Introduction

In this chapter and the next, accounts are given from two different perspectives of the introduction of choice as the organising principle for school admissions. This chapter will examine the political steps, and the legislative and regulatory approaches taken by central government to secure the necessary pre-conditions for establishing choice as the key policy for school admissions: the creation of a quasi-market through school diversity, greater freedom to control admissions at school level, and the limiting of local government powers. This account will be presented in three phases: the phase of policy initiation that started with the Thatcher governments and found its greatest expression in the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA); the period of continuity and expansion as the market ‘baton’ was passed to the New Labour reformers in government in the period from 1997 to 2010; and, at the time of writing, the current phase of policy acceleration under the Coalition government. In Chapter Five, the focus will be on the outcomes of school admissions processes within the quasi-market: how parents and pupils have experienced, and how schools and local authorities have reacted to, the realities of choice in admissions, and the responses of the relevant legal and administrative processes when parental preference has come into conflict with school admissions practice.

The move away from the planning mode of school admissions was marked by the Thatcher government's emphasis on the use of market and business models to respond to ‘inefficiencies’ in the delivery of public services; in essence, how to transfer ‘the logic, model and visions of a private company’ (Ball, 2008, p 7) to the organisation and distribution of school places. Since 1988, school admissions have been increasingly based upon a quasi-market system predicated on choice, though, as will be demonstrated in this chapter and the next, there is plentiful evidence indicating that the ‘choice’ is not always, as had been originally promised, that of parental choice of school but rather of school choice of pupil.

From the Conservative government's perspective, the most significant impediment to progressing this agenda was the power of the local authorities in determining the running of schools. In the general context of explaining public service reform, Loughlin (2003, p 521) identifies ‘a disintegration of the constitutional tradition of local government’.