Education Reform Act. Many argued these policies would have unintended sorting consequences in terms of changes in the distribution of pupils from …
Becky Allen 