Outline some of the ways in which some marketisation and selection policies may produce social class differences in educational achievement.

Outline some of the ways in which some marketisation and selection policies may produce social class differences in educational achievement. (12 marks)

Marketisation is the policy of introducing market forces of supply and demand into areas run by the state, in this case education. The 1988 Education Reform Act began marketisation of education by encouraging competition between schools and choice for parents. Marketisation includes funding formulas, exam league tables, cream-skimming and silt shifting.

A funding formula is a formula that gives a school the same amount of funds for each pupil. This can affect a working class child’s education because if other schools have a higher fund because they are more popular due to better exam results then working class children are unlikely to be able to get a placement at that school so they will be silt-shifted to a less popular school which has lower exam results because of its lack of funding due to its lack of pupils. However, this idea can be criticised because if an unpopular school gets too bad they will be put into special measures by ofsted, this then gives them more funding to try and help improve the school, if this is achieved then their popularity will improve. Silt-shifting is when a school off-loads pupils with learning difficulties who are expensive to teach and so get poor results. This benefits middle class pupils as all the troublesome students are removed from their school it means the teachers have more time for them to improve their grades thus making the school more popular because of their rank in the league tables then letting them cream-skim thus improving the school further. Consequently, this means the less successful schools have the less able, working class students putting them in a spiral of decline.  Cream-skimming is when a higher achieving school selects higher ability pupils, who gain the best results and cost less to teach. This then means they have more money to pay for better equipment and more facilities for the students to achieve higher thus keeping up the standards of the school allowing the school to cream-skim the very best pupils making the school more popular because it has a better rank in the exam league tables. Exam league tables rank each school according to its exam performance but it makes no allowance for the level of ability of its pupils. This means that the schools that cream-skim look a lot better compared to the schools that have had all the less able students silt-shifted into their school but in reality the lower achieving schools pupils have probably made a lot more progress through school than in the higher achieving school. Middle class parents also use exam league tables to help choose the better school for their child so they can almost guarantee that their child will achieve more whereas working class parents just want their child to have a placement, even if they did try and go for a better school they are likely to be turned down because the schools will cream-skim to reduce the amount of competition they have. There is competition among schools to attract students; the lower achieving schools have more competition because they have lower exam results meaning they are less popular so they have less funding to pay for better teachers and more facilities so they get lower exam results and so on, but it’s the opposite for higher achieving schools even though they do have a bit of competition from other high achieving schools.