Rimary School Choice in a Rural Locale: a Right, Good, Local School

Primary school choice in a rural locale: a ‘right, good, local’ school

MARION MOSER, Departments of Educational Research and Geography, Lancaster University*1

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006

ABSTRACT Existing empirical research shows that school choice is a complex process dictated by family and structural limitations. Parental choice is affected, on the one hand, by the range and number of resources parents have at their disposal, and on the other hand, by the values they uphold. Current literature argues that new groups of both working and middle-class social class fractions are emerging and that crucially the people within these class divisions are not only affected by the amount and type of capital at their disposal but also by lifestyle and a connection to particular locales. Primary schools tend to act as ‘feeders’ to secondary schools and so for parents who think in the long-term primary school choice is an important first stage within the school choice process. However, the academic literature has focused on parental choice in urban areas, and in particular on those parents choosing within the secondary sector. In order to address the gap in the literature this paper sets out to consider the choices parents are making within the primary sector and more specifically those living in rural areas. Using primary data collected through interviews and observations with parents from three case-study primary schools the research utilises Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus and field and shows how resources and ties to the locale and the community affect the values the parents hold and the school choices they make. The paper concludes that parents making a rural ‘local’ primary school choice are influenced not only by social class and access to resources but also by familial ties and an emotional connection with the rural locale.

Introduction: schools, parents and the discourse of choice Existing empirical research shows that school choice is a complex process dictated by family and structural limitations (Reay, 1996; Reay and Lucey, 2000). Parental choice is affected, on the one hand, by the range and number of resources parents have at their disposal, and on the other, by the values they uphold (Vincent, 2001). However, the academic literature has focused on parental choice in urban areas, and in particular on those parents choosing within the secondary sector2. Nevertheless, primary schools tend to act as ‘feeders’ to secondary schools and so for parents who think in the long-term primary school choice is an important first stage within the choice process. In order to address the gap in the literature this paper considers the complexities of primary school choice for parents living in rural areas. The study sets out to uncover why parents see one school as superior to another, what it is they see the schools offering and why parents would choose a school other than their nearest when doing so incurs extra time and travel

1 Email: [email protected] 2 One exception is the research carried out by Ball and Vincent (2005) on parental choice within the pre- school sector.

1 costs. The differences between rural schools may be less obvious than those between urban schools, or indeed between a rural and an urban school, but the participants in this study illustrate that parents do see subtle and yet clear differences. The paper considers the choice processes that affect parents living in- and out-of-catchment, which includes parents who are local, that is the people who were born in the county, and those who are called the ‘offcomers’, that is, those who have migrated to the area. It examines the differences between the choice processes the local and offcomer parents go through by considering whether the offcomers are more likely to optimise their choices and to ‘shop around’.

While market discourses suggest that the mechanism of parental choice is a force for equality because it offers choice for all, the reality is that school choice does not provide parents with equal opportunities for their children because choice is dependent upon the amount and type of resources parents have at their disposal. These resources include economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) as well as those of time and space (Giddens, 1984). Ultimately some parents have more choice than others but fundamentally the mechanism of choice enables the middle-classes to socially reproduce to protect their advantageous position without appearing to do so (Ball, 2003) because the process of choice is couched in the rhetoric of ‘parental rights and responsibilities’.

Early work by Gerwitz et al. (1995) suggests that the choice process is very different for middle-class and working-class parents not only with respect to the levels of capital the parents possess but also with respect to the spatial framework within which the parents operate. More choice is available to those with the skills and the resources to work the system to best advantage and Gerwitz et al. (1995, p.24) make this clear connection with reference to their “privileged/skilled” middle-class choosers and their “disconnected” working-class choosers who have fewer skills and resources to enable them to engage with the choice process3. Most importantly they argue that parental choice favours the middle-classes and they identify a typology of parent choosers connected to social class. The skilled choosers are “overwhelmingly middle-class”, the semi-skilled choosers are a “mixed-class group” and the disconnected choosers are “overwhelmingly working-class” (Gerwitz et al., 1995, p.24). Within their detailed analysis they suggest that the middle- class skilled choosers value the notion of choice because these particular parents believe that it enables them to engage in a process of child and school matching to find a school that fits with their perception of their child’s personality and interests. These are the parents, Gerwitz et al. (1995, p.26) suggest, who think in the long-term so that “choice of primary school is often the first of several strategic decisions involved in the careful construction of their children’s school career”. Moreover, the skilled choosers are presented as having the financial resources to allow them to widen their choice of schools but the more choice, the more potential there is for confusion. Crucially many of the skilled choosers have ‘inside’ knowledge of the education system which enables them to understand how the system works, to decode the measures of public accountability and then to go on to make independent choices to find what they believe to be the ‘right’ school. There is however the possibility that none of the schools will match up to their

3 Willms and Echols’ (1992) earlier work offers the typology of the ‘inactive’ and ‘alert’ parent choosers.

2 expectations and so compromises may have to be made which could involve opting out of the public sector. Clearly these are the parents who have the most choice.

The semi-skilled choosers Gerwitz et al. (1995) present as wanting to act as ‘responsible’ parents but they lack the knowledge to enable them to do so. These parents are more likely to be ‘outsiders’ from the education system and so they rely less on their own judgement and more on those they consider to be in ‘authority’. Performance table indicators tend to be confusing to them and so for the semi-skilled chooser parents “rumour and reputation” (Gerwitz et al., 1995, p.43) become the most helpful indicators in their quest to find a ‘good’ school.

The disconnected working-class choosers, however, are the most likely to have left school early and they lack the knowledge to enable them to decode the measures of public accountability but unlike the semi-skilled choosers they have less confidence talking with those in ‘authority’ (cf. Lareau, 1989). As a consequence, Gerwitz et al. argue, the disconnected choosers are far more concerned with material matters such as school facilities and school distance from home than they are about school policy and teaching methods. School choice for the disconnected chooser is dictated by family needs and constrained by a lack of resources so that ultimately “this is class-choosing of a different kind” (Gerwitz et al., 1995, p.47). Choice for these parents is contained within a spatial framework that emphasises collectivity and connects a sense of community, of which the family is a part, to the process of choosing a ‘local’ school.

From this research it appears that the middle-class and working-class parents are not only operating with different levels of capital but that they are also operating within different value systems. The research suggests that middle-class parents are more inclined to travel further afield to find the ‘right’ school whereas working-class parents prefer a ‘local’ one. Certainly, as Reay and Lucey (2000) found in their research on children and secondary school choice, there were marked social class divisions in the way the children related to space and place, and it was the working-class children who were “much more likely to emphasise the local and the familiar” (Reay and Lucey, 2000, p.86). From the working-class parents’ perspective there is no doubt that the choice process is constrained by a lack of resources because, as Reay and Lucey (ibid.) explain, the middle-classes are operating with a conceptual horizon “that is much broader than that of the working- classes, who are more constrained both in terms of mobility and travel”. However, as Gerwitz et al.’s (1995) research illustrates, working-class parents value localism so that a ‘local’ choice may not necessarily be one made purely out of financial necessity but may in fact be a ‘real’ choice connected to habitus and based upon a valued localism and the sense of community that supporting the local school provides.

Since the notion of choice “means different things to different people and in different settings” (Gerwitz et al., 1995, p.23) understandings of choice must therefore be considered, not only in relation to access to capital but also, as Reay (1996, p.581) points out, to family habitus so that the connections parents make with “localised issues of history and geography” provide the context for the choice process. This suggests that parental choice of schools is affected not only by the more ‘visible’ power and resources

3 available to parents but also by less tangible social practices. Working-class and middle- class parents perceive their parental roles in different ways due in part to their differential access to capital, their values, and their social self-positioning and this in turn affects the significant act of choosing a school.

Nevertheless, assigning people to social class categories is problematic since, as Goldthorpe et al. (1969) point out, the boundaries between the working and middle- classes have become fuzzier due to the complexities involved with using the traditional variables of income, occupation, home ownership, consumption patterns, education and value systems. More recent work on social class analysis (Cloke and Thrift, 1990; Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 2004) argues that these rigid class divisions are no longer flexible enough to cope with the complexity and diversity of family life so that the problem of assigning people to social class categories is not only problematic between but also within categories. Indeed Vincent (2001) argues that the fractions within classes need to be taken into consideration because they affect the type and level of involvement parents have with their children’s schooling and this includes the initial stage of school choice. In her research exploring the relationship between social class and parental agency Vincent suggests that there are not only differences between the working-class and the middle-class parents she interviews but also that there are clear differences within the middle-classes. Making a distinction between the middle-class parents who work in the public sector, in education or other ‘caring’ professions, and the middle-class parents who have worked their way up to supervisory and managerial posts in the private sector, Vincent (2001, p.356) notes that the “education-insider” professional parents are the most likely to be the ones who rely upon “their cultural capital as a key asset [in] helping them to identify and manage their children’s chances of reproduction within the middle- classes” (ibid.) .

Building upon this work Vincent et al. (2004) go on to research the parental choice process within the childcare sector for parents belonging to different middle-class fractions and (2004, p.231) argue for a “more flexible approach” to the process by considering the link between choice, social class, lifestyle and locality. With this in mind this study sets out to assess whether the earlier typology (Gerwitz et al., 1995) and the more recent attention to choice connected to class fractions within particular settings (Ball and Vincent, 2005; Vincent et al., 2004) can be applied to parents choosing primary schools in rural areas.

Methodology The paper draws on data collected at three rural primary schools situated within the same county during the summer and autumn school terms of 2004 and includes 28 semi- structured interviews with county council employees, staff, governors and parents and a week of observations in each school4. The schools are in close geographic proximity; each school is approximately three miles away from the other two schools, so that for marketing purposes they are operating in a “local competitive arena” (Taylor, 2002,

4 In order to maintain the confidentiality of all those who participated in this study the schools, children, parents and all the places have been given pseudonyms.

4 p.199). Indeed bringing this geographic perspective to the study adds a further dimension to our understanding of parental choice by capturing intra- and inter-community issues within the educational market place. At the time of data collection Fieldsend School had a capacity for 56 with a pupil roll of 47 including 20 pupils from out-of-catchment; Marshland School also had a capacity for 56 with a pupil roll of 49 including ten pupils travelling from out-of-catchment and Greenthwaite School had a capacity for 28 with a pupil roll of 24 including 17 children travelling from out-of-catchment.

Parents making choices in a rural locale: the offcomers For some parents school choice is not a complicated process but governed by familial ties to their catchment school. This was the case for local parent Jenny who said, “There isn’t another school in the area I would have chosen; I have family in the village and both my nieces have been educated here”. In contrast, for others the school choice process is long and convoluted. Sian is an offcomer and she and her husband (who is a former Steiner School teacher) decided that they wanted to move from the city to provide their children with a rural lifestyle. Sian has very specific views about the style of education her children should receive and the decision to opt for out-of-catchment Greenthwaite, rather than their local village school whose class sizes average 30 pupils, is based around the small size and the individual one-to-one attention Greenthwaite can provide: We have long subscribed to the view that the education system in Britain starts kids too young…our view was that kids up to seven should be playing and hanging out. When we moved here, my son was rising seven and hadn’t been to school so we thought there is no point in putting him with 30 children where he’ll be with age-peers but way behind in terms of the basic stuff, although ahead in other things…So we thought we’d look around and we came down for a day and sat in and thought a) they are robust enough to cope and b) he is not going to be so shown up because he is going to be in a class with four, five and six-year olds. (Sian, Greenthwaite School, out-of-catchment)

The dilemma for Sian is that she lives in one village and commutes into another community on a daily basis resulting in her feeling like “a fish out of water” when she is at the school gate. Sian could be described as a ‘principled chooser’; she has chosen where to live, the type of lifestyle she wants and the type of education she wants for her children. Her ideal would be that the children should walk to school but in order to provide them with the education of her choice she has had to sacrifice the principle of walking and so she drives them to a school seven miles away. Clearly parents with a number of principles need to prioritise and Sian has the resources to enable her to do so. Firstly, the family had the economic capital to relocate from an urban to a rural location. Secondly, she and her husband have the educational capital which gives them the confidence to choose the school they believe will best suit their children. Thirdly, since both parents are self-employed they have flexible working hours giving them time to commit to the twice-daily fourteen-mile school run.

Offcomer Samantha is another mother who has committed herself to a twice-daily twelve-mile school run rather than opt for her local school. Samantha’s experience of

5 both the private and the state sector in London has convinced her that the daily school run is “worth it”: ...moving up from having to fight for places in London you are used to having to drive further to get to a decent school. It takes me twenty-five minutes to drive here and twenty-five minutes to drive home. They’ve got more than the state school in London had facility wise… I just can’t fault it compared with what I’ve come from with private schools and paying fees and then coming here; it’s incredible… (Samantha, Marshland School, out-of-catchment)

Like Sian who “looked around” before making her choice Samantha visited four schools before opting for Marshland. Her choice was based on finding a small school where her son would not “be lost at the back of the classroom in a class of 30 children” as she said he had been in the state school in London. Describing herself as a “ruthless, pushy parent” Samantha turned to the more formal measures of school attainment and checked the school Ofsted reports. Unable to refer to the league tables because of the small size of the schools5 Samantha explains how she looked at specific areas of interest and the choice of words Ofsted used to describe them: I was looking at their ‘areas for improvement’; I was looking for the faults first and then I read the summary. Ofsted are always quite pleasant about the schools, it just depends on what adjective they use. (Samantha, Marshland School, out-of- catchment).

In addition to her detailed examination of the Ofsted reports, Samantha also used the skills she learned from her own “determined” mother who she described “trawling around” to find a school for her after she had failed the 11+. Samantha values the capital which educational qualifications bring and wants her son to attend the local selective grammar school. Here she explains how her own experiences together with her economic capital have affected her approach to her son’s situation: I’d never seen a paper until the day of my 11+ so we weren’t prepared …I’m coaching him in the evenings and really doing my best to get him there; I spend a fortune on those past papers. (Samantha, Marshland School, out-of-catchment)

It is clear that the choice process Samantha is engaging with is taking a great deal of time and effort on her part, something that offcomer Sian also invested in her choice of schools. But significantly these two parents chose different schools that are only three miles apart. Samantha did not consider Greenthwaite because it was “too small” whereas Sian specifically wanted a “very small school”6. Samantha turned to Ofsted reports but Sian relied more upon her educational capital. Within the typology of choosers both Samantha and Sian are middle-class and skilled but they are operating with differing values illustrated by the different ways they went about the choice process. Samantha’s ultimate goal is that her son will pass the entrance examination to the local selective school whereas Sian’s goal is for her children to attend a school that pays attention to the expressive side of the child “despite the National Curriculum”. One of the things she 5 Schools with ten or fewer pupils on the roll in Year 6 do not have their schools’ performance published because with such small numbers of pupils being assessed there is “the risk that individual pupils could be identified” (DfES, 2004). 6 Schools with 50 or fewer pupils are described by Ofsted as ‘very small’.

6 likes about Greenthwaite is that in her opinion the pupils “are not sweating away worrying about the SATs too much” whereas Samantha believes that it is important for her son to spend an extra hour each day on SATs revision in order “to earn TV”. The difference between these mothers is that Samantha makes a detailed personal decision and is working within the confines of the education system with its emphasis on standards and accountability, which places her as a skilled ‘managerial’ middle-class chooser (Vincent, 2001). In contrast, Sian’s choice preferences are governed by her ‘ideal’ principles and she pays scant attention to the official measurement of standards and accountability so that Sian is in fact a skilled ‘professional’ middle-class chooser (Vincent, 2001).

Another mother who is equally determined to use her choice options is offcomer Suzanne. Suzanne’s children have moved schools several times as a result of a number of house moves. She is well aware of her rights and said, “I’ve got options and I would do whatever it took to get them into wherever it was that made them happy”. Suzanne’s nine-year-old daughter Rosie used to attend an out-of-catchment school and now attends her local one (Marshland) but the impetus to move schools initially came from Rosie. Here Suzanne explains: This summer when she moved up to another class she had a real problem with the teacher and she became really unhappy and she actually said ‘could I look at Marshland’? …We just jumped at it cos ever since we’ve moved we’ve wanted her to come here because it was much easier and we’d heard ‘a good reputation’. We brought her to look round and she said ‘yes’ that afternoon, absolutely ‘yes, please can I come here’? (Suzanne, Marshland School, catchment)

Nevertheless Suzanne considered the other nearby schools but she said, “Rosie was absolute, if she’s going to move it may as well be near home; you know it is thirty seconds to walk”. Clearly Rosie’s opinion counted which fits more closely with the description of working-class parents who are less controlling about school choice than middle-class parents (Reay and Lucey, 2000). Furthermore, as a local chooser Suzanne appears to fit the description of a disconnected one when in fact the reality is that she is middle-class and skilled. Her priority is Rosie’s happiness and this governed her choice decision, which is child-centred rather than school-centred, and so she allowed Rosie to play a key part in the decision-making process. However, Suzanne would “do whatever it took” to help her children achieve their preferred choice, whether this was in- or out-of- catchment, and she has little patience for “moaning” parents who, she said, should “get up and march on their feet”. Suzanne clearly lacks understanding about the barriers, such as transport and time costs, that prevent some parents from optimising their choice options. However, she believes that one of the reasons why the local parents do not consider schools other than their nearest is connected to their perception of travel distance. She said: You find in talking to the local people who’ve been born and bred here that if you travel ten miles out of the area they are absolutely amazed…Some people have not been out of the county; they’ve married locally, all their family is local. I travel five hours to visit my mother but these people have got their parents in the village…and so, yes, if they wanted to move schools, travelling to do so is just not

7 considered. It’s got to be their local and that’s it. (Suzanne, Marshland School, catchment)

One parent who is not local but was really keen that his children should attend their nearest school is Karl an offcomer from former East Germany. Karl explains: We walked to school. I lived in the city and my parents never ever would take us in the car to school…My wife and I needed a property with some land for horses…And then we found Greenthwaite…without the school we would not in fact have moved here. (Karl, Greenthwaite School, catchment) There is no doubt that 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 their small size and caring family ethos (LGA, 2000). However, as the school secretary explained, buying a property in Greenthwaite for a young family is an unusual occurrence. “If there’s a house for sale, it’s a retired solicitor or someone like that that buys it. Families just haven’t got a chance.” Fortunately, Karl and his wife had the economic capital to enable them to buy a house in a village with a school within walking distance. Nevertheless, walking to school was not Karl’s only priority; school size was also an issue. Karl had trained and worked as a teacher in both Germany and England and he prefers small schools because, “the smaller the classes the easier problems can be sorted out”. And what Karl specifically likes about Greenthwaite is, “the care they get here, the personal attention”. Indeed the wider research project on which this paper draws shows that these three factors - small school size, caring school ethos and one-to-one attention - were mentioned time and again by the offcomer participants as the variables that attracted them to choose a rural school.

These three school factors were also important to offcomer Colin when he moved into the village of Fieldsend. Colin and his wife (who is a general practitioner) bought a four- bedroomed detached family home in the village which the school’s head teacher Alison says, “is becoming quite an elite place” in spite of several recently built ‘affordable’ homes for young local families. Colin, whose eldest child is five years old, had already been thinking long-term about secondary schools before he relocated to Fieldsend. Moreover, as a former secondary school teacher, Colin’s choice decision was affected not only by his work experience but also by his personal experience: I was keen we would be in the Fayretown High School catchment area…I went to a fairly small secondary school and I’ve always felt that small secondary schools have got huge advantages. (Colin, Fieldsend School, catchment)

Parents making choices in a rural locale: the locals Like Colin, Janet also chose Fieldsend School but Janet is a local mother whose nearest school is Lowdale7. As a child she had attended Lowdale Primary School but after her secondary schooling she said, “I left the area all together”. When her husband got a job

7 Lowdale School is approximately 3 miles from Greenthwaite and Fieldsend. Lowdale village has a highly transient population; the school has a pupil roll of 80 (approx.) and is currently receiving funding from Sure Start.

8 as a wagon driver at Lowdale they returned to the area and she took her son Arran to Lowdale playgroup and said: I made me mind up when he was a few months old that he wasn’t going to Lowdale or anywhere like that… they were all just bullies and I thought no way. I didn’t want him growing up thinking that was normal behaviour… they were just absolute hooligans. (Janet, Fieldsend School, out-of-catchment)

If Janet had opted for her catchment school Lowdale then the local authority would have provided a free taxi for Arran but by choosing out-of-catchment the school journey became her responsibility. Janet’s husband works away from home and although she suffers from an illness, which sometimes leaves her incapacitated, she was determined that Arran would not have to mix with the “hooligans” and so she chose a school further away. Nevertheless, once Janet had decided against Lowdale she was left with the choice between two schools equidistant from her home: Fieldsend and Greenthwaite. Janet did not refer to Ofsted reports but she visited both schools, collected their prospectuses, attended school events, listened to the local gossip and finally she made the decision to go with her “gut” feeling and chose Fieldsend. Clearly Janet’s story shows the complexities involved for this mother who was determined to actively choose a school for her son. Janet used the resources she had at her disposal including time, transport and the help of family and friends. Moreover, a crucial part of Janet’s story is that she moved away from her locale resulting in a disruption to her habitus so that, when she returned, she considered Lowdale to be “rough” and the people who lived there to “lack class”, suggesting that the move away had changed her. Not only does Janet not fit the description of the disconnected chooser who chooses the local school by default but there is the added complication that although she could be described as working-class she sees herself as a different ‘class’ to the people who now live in Lowdale.

As the data reveal, not all parents have the ability to buy or rent in the catchment of the school of their choice. Kelly is a local mother who lives in a housing association house which is approximately 2 minutes walk away from Greenthwaite School but in-spite of its ‘good’ reputation she chose Marshland for her two sons because Marshland has an after-school club. Kelly is studying for her NVQ Level 3 whilst working as a care assistant and the after-school club has made “all the difference” to her working hours because without the extended day-care she would have to work two nights a week instead of one day and one night. However, as Kelly explains, choosing a school other than her local one was something that her parents had done for her, “I came to Marshland when I was little and I used to live at Lowdale but we didn’t go to school there; we came here”. Kelly believed that, “all the schools in the area have had quite good Ofsted reports. I’ve not been into detail; you know word-of-mouth has said that they are all very good” and so she opted for her former school Marshland. What Kelly’s story highlights is that she is a working-class mother who is ‘alert’ (Willms and Echols, 1992), to a limited degree, with the school choice process and that crucially the interaction between her capital and her habitus has enabled her to make an “active” choice (Taylor, 2002, p.199).

9 Clearly, for the offcomer parents who can afford to buy locally and for the parents who live out-of-catchment and can afford the time and cost of the daily school run choice appears to be advantageous. However, not all of the participants agreed that parents should have choice. The general response from the local parents was that parents should support their catchment school and that not to do so was in fact divisive to the local community and may ultimately jeopardise the survival of the school. Local farmer Raymond said that when his primary school closed, “it affected the community… it knocks the stuffing out of a village because the school is the central thing”. Raymond subsequently attended the new catchment school at Marshland, as have his three children. When the school received a poor Ofsted report in 1997 Raymond was by this time a parent governor and determined to work towards improving the school to ensure its survival. Raymond was aware, as were many of the local parents from the three schools, that if pupil numbers fall small schools are vulnerable to closure and he said this about choice: It is good but it isn’t good either cos if a school sounds as if it’s in trouble, everybody gets on the grapevine ‘oh don’t send your kids there, they’re in big trouble’. It almost lets people run away. (Raymond, Marshland School, catchment)

Raymond felt that parents should support their local school by helping to solve the problems rather than “jump ship” as offcomer Paula did when she moved her son from Marshland to nearby Greenthwaite. However, Raymond felt a strong loyalty to his local school and he wanted to preserve it for the rural community. In fact several participants at Marshland made reference to “the parent” who had “jumped ship” and it was obvious that tensions were still running high amongst the locals who were angry that Paula had moved her son to an out-of-catchment school. But, as an offcomer, Paula had little allegiance to the locale and she was driven by her personal needs for her son, “I’d heard that things weren’t going right, and I remember thinking, what have I done? I just felt there was something not right”.

Offcomer Samantha also experienced ill feeling because she chose out-of-catchment and said, “In the village I was labelled quite snobby and a lot of people didn’t talk to me for a long time because I hadn’t sent my children to the local school”. But having come from London Samantha said she was “used to having to fight for everything” and her reaction to the people who opted for the nearest school was that they were taking “the easy option”. Clearly Samantha’s experience of urban school choice differs from the rural school choice her local critics are engaging with, where the tradition to support the local school is strong.

Discussion: a ‘right, good, local’ school This study shows a complex picture of both local and offcomer parents choosing catchment and out-of-catchment schools and illustrates that different social class fractions use different ways of choosing. Within this ‘local competitive arena’ the process of parental choice is affected by a number of variables including the level of educational capital the parents have acquired, their personal and family habitus and their access to the geographic space. The latter may involve living or relocating into the catchment of their

10 preferred school or providing the daily transport from out-of-catchment to the school, hence incurring economic and time costs. Clearly for the offcomer parents who can afford to buy locally or for the parents who can afford the time and cost of the twice-daily school run choice appears to be advantageous.

However, the study also shows that not all of the participants believed that choice was necessarily good; some saw it as in fact divisive to the community. In a rural location, where there are fewer schools and the boundaries surrounding rural communities are more visible (Cohen, 1982), it is more obvious when parents do not choose the local school, which leaves those ‘defecting’ open to criticism. In an urban environment school catchment boundaries tend to be blurred so that parents choosing out-of-catchment will be less publicly engaged with the daily school out-migration from their locale and it is therefore less apparent that they are not supporting their local school. Certainly current rural migration literature suggests that people who opt for a rural lifestyle also wish to join the rural community (Cloke et al., 1995), which includes supporting the local school. But some of the offcomer parents within this study are engaged in a daily migration from one rural community to another in order to provide their children with their preferred school choice suggesting that educational style is more important to these parents than community loyalty.

Finally, what the paper illustrates is that parents hold different values and the weight of their values differ so that for example, parents choosing the same school are doing so for different reasons. This paper includes examples of parents making a school choice from the middle-class ‘professional’ and ‘managerial’ fractions and of non-stereotypical working-class choosers who have engaged with the choice process by rejecting their local school. It appears to be the case that not all working-class parents are disconnected from their choice options and that some working-class parents engage with choice to a limited degree. Similarly, not all local choosers are working-class or indeed disenfranchised from the choice process and in fact some who chose the local school are skilled and middle-class. Referring back to Gerwitz et al.’s (1995) typology of choosers and their suggestion that the skilled chooser is looking for the ‘right’ school, the semi-skilled chooser for the ‘good’ school and the disconnected chooser for the ‘local’ school, it seems that in the rural situation the ideal choice for both the local and offcomer parents may be a combination of all three. Many of the local parents perceived their nearby school to be both ‘right’ and ‘good’ for their child. Moreover, for the offcomer parents who could afford to buy a house in the catchment area of the school they believe to be both ‘good and right’ for their child, the favoured choice is the ‘right, good, local’ school.

Most importantly, this ideal ties in with the myth of the rural idyll and the chocolate-box image of ‘the local school at the heart of the rural community’ (DETR, 2000). In the context of Gerwitz et al.’s (1995) typology, and in the rural situation, a local choice is not necessarily a disconnected one because parents making a rural ‘local’ choice are affected not only by social class and access to resources but also by habitus and an emotional connection with the rural locale. Crucially it appears that rural primary school choice is affected by both social class positioning and the amount and type of resources parents

11 have, and that these interact with personal and family rural habitus within the field of education resulting, in Bourdieu’s terms, in the social practice of parental choice.

Acknowledgements Firstly, I wish to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding my PhD and secondly, for their constant support and encouragement, my supervisors Dr. Yvette Solomon, Department of Educational Research and Dr. Gordon Clark, Department of Geography at Lancaster University.

References Ball, S., J. (2003) Class strategies and the education market: the middle-classes and social advantage. London: Taylor & Francis. Ball, S. J., & Vincent, C. (2005) The 'childcare champion'? New Labour, social justice and the childcare market. British Educational Research Journal, 31(5) 557-570. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (L. D. Richard Nice, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cloke, P., & Thrift, N. (1990) ‘Class and change in rural Britain’. In T. Marsden & P. Lowe & S. Whatmore (Eds.), Rural restructuring: global processes and their responses. London: David Fulton. Cloke, P., Phillips, M., & Thrift, N. (1995) ‘The new middle classes and the social constructs of rural living’. In T. Butler & M. Savage (Eds.), Social change and the middle classes. London: UCL Press. Cohen, A. P. (Ed.). (1982) Belonging: identity and social organisation in British rural cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gerwitz, S., Ball, S. J., & Bowe, R. (1995) Markets, choice and equity in education. Buckingham: Open University Press. DfES (2004) 2003 Primary school (key stage 2) performance tables, http://www.dfes.gov.uk/performancetables/primary_03/p4.shtml (Retrieved 22/04/04). DETR (2000) Our countryside: the future - a fair deal for rural England (Rural White Paper, Cm. 4909). London: HMSO. Giddens, A. (1984) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lareau, A. (1989) Home advantage. London: Falmer Press. Little, J., & Austin, R. (1996) Women and the rural idyll. Journal of Rural Studies, 12(2) 101-111. Local Government Association (LGA). (2000) Education in rural communities: report by the Local Government Association Education and Lifelong Learning Working Group, from the World Wide Web: http://www.lga.gov.uk/Documents/Publication/RuralIssues.PDF (Retrieved 19/08/05). Reay, D. (1996) Contextualising choice: social power and parental involvement. British Educational Research Journal, 22(5) 581-595.

12 Reay, D., & Lucey, H. (2000) Children, school choice and social differences. Educational Studies, 26(1) 83-100. Savage, M. (2000) Class analysis and social transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, self, culture. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. (2002) Geography of the "new" education market: secondary school choice in England and Wales. Aldershot: Ashgate. Valentine, G. (1997a) A safe place to grow up? Parenting perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll. Journal of Rural Studies, 13(2) 137-148. Vincent, C. (2001) Social class and parental agency. Journal of Education Policy, 16(4) 347-364. Vincent, C., Ball, S. J., & Kemp, S. (2004) The social geography of childcare: making up a middle-class child. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(2) 229-244. Willms, J. D., & Echols, F. (1992) Alert and inert clients: the Scottish experience of parental choice of schools. Economics of Education Review, 11(4) 339-350.

Appendices

Parent profile Participant details are given in alphabetical order.

Fieldsend  Colin - catchment, offcomer, full-time homemaker, BSc Geography, PGCE, MA Town Planning, former county council manager and teacher, married to General Practitioner  Janet - out-of-catchment, local, former HGV driver, full-time homemaker, married to HGV driver

Greenthwaite  Jenny - catchment, local, cashier clerk, married to company director  Karl - catchment, offcomer, degree in English and Russian, former foreign language teacher, self-employed translator, he is married to an ex-art teacher who is now a horse masseuse.  Paula - out-of-catchment, offcomer, BSc Business Studies, hotel management, works one day a week, married to international loss adjuster  Sian - out-of-catchment, offcomer, BA Religious Studies, MSc Community Education, self-employed consultant, married to former Steiner teacher and cabinet maker

Marshland  Kelly - out-of-catchment, local, former pupil, NVQ Level 2, care assistant  Raymond - catchment, local, former pupil, farmer, married to school secretary  Samantha - out-of-catchment, offcomer, secretary, full-time homemaker, married to solicitor

13  Suzanne - catchment, offcomer, private education, BA (Hons) English and Visual Arts, full-time homemaker, married to industrial manager