School Size Matters: small school responses to the market
MARION MOSER, Departments of Educational Research and Geography, Lancaster University*[1]
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
ABSTRACT
This paper considers the marketing strategies small rural primary schools adopt within the educational market place and the varying responses parents make to these strategies. Using primary data collected through interviews and observations the research considers the marketing interface between the schools and their parent community. The research illustrates how taking the issue into the rural location and focusing on small schools draws out subtle differences between schools and within parent groups. This work-in-progress presents two case studies, located within a county with a high proportion of small schools, and illustrates their varying ability to respond to the market within the constraints of Government and Local Education Authority policies. The paper sets out to capture the dynamism between structure and agency and shows the radically different ways the case study schools operate, ranging from embracing the government’s extended childcare policy through to a 'chocolate-box' selling of a rural idyll. The schools manage their local reputations as a covert form of selection: the dynamic relationship between the school and the parents not only maintains particular pupil populations but also governs how parents select and self select. The paper concludes that examining the schools within the structural context of place, community and governmental institution aids a better understanding of how they react to market pressures.
Introduction
Like all schools, since the 1988 Education Reform Act rural primary schools have been subject to government policies aimed at raising education standards through the marketisation of education and the institution of parental choice mechanisms (DfE, 1992). The effect the market is having on the rural primary school and their parent consumers is however under-researched[2]. This small-scale ethnographic work-in-progress therefore sets out to capture the marketing interface between two case study village schools and their parent communities.
Small rural schools occupy a vulnerable position within the quasi-market. There is no doubt that those schools with 50 or fewer pupils, described by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) as ‘very small’[3], remain in a vulnerable position since they are sensitive to small changes affecting both standards and the school budget. Moreover, small schools are costly to run, even with the addition of government grants and matched funding[4] from the Local Education Authority (LEA). The village school is however considered to be a vital resource evidenced by the government pledge to strengthen its policy against the closure of rural schools in a bid towards the revitalisation of the countryside (DETR, 2000: 3.4.1). Indeed the village school is often considered by local people to hold a symbolic place within the locale (Forsythe, 1984) and the closure of a village school is seen to affect not only young families but also the wider community (Cohen, 1982; Robinson, 1990). Government policy suggests that rural services should be ring fenced from competition, as have rural post offices, but this is not happening in the case of the small school. Within the educational market place small rural primary schools are forced to behave like businesses and need to promote themselves in order to be competitive and viable.
Village school attractiveness is linked to the perception of the “rural idyll” (Valentine, 1997; Little and Austin, 1996) and rural primary schools are often perceived to be distinctive and better because of small size, their caring family ethos and their ability to include children with Special Needs (LGA, 2000). Nonetheless small rural schools also carry the historical negative stereotype of old, poorly equipped school buildings that are expensive to run, where teachers struggle to offer a rich and varied education to mixed-age classes and where pupil friendships suffer due to small peer-group size (Bell & Sigswoth, 1987; Galton and Patrick, 1990). The schools in competition therefore need to stress their positive characteristics, such as being small and caring, and present these as competitive advantages. One of the most commonly associated devices for primary schools to advertise their academic success is through the league tables. This is not, however, the case for small schools with ten or fewer pupils on the roll in Year 6 because with such small numbers of pupils being assessed there is “the risk that individual pupils could be identified” (DfES, 2004) hence these schools’ performance is not published. This inability, for the very small school, to engage with the annual public scrutiny of their Key Stage 2 SATs results (Standard Assessment Tasks) may be to their marketing advantage for those parents concerned more with school ethos than academic reputation. Indeed league tables provide only one element within a set of criteria adopted by parents in their decision to choose a secondary school (Gerwitz et al., 1993) and the same must be said of the mechanism of choice within the primary sector.
The wider research project on which this paper draws shows that small school responses to the market include selling the school’s rural identity and ethos through the school prospectus, promoting school success through the media, making connections with the local community, developing a link with a nursery and extending day-care provision through breakfast and after-school clubs. Nevertheless, since the schools are in competition with nearby schools, that may share a number of rural distinctive characteristics, it is important to consider the unique selling points each school highlights in order to promote their individual strengths. The school’s choice of their selling points says something about the image it wishes to portray and the type of consumer it is aiming to attract. A school may therefore encapsulate its ethos by pointing to its rural location, the school-community relationship it encourages, the school’s local heritage, facilities and resources and its stance on academic performance or care of the child as a rounded individual.
In addition to selling these specific items the schools also try to manipulate the less tangible characteristic of reputation. Locally held perceptions of a school’s reputation are passed around by word-of-mouth to the extent that, as Ball and Vincent (1998) suggest, ‘hot knowledge’ provides parents with more accurate information than the school prospectus and examination results particularly in close-knit rural communities. Nevertheless, reputation is affected by the interplay between the structuring effects of OFSTED and SATs results and the action of staff, governors and parents but reputation in turn affects the mechanism of parental choice for different groups of parents. This complexity leads to subtle differences in the choices that individual schools make concerning how they cultivate their reputation in order to compete within the educational market place. Clearly the nebulous nature of school reputation is worthy of further exploration because it affects the dynamic relationship between schools and parents within the educational market place. This paper therefore considers how small rural primary schools promote themselves through their local reputation. It shows how schools develop a reputation, how much control they have to manipulate this and crucially why it is important for them to claim a unique reputation to help them compete with neighbouring schools.
Methodology and Contextuality
The paper draws on data collected at Greenthwaite School and Marshland School[5] during the autumn school term of 2004 and includes 20 semi-structured interviews with staff, governors and parents and a week of observations in each school. The schools are approximately three miles apart, operating in what Taylor (2002, p.199) refers to spatially as a “local competitive arena” and are situated in a rural county with a high proportion of primary schools with a hundred or fewer pupils. The county has a stagnant population with more elderly and fewer young people, so the LEA is struggling to combat the effect of an overall fall of 9.5 per cent in its primary school intake. The county recognises that it has an oversupply of schools and the macro position is that the schools are clearly in competition with each other. Very small schools are more costly to finance for the LEA (see Table 1) and the smaller the school the more costly it becomes (LGA, 2000:6)[6]. In order to reduce the number of surplus places throughout the county (in response to OFSTED recommendations) the LEA has resorted to either federation[7] or school closure particularly in the case of very small schools with a declining pupil roll.
Table 1
Size of School Average cost per pupil
More than 50 £3,080
40 – 50 £3,200
30 – 40 £3,350
20 – 30 £3,900
Under 20 £5,140 (OSA, 2004)
The two case study schools have experienced fluctuations in their pupil roll causing budget and staffing problems and ultimately a feeling of vulnerability. Many of the participants were aware that the threat of closure was not an idle one since both schools are near to other small schools that have closed down in living memory. This feeling of vulnerability appears to set the scene for creative leadership to ensure school survival, whether this comes from the head teacher or the governors or a combination of the two.
Greenthwaite: advertising the school to best advantage
Greenthwaite Community School promotes itself as a very small rural school where children learn traditional educational and moral values. The school is renowned locally for its high academic standards and the excellent art, drama and music teaching it provides. The most recent OFSTED report stated that pupil attainment on entry is at the ‘expected level’. The Victorian school building is located on the village green and is surrounded by a number of large traditional stone-built detached houses. Visually this school appears to be a typical rural idyllic school ‘at the heart of its community’ and since there are very few services within the village, other than the school, village hall and church, the school holds a symbolic place within the community. But more than half of the children attending Greenthwaite School live out-of-catchment with the result that this school is marketing itself to parents who live in the local community and to those who live in the wider geographic community. At the time of data collection Greenthwaite had a capacity for 28 with a pupil roll of 24 including 17 children travelling from out-of-catchment. As head teacher Bill explains, the school’s widely known outstanding reputation is in fact crucial to its survival, because “if I relied on the children from Greenthwaite there would be seven children in school”. Advertising the school’s successes to a wider catchment of consumers is a marketing strategy Bill uses to good effect. In the past two years the school has won two prestigious awards for its creative work, which has left Bill feeling that “we have kudos - we’re on a roll”. The school has received local, regional and national media attention through the awards providing a considerable amount of positive free advertising both within and beyond its catchment so that it has received wide exposure to potential customers.
Bill is aware that by specifically targeting parents from out-of-catchment that he is attracting in those who consider Greenthwaite to be superior to their local school. However, this choice costs the parents “time, transport and commitment”: in Gerwitz et al’s (1993) terms they are semi-skilled and skilled choosers with cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). One such parent is Victoria who engages twice daily with a 20-mile round trip to and from school. Victoria is a freelance journalist and is able to fit the start and end of the school day into her work pattern and she is also willing to use her professional skills to help the school, “Well, I write the stories about what they’ve done and send them off…I’m their PR person”. The school is renowned for its annual Christmas and summer drama and music productions and this indeed sets the school apart from its local counterparts. Having parent Victoria ‘on the spot’ means that Bill is sure she will produce a glowing account of the performances.
Victoria is a mother who places academic achievement high on her list of priorities for primary school choice and although Greenthwaite School’s SATs results are confidential Bill says that in a small community[8] “the parents always know”. What Victoria likes about the school are the factors that make it exclusive: its very small size enabling the pupils to receive individual teacher attention, the high standard of creative subjects the school has on offer and the well-behaved pupils who “naturally know what’s right and what’s acceptable”. Her perception of the pupils at Greenthwaite is supported by her ‘insider’ knowledge gained from her visits to many of the local primary schools in her capacity as a journalist. Victoria claims that the children from Greenthwaite School stand out because “their language is very advanced”. Added to this Victoria likes the fact that Greenthwaite School does not offer extended childcare:
The other schools where I go they have the breakfast club and the after-school club and the kids are just exhausted. I think that’s probably a lot to do with why they are so wild. The school day here is the shortest school day I suppose whereas most schools now a lot of kids get dropped off at 7.30am and they are not picked up until 6pm. (Parent Victoria, Greenthwaite School)