Education- Educational Policies Flashcards
Explain ‘educational policies’.
Educational policies are concerned with government plans for what the education system should achieve and how it should be organised.
Such policies include an understanding of the structure, role, impact, and experience of access to education, as well as the impact of globalisation on educational policy.
What are the key aims of educational policy?
- Economic efficiency: improving skills of the labour force.
- Raising educational standards.
- Creating equality of educational opportunity.
What are Gillborn and Youdell’s four aspects of educational opportunity? Explain them.
- Equality of access: Everyone should have the same opportunities to access schools of similar quality without unfair selection.
- Equality of circumstances: Everyone should start school at the same point in terms of home and material circumstance.
- Equality of participation: Everyone should have the same chances to participate on an equal footing in the everyday life of schools.
- Equality of outcome: Everyone should have the same chances of sharing the long-term benefits of schooling.
Explain the Tripartite system and the three types of school.
Abilities were based on the 11+ exam, and children were allocated 1 of 3 schools based on aptitudes and abilities.
Technical schools only existed in a few areas.
Secondary modern schools offered a ‘practical’ curriculum and access to manual work for those who failed the 11+ (working class).
Grammar schools offered an academic curriculum and access to non-manual jobs for those who passed the 11+ (middle-class).
Reproduced class and gender inequality: channelled the two social classes into separate schools, and girls needed more marks in the 11+ to get a place in a grammar school than boys.
Explain the Comprehensive school system.
Abolished 11+ exams, secondary-modern and grammar schools. It aimed to overcome the class divide and make education more meritocratic. All students within one area would attend the same comprehensive school. The change was decided by local education authorities meaning a secondary-modern/grammar divide still existed.
What was the functionalist perspective on Comprehensive schools?
Functionalists say that comprehensive schools promote social integration by bringing children of all classes into one school. They also see the comprehensives as more meritocratic as it gives pupils longer to develop abilities and show skills.
Explain Julienne Ford’s 1969 study.
Julienne Ford (1969) found that there was little social mixing between working-class and middle-class pupils, largely because of streaming.
Explain the Marxist perspective on Comprehensive schools.
They argue that comprehensives are not meritocratic, and instead say that it reproduces class inequality through the continuation of streaming and labelling.
What is the ‘myth of meritocracy’?
By not selecting children at 11, comprehensives appear to offer equal chance. The ‘myth of meritocracy’ legitimates class inequality by making unequal achievement seem fair and just, because failure looks like the fault of the individual rather than the system.
What are compensatory policies, and what did they aim to do?
Compensatory education policies aimed to discriminate in favour of young people facing disadvantages in education due to home life or social class.
The policies included:
- Educational Action Zones/ Excellence in Cities (late 1990s-2000s)
- The pupil premium (2010-).
Gives schools with disadvantaged pupils more money which HAS to be spent on helping those pupils.
What are the 4 factors that influence educational policy?
- Neoliberalism
- Globalisation
- Privatisation
- Marketisation
Explain Neoliberalism’s effect.
Neoliberalism has links to the New Right and believes that the state should have a minimal role in providing and managing public services like education, relying instead on a system akin to how businesses operate in a free market.
Explain Globalisation’s effect.
Globalisation, as it refers to education, is the formation of educational policy within a global context, using evidence drawn from comparisons with other countries (e.g. PISA).
This evidence had influenced changes to the curriculum, including the introduction of the EBacc which enables students to compete more effectively in a global market.
Explain Privatisation’s effect.
Privatisation refers to the drive to make schools and colleges operate more like independent private businesses, such as managing their own affairs and competing with other schools through systems like league tables.
Explain Marketisation’s effect.
Marketisation is necessary if schools are to be run like businesses and might include publicity, advertising literature and open days in order to tempt parents (the consumer) to send their children to the school.
Explain Ball and Youdell’s ‘endogenous privatisation’ (privatisation IN education).
Privatisation in education involves schools and colleges operating in similar ways to private independent businesses, including managing their own affairs, competing with other schools for pupils, and using target setting and league tables to measure progress.
Explain Ball and Youdell’s ‘exogenous privatisation’ (privatisation OF education).
Privatisation of education refers to the opening up of state education to private businesses who design, manage or deliver education (e.g. privately managed chains of academy schools, private companies taking responsibility for the exam system or ICT companies like Apple and Google providing online curriculum content).
Evaluate Privatisation.
Positives:
- Privatisation creates more business-like and efficient schools, leading to raised standards and an increase in the school’s popularity amongst a potential customer base.
- Privatisation provides parents with more choices.
Negatives:
- Money might be drained from education and into private profit.
- Privatisation might very well lead to more inequalities in education because schools will want to discourage those children from poorer and disadvantaged families who might threaten the schools league position.
What are the main 3 features of marketisation (education)? Explain them.
The marketisation of education began with the 1988 Education Reform Act, influenced by the neoliberal ideas of the New Right, and includes three main features:
- Independence: refers to the way schools operate similarly to businesses, in that they have control over their own affairs.
- Competition: means that schools compete with other schools for customers (pupils).
- Choice or ‘parentocracy’: refers to the way in which parents and potential pupils (the customers) are given the opportunity to decide which school or college they attend, rather than these decisions being made by the local authority.
Evaluate ‘parentocracy’.
Parentocracy isn’t a reality for many parents, and while the middle-classes have gained most from parental choice, those families from disadvantaged backgrounds might be discriminated against through hidden or covert methods.
What are the negative consequences of educational marketisation?
- Schools might attempt to maintain their position in league tables by concentrating resources on those pupils who are most likely to achieve (usually the middle-class) which increases divisions between pupils.
- Marketisation fails to help the weaker schools improve, as they lose money to their more successful rivals.
- There is less control over the planning and supply of school places and less control over school quality, with little regulation to prevent illegal and unfair covert admission policies.
What was the influence of the Conservative government policies on management & funding? (1980s onwards).
Management moved from away from local authorities and to governors and headteachers.
The Conservative governments changed the formula used to calculate funding. Money is now allocated to schools based on the number of pupils in a school.
What was the influence of the Conservative government policies on choice? (1980s onwards).
Parental choice and open enrolment – any school with vacancies had to accept any pupil until they were full.
A National curriculum and national testing (SATs) was implemented.
What was the influence of the Conservative government policies on control measures? (1980s onwards).
Establishment of Ofsted to measure school performance and school quality.
Introduction of school performance tables (league tables), ranking schools on the grades achieved by their students and the ‘quality’ of each school.