Welcome to one of the most dynamic and heavily debated areas of A-Level Sociology! Educational policies are the plans and actions implemented by governments to run and reform the education system. These policies do not just dictate what happens in classrooms; they actively shape life chances, dictate social mobility, and can either challenge or reproduce wider social inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity.

What you'll learn

• How educational policy shifted from selection (the Tripartite System) to a comprehensive model, and the sociological debates surrounding both.
• How marketisation and privatisation have turned schools into businesses and parents into consumers, and who benefits most from this.
• The various compensatory education policies designed to bridge the achievement gap for disadvantaged students.
• How the forces of globalisation have reshaped the goals, curricula, and structures of the UK education system.

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1. Selection and the Tripartite System (Post-1944)

Before the mid-20th century, secondary education was a luxury largely reserved for those who could pay. The 1944 Education Act (also known as the Butler Act) aimed to change this by introducing free secondary education for all, guided by the social democratic idea of "parity of esteem"—the belief that different types of schools should have equal status and resources.

To achieve this, the government introduced the Tripartite System.

• Grammar Schools: Highly academic schools for pupils who passed the 11+. Students were taught an academic curriculum designed to lead to university and professional careers.
• Secondary Modern Schools: Offered a non-academic, practical curriculum for the 80% of pupils who did not pass the 11+. Students were prepared for manual or routine clerical work.
• Technical Schools: Intended to focus on vocational and technical skills, though very few of these were actually built due to a lack of funding.

Sociological Evaluation of the Tripartite System

While the system was promoted as meritocratic, sociologists argue that it deeply entrenched social class division:

• Class reproduction (AO3): Rather than offering equal opportunities, the 11+ exam was culturally biased. It favoured middle-class pupils who possessed the cultural capital (as conceptualised by Pierre Bourdieu) to decode the complex language and logic used in the test. Working-class children were disproportionately channeled into Secondary Moderns, effectively labeling them "failures" at age 11.
• Gender bias (AO3): Girls often had to score higher than boys on the 11+ to secure a grammar school place because local authorities capped the number of girls' places to maintain an even gender balance.

The Move to the Comprehensive System (1965)

Frustration with the Tripartite System led the Labour government to issue Circular 10/65 in 1965, which instructed local education authorities to phase out the 11+ and replace selective schools with Comprehensive Schools. Comprehensives are non-selective state schools that admit all children from the local catchment area, regardless of academic ability.

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2. Neoliberalism and the Marketisation of Education (1988 onwards)

From 1979, the Conservative government, heavily influenced by Neoliberalism and New Right ideology, radically changed the direction of education. They argued that state-run education was inefficient, unresponsive to parents, and produced poor standards because schools faced no competition.

To fix this, they introduced the policy of marketisation through the landmark 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA).

To create an "education market," the government had to establish parentocracy.

The 1988 ERA introduced several key policies to construct this market:

1. League Tables and Ofsted: Schools were forced to publish their exam results and undergo inspections. This gave parents the information they needed to shop around for the "best" school.
2. Formula Funding: Schools began to receive funding based on the exact number of pupils they attracted. More pupils meant more money; fewer pupils meant budget cuts and potential closure.
3. Open Enrolment: Parents were allowed to apply to any school of their choice, rather than being restricted to their closest local catchment area.

The Sociological Critique of Marketisation

While New Right sociologists argue that marketisation raises standards by forcing schools to improve, critical sociologists (particularly Marxists and feminists) argue that it has widened the gap between middle-class and working-class pupils.

1. Cream-Skimming and Silt-Shifting (Will Bartlett)

Because schools are desperate to perform well in league tables to attract funding, oversubscribed, successful schools can afford to be highly selective in who they admit. Bartlett argues this leads to two processes:

• Cream-skimming: High-achieving, mostly middle-class pupils are selected ("skimmed") by popular schools. These students are easier to teach and highly likely to maintain the school’s league table position.
• Silt-shifting: Popular schools can avoid taking harder-to-teach, lower-achieving pupils (often working-class or those with special educational needs), who are "shifted" into less popular, struggling schools.

2. Class Differences in Parental Choice (Sharon Gerwitz)

Gerwitz studied parents in London and found that marketisation does not benefit everyone equally. She identified three types of "choosers":

• Privileged-skilled choosers: Highly educated, middle-class parents who possess the cultural and economic capital to navigate the school admissions system. They can afford to pay travel costs to send their children to distant, better schools, or even move house into a desirable catchment area.
• Disconnected-local choosers: Working-class parents who lack the cultural capital to understand school league tables or admissions procedures. They are realistic about transport costs and simply send their children to the nearest local school, regardless of its performance.
• Semi-skilled choosers: Mainly working-class parents who are ambitious for their children but lack the capital to fully exploit the system, often feeling frustrated by their inability to secure preferred choices.

3. The Myth of Parentocracy (Stephen Ball)

Stephen Ball argues that parentocracy is a myth. While the system appears to give all parents choice, it is an illusion. In reality, middle-class parents are far more equipped to exercise choice, while working-class parents are left with whatever places remain. This legitimises inequality by making it look as though working-class parents simply chose poorly, when in fact they had very little choice at all.

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3. Privatisation and Globalisation

In recent decades, educational policy has moved beyond simple marketisation to embrace privatisation and respond to the forces of globalisation.

Privatisation of Education

Sociologists like Stephen Ball distinguish between two forms of privatisation:

• Endogenous privatisation (privatisation in education): Importing business-like techniques from the private sector into state schools. Examples include performance-related pay for teachers, targeting systems, and treating students as "customers."
• Exogenous privatisation (privatisation of education): Opening up the UK's state education assets directly to private company ownership and profit-making.

The rapid rise of Academies and Free Schools (heavily expanded by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government from 2010 onwards) is a prime example of privatisation. Academies are funded directly by the central government (rather than local authorities) and are often run by private Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) or backed by private business sponsors.

The Impact of Globalisation on Policy

Globalisation is the increasing interconnectedness of societies across international boundaries. It has profoundly influenced UK educational policy in several ways:

• The Influence of PISA League Tables: The OECD publishes the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) league tables, comparing reading, maths, and science skills across countries. If the UK drops down the tables, it triggers "moral panics" about national competitiveness. This has directly led to policies like the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and a greater curricular focus on traditional STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths).
• International Comparisons in Teaching Methods: UK governments have imported successful methods from abroad. For instance, "Mastery Maths" approaches were introduced to UK primary schools after studying the high performance of students in Shanghai and Singapore.
• Global Edtech and Privatisation: Many educational services in the UK (such as exam boards like Pearson, virtual learning platforms, and online assessment tools) are owned by massive transnational corporations operating on a global scale.

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4. Policies to Promote Equality of Opportunity

While marketisation and privatisation have dominated since 1988, various governments have also introduced policies explicitly designed to reduce social class, gender, and ethnic inequalities. These are often categorized as compensatory education policies—efforts to provide extra resources to schools and communities in deprived areas to make up for cultural and material deprivation at home.

Gender-Targeted Policies

Educational policies have also responded to the changing landscape of gender achievement. Historically, policies focused on helping girls access male-dominated subjects:

• GIST and WISE: Initiatives such as Girls into Science and Technology (GIST) and Women into Science and Engineering (WISE) successfully encouraged girls to pursue non-traditional career paths.
• The National Curriculum (1988): By making core subjects like science and maths compulsory for all students up to age 16, it removed the gender option barriers that previously saw girls opt out of these disciplines.

Conversely, contemporary concerns about the "underachievement of boys" have led to policies promoting boy-friendly active learning, phonics-based reading schemes, and recruitment drives for male primary school teachers.

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