School choice as game theory

Guardian readers are not hypocrites on education

A little flyer appeared through our letter box the other day, telling us that property prices are ‘set to rocket’ nearby because many of the state schools in the area are rated as outstanding - and the new VAT rules on private schools would soon make them unaffordable to many parents.

It’s a little demonstration of how schools always select to some extent; being within the catchment area of the most popular primary school in our area apparently added £40,000 or so the value of a property, and landlords with flats close by could always find tenants as parents gamed the system by renting for a year. (Catchment areas are expanding at quite a rapid rate now, so it will be interesting to see how that develops).

Higher house prices within a catchment area will lead to a school intake of higher social class, children possessing both the ‘cultural capital’ (a fancy way of saying books in the house) and inheriting the genes which made their parents rich in the first place. This drives selection. It also means more parents willing to take on prosocial roles such as membership of the parent governor committee and the various fundraising organisations, which often involve people whose hourly earnings are in triple figures spending huge amounts of time on cake-making or putting up bunting.

The advantages of living within a prized catchment area are different for primary and secondary schools. Early year schooling is less about education than childcare, so one of the major benefits is in fact the parents’ own friendship group: the school introduces you to a whole new set of trusted friends, who will share much of the labour associated with parenting, such as the endless ferrying around and feeding. Having new friends in the neighbourhood, at a time of life when older pals have invariably moved to distant climes, is a huge bonus.

At secondary level, the importance of the right school for your child is even greater: peer group hugely shapes development and influences behaviour in adolescence, more than any other time in life, and there’s a huge amount that can go wrong: drink, drugs, even gang membership for boys; social contagions for girls.

But the threat of violent bullying, in particular, is a significant reason for why some people go private in the first place, at least for the parents of boys; yet it’s an issue that doesn’t come up much in discussion of private schools. 

The percentage of children in England attending private school increased from around 5.5% in 1978 to its peak of 7.5% in 1991, just at the time when the philosophy of child-centred education reached its greatest dominance. With the abandonment of the strict discipline traumatically remembered by Pink Floyd in The Wall, order broke down in many comprehensives. Compared to today, London schools when I was growing up were quite daunting places.

As discipline collapsed in these schools, the middle class fled, and there were two famous cases which epitomised the problem: one was Holland Park Comprehensive in west London, which had once been nicknamed the ‘socialist Eton’ because of its progressive ideas about child-centred education. It had no homework and no uniform, allowed its pupils huge freedom, and was heavily influenced by the child-centred ethos of the time. In its early days, the school drew in the children of Notting Hill’s elite, including Tony Benn, Lady Antonia Fraser and Philip Toynbee. 

Yet by the time I entered secondary school in 1989, Holland Park was a dystopia which parents were keen to avoid, wracked by violence against other pupils and teachers, and even small-scale disorder; former pupils even wrote survivor memoirs. As families with higher cultural capital begun to flee, this became a self-perpetuating process which saw its descent into a sink school.

The educational climate began to change in the 1990s, with many schools returning to homework, discipline and uniform, and the national percentage of private school pupils has since fallen slightly to 6.8%. Holland Park had a complete revamp, and now has very good GCSE results, although as I noted in my book about growing up nearby, it has had so many alumni killed fighting for ISIS that they could put up their own First World War-style memorial wall for jihadis.

Middle-class parents took their children out of the school because they faced a high chance of victimisation. Many, no doubt, made huge financial sacrifices to do so, when they would have been happy with a comprehensive which hadn’t descended into chaos, such as Holland Park’s nearest neighbour, Cardinal Vaughan, where I went. For many, that involved a different type of sacrifice, by giving up their Sunday mornings to attend church, and swallowing any scepticism they might have about ‘indoctrination’ (compared to today’s secular schools – ho ho).

Another example was Creighton in Muswell Hill, north London, the only school in Britain to introduce busing – with as much success as you can imagine.