Stuck Between School Wars and School Choice? The Politics of Comprehensive Education in England and France

The advantage of students of higher socio-economic background in the competition for good school places challenges equality of opportunity in education. Policy analysts have pointed at two types of institutions that reinforce inequalities of access to quality education: unregulated choice, where schools select their pupils, and tracked systems, where students are sorted into schools of different academic level. Inequalities due to choice have often been considered a consequence of neo-liberal policy making. This paper challenges that view by comparing and tracing the process of the political mechanisms that introduced school choice in France and England as a direct consequence of abolishing tracked school systems in the 1960s-1970s. In fact, comprehensive school reforms did not institutionally hold what they promised: in both cases, they introduced exclusive choice, where families could opt out of the local school by opting into church schools. These were publicly funded but remained responsible for student admissions, making them part of the driving mechanism of persistent inequality in education up until the present. Why did governments that introduced comprehensive schools in view of investing into quality education for all in fact produce a system that continues to favour the socio-economically advantaged? I argue that while religious schools are a driver of educational inequalities, barriers to the regulation of their admissions are not due to religious, but socio-economic cleavages. These limited left-wing governments to regulate existing government-maintained private schools and allowed right-wing governments to capitalize on their existence to introduce exclusive choice instead.