Sirkka Ahonen is a senior lecturer in social studies education in the Department of Teacher Education, PB 38, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland (e-mail: sirkka.ahonen@helsinki.fi). Her research has focussed on post-communist history curricula in eastern Europe and the formation of historical identity among young adults in Finland. Her ongoing research deals with the role of schooling in the making of a civic society in northern Europe.

 JCS invites comments responding to the views in this paper. Such comments should be addressed via e-mail to westbury@uiuc.edu.

Copyright © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd. ISSN 0022-0272. Copies may be made under the normal terms of copyright law.

 The idea of free, universal basic education has been corrupted by neo-liberalism. As the language of economics takes over much of the policy discourse around schooling, school systems are being converted into marketplaces where schools compete for students and resources. Some studies have reported that this ‘marketization’ has created or exacerbated socio-economic segregation within the common school; but the curriculum is also affected by the market. Such developments raise important questions!

The common school was the core of the Enlightenment project. For two centuries ‘progress’ was pursued in the utilitarian terms of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’ and, throughout the western world, the idea of free and equal basic education was the hallmark of progressive, state-provided education. The times changed: in 1979 Milton and Rose Friedman (1979: 155), the best-known of the proponents of the neo-liberal school of economic thinking, named the common school ‘a black hole in the economic universe’ where taxpayers’ money kept disappearing. They wanted to break up the common school so that schooling could became an open market in which differentiated commodities were offered.

Historically, the common school promoted both social cohesion and mobility&endash;with the goal of building the modern nation-state with its industrial infrastructure. Moreover, through the pastoral functions embedded in the curriculum, the school contributed to the project of equal educational opportunity (see e.g. Boli 1989, Green 1990). The Friedmans, however, considered such a pursuit to be irrelevant to the true fundamental task of the basic school, ‘to teach the three R’s and to transmit common values’. Beyond this, education should be available according to ability and money.

The legacy of equal opportunity was deeply rooted in the history of the common school. When building their systems of universal education, nation-states assumed a responsibility for regulating schools in order to equalize both accessibility and the quality of educational services. Neo-liberals have rejected this legacy. They considered equal opportunity an obsolete idea hampering the competitive zeal of human beings.

It is not only economists who have advocated neo-liberal changes in the educational system. Psychologists like Eysenck (1973) and Herrnstein (see Herrnstein and Murray 1994) have argued that the goal of equal opportunity through education was a vain pursuit&endash;and contributed to a decline in the standards of the schools. Quality and equality were thus not compatible. In the field of social ethics, Nozick (1974) and Hayek (1976) taught that state regulation only caused ‘dependence’.

Neo-liberalism does not live only in academia. It has affected the reality of education and found its way into policy-making in many countries. The most prominent examples of neo-liberal implementations in education are provided by the US, the UK, and New Zealand. Furthermore, the attraction of educational neo-liberalism is independent of political ideology: both in New Zealand and Britain neo-liberal reforms of the school system have been implemented by left-wing as well as right-wing governments.

In this context I was intrigued by a recent study of developments in New Zealand by Hugh Lauder and David Hughes (1999) who, together with a group of colleagues, explored what really happened to the common school when market forces were applied to student recruitment and resource-provision. After the right-wing National party won the 1991 election it passed legislation which abolished the home-zones of local schools; from that point on, student enrollment was dependent upon free parental choice. In Trading in Futures: Why Markets in Education Don’t Work, Lauder and Hughes (1999) asked how this affected educational opportunities.

Trading in Futures appeared at a time when the marketization of schools was also occuring in Finland. Across the Nordic region welfare structures are being reconsidered and, as a policy innovation, the common school is to be subjected to the rules of the market. Local authorities have been given authority to distribute their state-provided monies as they chose. Communities have dissolved fixed school zones and the parents have been given complete freedom to chose the schools their children might attend. Competition among schools for pupils has also began.

To this point the Finnish research on these policies has restricted its analysis to a monitoring of the motives of parental choice. However Lauder and Hughes (1999) have gone further to ask a fundamental question: What happens to the schools, as institutions, as they face the market? In order to explore this question, I will consider both Lauder and Hughes’s findings and my own Finnish experience to speculate about what will happen as nations go down the road to the deregulation and the marketization of schooling. I will also be discussing some findings from studies from the UK with the goal of reflecting on the issues around the idea of the educational marketplace.

What has been found about school markets?

Lauder and Hughes (1999) maintain that the marketization of schools involves the substitution of economic for pedagogical categories of thought. Instead of notions like ‘educational opportunity’, ‘social and personal development’ and ‘social integration’ providing the language for talk about education and schooling, the school is considered in terms of ‘cost-effectiveness’, ‘commodities’, ‘customer choice’, and ‘competitiveness’.

Table 1 presents Lauder and Hughes’s summary of the contrasting pro-market theory and social conflict understandings of the nature and function of markets in basic schooling. While pro-market theorists believe in competition, social conflict theorists put a different gloss on the benefits of free parental choice: in their view the choice is neither free nor equal.

Pro-market theory

Social conflict theory

Parents are equally capable of choice in education marketplace

Choice is determined by social location

Schools become socially more mixed thanks to free choice

Markets polarize school intakes

Schools are more innovative and diverse

Competition for exam results leads schools to focus their work

Competition for students enhances school performance

Polarization leads to a decline in resources and school achievement in socially-deprived areas

These arguments are derived from beliefs in the contrasting social doctrines of freedom and regulation; but ultimately the advocates of the one or the other position also refer to findings from educational research. Pro-market theorists tend to highlight the higher achievement of pupils in private schools, a context where parental choice, i.e. the market, is found. However Lauder and Hughes (1999: 16-17) point out the weaknesses of the research evidence for such claims. Thus both Chubb and Moe (1997) and Gerstner et al. (1994) point to some obvious intrinsic assets that go along with being private: the greater opportunity of private schools to set their academic goals high; the assumed invigorating effect of competition on teachers; and the motivational effect of choice on parents and students. Chubb and Moe (1997) blame the bureaucracy inherent in state regulation for the poorer learning outcomes of public schools. But Lauder and Hughes (1999: 16; see also Green 1997: 106-129) point out that educational achievement tends to be higher in countries with strong state regulation of schooling.

Supporters of social conflict theory point first and foremost to the necessity for social integration. For democracy to work, an educational foundation is needed. The common school socializes people. Without an opportunity to encounter different social groups, people will lack trust in others. But they also point to findings about the utility of social balance and of a mix of students when seeking significant overall learning outcomes (Lauder and Hughes 1999: 31).

The arguments for and against marketization of schools tend to be either abstractly deductive or derived from comparative studies of one kind or another. But the validity of many such comparisons can be questioned: there is much that is not easily controlled, and the findings of one study often tend to cancel out the findings of another.

Lauder and Hughes also cast a shadow over Chubb and Moe’s book, and similar pro-market studies; these studies, say Lauder and Hughes, are not as ‘empirical’ as they pretend to be. The results often prove to be ideological statements disguised as empirically-drawn conclusions. Lauder and Hughes (1999: 9) cite Margaret Brown (1998) who has made the same accusation about some of the reports in support of the market theory published in the UK by the former Conservative government: national test results were wielded against socially equalizing school politics in order to support the market theory.

Truly valid results can only be achieved when monitoring, on the actual spot, change as it is occuring. What is done in schools with different socio-economic contexts has to be studied before and after the move to the market. Lauder and Hughes do this rigorously for the New Zealand of the 1990s; researchers in the US, in Scotland and in Finland have undertaken such studies, albeit in less rigorous ways and on a smaller scale.

The pragmatics of free parental choice of school

There is a striking similarity between the findings that Lauder and Hughes (1999) report from New Zealand and the findings in Finland with regard to the functioning of the school market. The examples from both countries indicate that the pro-market theory does not fuction in the ways its advocates claim it does: parents are not free to choose their children’s school and the schools, as a whole, are neither diversified nor improved.

Educated and relatively well-off parents used freedom of choice in the school market more often, and more effectively, than parents of lower social status. This SES-based difference did not depend on the educational awareness of the parents, but on very practical restrictions imposed by life-situations. Lauder and Hughes asked the parents in their study two questions:

• Which school would you choose, assuming that things like money and distance were no object? and

• Which school of those that are feasible for you will you choose?

The findings showed that, in the case of the first question, lower-SES parents chose the same schools as higher-status parents. But for the second question, the choices differed: lower-SES parents tended to opt for schools which were accessible to them: they could not pay or organize transportation to the more distant schools.

All parents thus well recognized the ‘good’ schools. They lacked neither information or judgement. All parents wanted good teaching and good discipline. But the actual choices of lower-SES parents were restricted, by the practicalities of daily life, to the neighbourhood school, even if it was not such a ‘good school’.

Lauder and Hughes (1999: 43-44) suggest that the differences in the actual parental choices are significant. Parents of higher and lower SES apply different perspectives as they consider the future of their children. While middle-class parents look far ahead to the children’s future educational careers when choosing a school, working-class parents use a shorter time-perspective. Working-class parents can not afford to think of future options for further education but opt instead for a school that is feasible in the here and now, in their life-situation. Thus, without doing so deliberately, they potentially thwart their children’s future educational careers.

The widespread availability of free parental choice of a public school has become a possibility only recently, and thus research has been limited by a short time-perspective. Lauder and Hughes provocatively named their book Trading in Futures. They are concerned about the potential impact on social deprivation of the marketization of education and they point to the harm caused by markets on the national level. Markets reduce educational opportunities for the population&endash;they do not address the needs of children at risk, and particularly children of disadvantaged groups. In Lauder and Hughes’s view equality of opportunity has been replaced by the more slippery concept of ‘fairness’, defined in the narrow terms of fair play between a seller and a buyer in the market.

Similar results indicating a new role for socio-economic power as an educational determinant have been reported from Scotland (Willms 1996), Britain (Ball et al. 1995, Gewirtz et al. 1995, Reay 1998) and Finland (Hirvenoja 1998). Only those with sufficient socio-economic power practise choice&endash;and when choice is determining in enrollment decision-making, educational segregation and inequality of educational opportunities emerge. ‘Equal opportunity’ has been left behind as an obsolete piece of 19th century rhetoric.

Some efforts have been made to counteract the role of socio-economic power in school markets. In New Zealand, in one of the towns studied by Lauder and Hughes oversubscribed schools were forced to choose students by ballot instead of by academic merit in order to balance the educational opportunity of the lower social strata. The assumption was that academic merit tended to be a result of social advantage. In Finland, in a single case, a local authority paid the bus fares of those who opted for schools out of their neighbourhood because of the special academic orientation of the schools they selected. These ameliorative measures, however, do not mute the overall tendency towards educational segregation on a socio-economic basis as a result of the new market-based systems.

As we have seen, the issue of free parental choice in a school market has attracted some research. In Finland much of the research has been ‘market research’, with a intention of finding out which ‘brands’ parents would favour, and why. Lauder and Hughes, Willms in Scotland, Reay and Ball in England, and Hirvenoja in Finland have gone beyond this question to ask how parental choice affects student enrollment in different schools. However too few researchers have asked what kind of impact an educational market might have on the curriculum.

The effect of the market on the curriculum

Curriculum is at the heart of educational power. Curriculum determines whether education is an emancipating or suppressing process. In the market situation a curriculum can change as a result of the requirements of competition and cost-effectiveness. Easily testable outcomes and short-term curricular attractions are what schools often pursue&endash;that is the way of the market.

Empirical research into the impact of the market on how schools work is needed. We must first ask what do schools actually do to avoid losing students and resources. Second, we must ask what happens to the curriculum in ‘loser’ schools. Will a neighbourhood school that loses in the market, and finds itself in a spiral of decline, be able to provide ‘adequate’ education?

The market divides schools into those that attract more students, and therefore resources, than before and those who lose students and resources. ‘Successful’ schools have more opportunities than before to develop their programmes; ‘unsuccessful’ schools have fewer resources to draw on when planning their programmes.

Winning, i.e. oversubscribed, schools can also select their students. It is not surprising that the academic achievement of such schools will be better than that seen in losing, i.e. undersubcribed, schools. Differences in achievement as such are not, therefore, of interest. The pedagogical responses to the situations of the different kinds of school are the main issue of interest for curricular research.

Some research of the kind has been undertaken. In the mid-1980s, when Reaganism introduced new pressures on US schools, Linda McNeil (1986) looked at teaching methods. As state-based tests created new conditions around schooling&endash;and the tests tended, in many states, to focus simply on the amount of information learned by students&endash;old-fashioned rote-learning returned. McNeil found that some teachers who had previously favoured open discussion in the classroom, and had used simulations, individual and group projects, and field-work returned to one-way transmission of knowledge, to lecturing and rote-learning (see also Gardner 1991: 140-141).

Under the pressure of statewide testing, US teachers thought of product instead of process. In the cases McNeil reports, the constructivist ideas of teaching and learning favoured by educationists since the 1960s were sacrificed to new context: a school had to be able to demonstate good test results in order to raise the trust of parents and attract students. Reform-pedagogy was declared obsolete by the supporters of the new rhetorics. In Britain academic educationists were discredited because of their progressivist ideas, and the Conservative government remodeled teacher education in order to reduce the impact of educationists. Teachers were to be ‘trained’ by practising senior teachers rather than ‘educated’ by way of ‘theories’.

Another market-influenced change was found in the UK in the nature of classroom communities. Differentiation of abilities was re-introduced into classrooms. Many UK schools, despite convincing research evidence demonstrating the benefits of heterogeneous classrooms, were tempted to separate slow-learners from the rest (Gewirtz et al. 1995: 168-172, Reay 1998). As they segregated by ability, individual schools hoped to impress middle-class parents with higher educational expectations and, as a result, favoured their preferences in the new school marketplace. Such segregating ‘setting’ occured not as a result of convictions about ‘best practice’ but because of the impact of the need for examination success-rates and middle-class parental pressure (Reay 1998: 547). Even when the outcomes pointed to the negative consequences of setting, especially for the lower sets, the practice was continued. And Tony Blair, the New Labour prime minister, has adopted the Thatcherism’s faith in setting.

The findings of both Linda McNeil in the US and Diane Reay in the UK hint at the same tendency: market-driven changes in school practice reinforce a hidden curriculum of competition and discrimination. Competition always produces losers alongside winners. The motivation of the losers tends to sink. Market-oriented schools are therefore likely to create significant larger problems. The ethos of such schools cannot be congruent the benevolent official curricular rhetorics which, semiotically, still stem from progressivist pedagogics. ‘Care’ and ‘empowerment’ are promised in the text, but in reality pupils see themselves, and are seen by their teachers, as a commodities:

‘I am worth £2200 to this school. ‘

‘£2200? You know, you’re not worth the trouble. Go to Riverway; we don’t need £2200 of your trouble, or whatever it is.’

The piece of dialogue (reported in Gewirtz et al. 1995: 176) shows the transformation of school discourse which is one outcome of the policy of free parental choice. In the marketplace, students and teachers speak the language of economics.

The substantive content of curricula is affected by the market in two ways. The curriculum can be crowded by programmes designed to address the competitive situation; and it can be narrowed because of diminishing resources. In Finland the wake of the marketization at first took some amusing forms. Schools behaved like boutiques: they introduced fancy novelties into programmes that traditionally had been very academic and static, a list of traditional subjects from religion to mathematics. Fashionable and life-relevant courses began to be offered by individual schools as they sought attractive new profiles. The expectation for a revival of values-based discussion in the newly deregulated school turned into a discussion of marketing. Brochures promised fancy lunches and cuddly pets for little pupils and adventurous sports for the older ones. Such commercial inventiveness went so that far that the teachers’ union found it necessary to warn the schools against indulging in vanities. However, the market was there to stay; to secure their economic well-being over the short run, schools went on competing with props instead of substance.

The Finnish development is reminiscent of developments in the US in the early 1980s when conservatives raised questions about the need for a common curriculum and pointed critically courses in ‘hamburger cooking’ and ‘bachelor living’. In the US such criticism led to a tightening of state regulation; in Finland which had had a tightly regulated curriculum, a cafeteria-curriculum was introduced in the 1990s as a novelty in the context of the marketization of school.

In the case of Finland, beneath the market-focussed innovations, only few truly innovative curricular ideas have been produced&endash;despite the claims for the effects of the market. One such innovation has been the new emphasis on mathematics and the sciences that has been accepted by many schools since the coming of the deregulation in the mid-1990s. However, the market was in the background even for this development. Like entrepreneurs in many other countries, Finnish employers launched a campaign for school sciences in the 1980s. According to their rhetoric, schools were obliged to contribute to the international economic competitiveness of Finland: this would happen through science-oriented curricula. This entrepreneurial rhetoric was widely adopted, and was co-opted by some schools as a powerful pitch for attracting parents, students, and resources. In this way the market affected the actual substance of the curriculum of the school.

Other, populist curricular innovations may eventually refresh school work, and bring it closer to the real life. But the introduction of exciting novelties is only feasible for those schools that win more students and more resources. An urgent research question concerns the losers. What happens to the schools that lose students and resources? In addition to the effect of socioeconomic segregation on their student population, will there will be changes in the curriculum? will there be less teaching, a poorer learning environment, a reduction in the substance of the curriculum, fewer curricular options?&endash;all of which become disadvantageous in the market. A spiral of decline, present at the beginning of the market experiment because of socio-economic segregation, is advanced on the curricular level.

Losing schools face unpleasant curricular choices. Take a neighbourhood school where the staff is painfully aware of a need for classes for special-needs students. If resources are scarce, a choice has to made&endash;whether to use funds for the such students or to employ a coach in martial arts who would attract adolescents, and their parents. Parents might shun a school that recruits special-needs students. And if a school loses students, will it be able to support special-needs students? In either case, whether it chooses to support special-needs children or the teaching of martial arts, it will fail in its obligation for pedagogic care.

Research into the effect of the school market on the curriculum is needed inasmuch as the legitimacy of the common school depends on its curriculum. If curricula are tailored for one particular social group, or if they are developed to on the basis of market attraction&endash;and compete with entertainment institutions&endash;their legitimacy as a public investment can be questioned. The common school was emerged to serve a common interest and fulfill the ideal of universal education. If the interest and the ideal no longer exist, the common school is obsolete.

The end of the common school?

In many countries ‘basic’ schools, typically comprehensive schools meant for all six- to 16-year-olds, have become more or less subject to the market. The expectation is that through competition they will enhance the learning of their students. However, Lauder and Hughes show very clearly that the pro-market theory does not hold: when they faced the market, the schools they observed did not diversify to meet different educational needs, they did not promote social mobility, and, remarkably, they did not raise their overall standards. Lauder and Hughes suggest that a social-conflict theory provides an understanding of what happened. In that lower-SES parents were not free to choose a school because of the practicalities of their lives, the system of free parental choice created socio-economic segregation. And when Lauder and Hughes looked at the curriculum, they found that schools could no longer afford to pursue progressive pedagogical ideals. Competition, which produced winners and losers, became a core principle of school work. Schools competed for students, and created conditions in which students competed for results. The hidden curriculum of the survival of the fittest was re-established in the common school.

Researchers in New Zealand, in Britain, in the US, and (tentatively) in Finland have exposed a movement towards the re-segregation of the common school. But they have have left important areas unexplored. We do not know what has happened in the loser schools with regard to actual school work. We can anticipate that, in the newly re-segregated situation, new demands will appear, but as a result of the new division of resources on the basis of cost-effectiveness, these demands will be hard to meet.

The historical meaning of the common school

Schooling is re-creating a a marketplace for free competition for educational capital, to use Bourdieu’s (1970) terminology. This observation leads us back to the history of the common school.

The meaning of the ‘common school’ is of course historically constructed. The common school played an important role in the 19th century in the making of the modern state. The common school was indispensable in the socialization of the new citizens. It continued to be a cohesive force as modern differentiated societies emerged in the 20th century. But when differentiation finally caused fragmentation, the institution of the common school began to be questioned, first by post-modernist thinkers, and then by economists, legislators, and the public. In a way, the post-modernists opened the way to the marketing of school.

Michel Foucault (1975) questioned the traditional view of the historical role of the common school as an emancipator. He saw the common school as an institution comparable to prisons and hospitals, institutions intended to create conformity. The capable ‘normal’ and healthy would be in charge and, as a result, the society would prosper and progress. Conformity was thus a vital precondition for the success of the modern project, but also an excluding force. The abnormal, the negative, was discriminated against, and excluded.

Foucault revealed the hidden curriculum of control embedded in the way schools functioned. Scheduled and monitored classroom work permitted the curriculum. The curriculum served economic growth and national coherence. At the same time, however, it excluded local, dissident and non-rational intentions and pursuits.

According to the Foucaultian view, the curriculum was at the same time both the source of social power and a way of excluding otherness. The curriculum was meant to mediate the great hegemonic narratives of a society and make them true. In doing so, it excluded minority narratives and foreclosed their futures. The hegemonic narrative was powerful inasmuch as people accepted it willingly as their own narrative, and believed in it.

Pierre Bourdieu (1970) is as much a revisionist about the meaning of the common school as Foucault. Bourdieu regards the school as a overtly discriminatory institution. In his view, the school is a market where cultural capital is traded: educational capital is negotiated, bought and sold. Those from higher socio-economic strata are more successful than those from lower strata in exploiting this capital and accommodating it into their careers. This is a direct result of the power of élites to influence school curricula and discourses.

Postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Bourdieu regard the grand narrative of equal educational opportunity as dead. In fact, they say, it was never true. However, they have been opposed by, e.g. Jürgen Habermas (1994), who speaks of the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and regards the emancipatory opportunities through education vital for mankind. People face too many common challenges for education to become purely interpersonal competition.

Recently historians have thrown new light on the the view of the common school as a market or a power monopoly. Thus Andy Green (1990) and John Boli (1989) have concluded that the intentions behind common school were emancipatory as well as consolidatory, and that the effects, on the local level, contributed towards civil society.

The common school grew alongside civil society. Historically the common school is intimately linked to the egalitarian project, and this project is undeniably unfinished. Today the issue facing the common school circles around the poles of instrumentalization of the school in the interests of hegemonic economic interests and maintenance of the school as the cradle of a civil society. As we consider this choice, more research into the construction of the meaning of school is needed. The politics of curriculum deserve to be a concern of both theorists and practitioners.

References

Ball, S. J. and Bowe, R. and Gewirtz, S. (1995) Circuits of schooling: a sociological exploration of parental choice of school in social class contexts. Sociological Review, 43 (1), 52-78.

Boli, John (1989) New Citizens for a New Society: The Institutional Origins of Mass Schooling in Sweden (Oxford: Pergamon Press).

Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage).

Brown, Margaret (1998) The tyranny of the international horse race. In R. Slee and G. Weiner with S. Tomlinson (eds), School Effectiveness for Whom? Challenges to the School Effectiveness and School Improvement Movements (London: Falmer), 33-47.

Chubb, J. and Moe, T. (1997) Politics, markets and the organization of schools. In A. H. Halsey, Hugh Lauder, Phil Brown and Amy Stuart Wells (eds), Education: Culture, Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 363-381.

Donald, James (1992) Sentimental Education (London: Verso).

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Gerstner, L., Semerad, R., Doyle, D. and Johnston, W. (1994) Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools (New York: Dutton).

Gewirtz, Sharon and Ball, Stephen J. with Bowe, Richard (1995) Markets, Choice and Equity in Education (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press).

Green, Andy (1990) Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (London: Macmillan).

Habermas, Jürgen (1994) Die Moderne&endash;Ein unvollendetes Projekt (Leipzig: Reclam).

Herrnstein, R. J. and Murray, C. (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Boston, MA: The Free Press).

Hirvenoja, P. (1997) Miksi mennään merta edemmäs kouluun? Tutkimus syistä, joiden perusteella yläasteen kouluksi valittiin jokin muu kuin lähikoulu Helsingissä vuonna 1997 verrattuna edellisvuosiin. Helsingin kaupunginopetusviraston julkaisusarja B16: 1997.

Lauder, Hugh and Hughes, David and Watson, Sue, Waslander, Sietske, Thrupp, Martin, Strathdee, Rob, Simiyu, Ibrahim, Dupuis, Ann, McGlinn, Jim and Hamlin, Jennie (1999) Trading in Futures: Why Markets in Education Don’t Work (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press).

Reay, Diane (1998) Setting the agenda: the growing impact of market forces on pupil grouping in British secondary schooling. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 30 ( 5), 545-558.

Willms, Douglas J. (1997) Parental Choice and Education Policy CES Briefing 12 (Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Educational Sociology).

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