The assisted places scheme: its impact and its role in privatization and marketization1

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Abstract
The Conservative government that was in power in Britain from 1979 to 1997 introduced a range of policies designed to restructure education provision. The Assisted Places Scheme was one of its first major reforms, enabling academically able children with limited financial means to attend private schools. Although subsequent provisions have focused more on the marketization of the public sector, the scheme was identified by the Conservative Government as the first significant step towards more far‐reaching restructuring. This paper draws upon interviews in private and maintained schools to explore the effects of the scheme. It discusses the scheme's articulation with the discourses of diversity, selection and choice, the relationship between privatizing and marketizing policies, and the nature of similar initiatives elsewhere. It concludes that, while there are differences between schemes that use public funds to subsidize private provision, those that seek to marketize public provision, and fully fledged voucher systems, they all tend to compound the promotion of individual decision making within education at the expense of collective responsibility.

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