Abstract
The cover of the book is very telling with a photographic close up on a textbook open and with the centre filled with loose change. Throughout this laudably clear and persuasive book, Ball demonstrates his view that in the 21st-century, education, as all social services, is now required to follow the processes and purposes of informational capitalism. He ends on the very worrying note that the next logical step in this process is for schools to be encouraged to be profit-making. In his first Guardian interview (31 May 2010) as Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove said that he has ‘no ideological objection’ to this and a range of think-tank documents have been produced to validate this approach. Ball is particularly good at pointing out these ‘thin end of the wedge’ actions as a specific strategy of recent governments who by framing the public services as broken, can then offer a ‘necessary’ solution that might have been unthinkable otherwise. These unthinkable ‘solutions’ will previously have been drip-fed into the media by think tanks and policy outliers so that they appear to be ‘natural’ elements within a mainstream debate. Through the lobbying effects of these outliers (from the Black Papers to the latest reports from the Centre for Social Justice set up by Iain Duncan Smith), Ball shows how once reviled concepts such as performance related pay, using unqualified teachers and creating education vouchers are normalised in education debate.
Indeed one of the greatest strengths of this book is how it puts current coalition policy into a longer historical perspective with Chapter 2 offering an exemplary short history of education policy from 1870 to the present day (though this is little changed from that in the first edition). In Chapter 3, he builds on the first edition’s discussion of how New Labour changed education to bring his argument and analysis up to the present moment. He is very strong on making the links between these two governments, not falling into a ‘Gove bashing’ posture at any time, but making it clear how Gove’s stewardship of education is both building on Labour policies and where it is radically different. The book has a social justice agenda running throughout and so the New Labour notion of school/parental choice is thoroughly dissected with Ball referring to his earlier work looking at how middle class parents with cultural capital are able to take advantage of choice systems and so increase inequalities. He also cites Burgess et al.’s work in this area that suggests that more choice actually means more class and race segregation.
Chapter 4 begins with an often used quotation from Gove’s May 2012 speech on UK inequality, commenting that it is perhaps surprising that the coalition have given so much attention in rhetoric at least to social justice. Like Labour they have supported the Equalities Act and other policies such as gay marriages. However, Ball traces a New Moralism in their attitude towards tackling social inequality through education, specifically in their position on pedagogies and a knowledge-based curriculum. Schools are very much being blamed for not compensating for social ills such as poverty and so exceptional schools where high community deprivation does not impact upon achievement are used as models against which other schools are held accountable. The same is true of race and gender underachievement; institutionalised inequality cannot be the barrier to achievement in coalition logic, it must be the fault of failing schools, or failing parents. In his analysis of education, Ball is good at making links with wider areas of social policy and discourse including the demonization of some families and parents. He ends the chapter by saying ‘In some areas of policy it is parents who are at fault, in other areas it is “progressive” schools and teachers’ (p. 214). Those of us that are both must be doubly ‘enemies of promise’ as Gove once said. This pessimist note sets the tone for the final and very succinct chapter, ‘A sociology of education policy: past, present and future’.
He concludes by summarizing his main arguments but also restating how complex the situation now is, and offering no clear future vision. He reasserts that the coalition are building on New Labour policies such as academies, but are different in their complete rejection of any notion of progressive education, their belief in wholesale public service reform and in a conservation attitude that is particularly evident in the new national curriculum. He unpicks the ideas of freedom and democracy that are supposed to underpin free schools serving local communities, asking who is the community in that case. The irony of local governance is that it needs enhanced central control systems to operate it. The confused mixed economy that results from the proliferation of reforms and types of schools is not a UK phenomenon, Ball is keen to state, but part of a wider global shift. His final salvo is that this global shift is tending towards profit-making in the public domain and he is able to cite both Gove (as previously cited) and a range of policy and think tank reports on this topic from 2011–2012. If he is right to state that these are the types of reports by organisations that appear to be outliers but who function to normalise what has previously been seen as unthinkable, then perhaps for profit education is just around the corner.
The argument in this book is very well evidenced and supported, but makes for uncomfortable reading. Ball writes as though progressive comprehensive education is a relic of the past, and offers ample evidence that inequality will rise rather than fall under the coalition. What practitioners, teachers, school leaders and parents can do to challenge this remains outside the purview of the book. Whilst it is clear from this and Ball’s other work where his politics lie this is not a polemic but sociology of education as he states. A strong social justice focus permeates the whole text but no answers are offered for how to make education more just; after reading The Education Debate answers seem even harder to find.