Education and Explanations for the Welfare State: Selective Schooling in England and Germany

Recent years have witnessed a rediscovery of education by political scientists in general and social policy researchers in particular.   Yet scholars continue to debate the place of education within wider conceptions of the welfare state.  This paper engages this debate by assessing whether theories that seek to explain national variation in the provision of social security, healthcare, and housing can also explain key differences in state education.  Specifically, it examines the extent to which power resource theory and the employer-centered perspective in the Varieties of Capitalism literature, two reigning conceptions of welfare state development, apply to a crucial and contentious component of general education, namely whether systems separate students into different secondary school tracks following primary school.  Examining postwar England and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the paper argues that changes to the English “tripartite” system since World War II and the continuities observed in the three-tiered system in FRG are best explained not by welfare state theories, but by a discursive institutionalist approach that makes reference to the content of legitimizing policy discourses in both countries and the comparative timing of shifts in each country’s respective discourses.  The paper concludes by outlining some of the factors that make education different and reconsiders the place of education among social policies.