Assisted Places Scheme

Assisted Places Scheme

The Assisted Places Scheme was established in the UK by the Conservative government in 1980. Children who could not afford to go to fee-paying independent schools were provided with free or subsidised places - if they were able to score within the top 10-15% of applicants in the school's entrance examination. By 1985, the scheme catered for some 6,000 students per year.

Claiming the practice to be elitist and wasteful of public funds, the Labour government of Tony Blair, upon its election in 1997, abolished the Assisted Places Scheme. The funds were instead used to reduce class sizes in state nursery schools. However, children already in receipt of an assisted place were allowed to complete the remainder of that phase of their education.

Some believe the result of abolition has been to reduce the social range of pupils educated at independent schools. Some schools have taken steps to provide their own funding for pupils from poorer backgrounds.

Surveys of the scheme indicated that relatively few (e.g. 7% of) assisted-place students actually came from working-class backgrounds. Around half the fathers of assisted-place students had professional or managerial jobs. In most cases, a parent of an assisted-place pupil had themselves been to an independent school. Another noted feature of the scheme was that around a third of assisted-place students came from single-parent families, again with the majority of parents having been educated privately themselves. [John Fitz; Tony Edwards; Geoff Whitty (1989) [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-1005%28198908%2937%3A3%3C222%3ATAPSAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 The Assisted Places Scheme: An Ambiguous Case of Privatization] "British Journal of Educational Studies" Vol. 37, No. 3, The Privatisation of Education. (Aug., 1989), pp. 222-234.]

A successor to the Assisted Places Scheme, known as the Open Access Scheme, has been established and financed by the Girls' Day School Trust in partnership with the Sutton Trust. The Conservative party has advanced some policy ideas for revised versions of the Assisted Places Scheme, with support from private-sector organizations.

External links

* [http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/atoz/a/assistedplacesscheme/ Assisted places information on TeacherNet]

References


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