Demand for good schools

The nexus of issues around what parents are looking for in schools, how they make their choices, how strategic they are, and how successful these choices are for different types of parent are crucial to the outcome of any choice-based mechanism. There are, however, unanswered questions – both theoretical and empirical – regarding the basis of parental choice. In 2009, Burgess and Wilson (with Vignoles from the CEE) will investigate this issue for primary school choice using the Millenium Cohort Study (project funded by an ESRC small grant). Here we propose two projects which complement this work, an empirical study of secondary school choice using ALSPAC, and a theoretical study applying three leading sociological approaches to the issue of school choice.

School choice and school assignment mechanisms (Simon Burgess, Paul Gregg)

The ALSPAC dataset allows a rich analysis of parental decision-making in terms of the choice of school. This project follows up our earlier project examining the assignment of pupils to schools, by using data on actual school applications made by parents. Using information matched in using spatial identifiers, we will analyse parents’ actual choices in relation to the attributes of the set of schools available.

A theoretical exploration of the basis for parental choice of schools (Deborah Wilson, Gary Bridge (SPS, UoB))

This study will contrast three different approaches to theorizing school choice. First, we will consider an individual model, with a simple economic calculus comparing the costs and benefits of choice, taking account of relative risk aversion. Second, we will take Boudon’s individual rational choice explanation, which adds in an analysis of social capital. These approaches have been applied to differential staying-on rates in post compulsory education; we will apply them to school choice. Third, Bourdieu’s ideas on class reproduction have been used in the literature to argue that there are different structuring frameworks of school choice for middle class and working class parents. We will compare the Bourdieu model that emphasizes non-individual, social class explanations with the two approaches based on individual rational choice. The aim is to formulate testable hypotheses from this conceptual comparison that will inform future empirical work on this issue.