Abstract
Trends towards the marketisation of the schooling sector have led to suggestions that state-funded schools in England will soon be allowed to operate on a for-profit basis. This article has two aims: to contribute to understanding of the regulation and characterisation of existing for-profit schools in England; and to assess the claim that for-profit schools ‘significantly outperform’ all independent schools by exploring the use of large scale databases including the National Pupil Database (NPD). This study highlights the growth of the for-profit sector, and the scarcity of legislation detailing the financial governance, educational oversight and staffing requirements of schools in the for-profit schooling sector. The for-profit schooling sector is found to be underperforming in terms of school inspection ratings at a level of statistical significance in comparison to the state funded schooling sector. Furthermore, performance indicators relating to GCSE and A level results suggest that the for-profit sector is underperforming compared to the not-for-profit independent sector. As such, the findings of this research have implications in undermining the neoliberal argument that has driven significant change in the schooling landscape in recent times.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 726-741 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of education policy |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 28 May 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 3 Sep 2019 |
Bibliographical note
© 2018 informa UK limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for detailsKeywords
- for-profit schools
- profit motive
- inspection outcomes
- academic outcomes
- For-profit schools
