Since the late 1980s British educational policy has embraced the market through its concern with parental choice and encouraging competition between educational institutions. Rational choice theory provides the centre-piece of this as it is assumed that parents will select the school that is most appropriate to their child’s needs through a rational appraisal of how these are matched through the school’s ethos and results. Ball and Gewirtz (1997) offer an analysis of how single-sex schools for girls are responding to their market position and how parents and their daughters choose between single-sex and mixed schools. Their research is based on interviews with parents and case studies of the schools in question. Their analytic framework seeks to explore both the demand and supply side of the market in girls’ education.
Ball and Gewirtz illustrate how schools position themselves in the market place through, for example, careful consideration of the images they present. These include changes to uniforms to ensure they represent a ‘respectable’ status and producing brochures that extol the benefits of all-girl schools. In these ways senior managers in schools juggle between professional and entrepreneurial interests and discourses. Parental approaches to choice certainly include a careful perusal of the documentation and other published information such as school league tables. They also visit schools on open days. However, Ball and Gewirtz comment that ‘both making choices and choices made is far from the rational calculus conjured up by some market theorists. While material class interests and concerns about the life opportunities available to girls clearly inform and underlie choice-making these are realised through a ‘‘fuzzy” and sometimes misguided logic’ (ibid.: 219). Thus ‘personal prejudices derived from their own school experiences, vague and uncertain grasp of received wisdom and reputational gossip acquired from local social networks and media hype. . . [together with] . . . powerful affective responses, positive or negative, from parents and daughters’ (ibid.) consequent upon visits to schools all impact on choice.