Beneficiaries, benefits and costs: an investigation of the Assisted Places Scheme

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Abstract
Introduced in 1981, the Assisted Places Scheme provides central government money to enable selected independent schools to waive or reduce fees for financially eligible and academically able students. This paper is a preliminary report on a four‐year ESRC‐funded project which studied the origins, implementation and initial effects of the Scheme in relation to the claims made by its advocates and critics. The paper outlines how the Scheme was initiated and implemented, analyses statistics on national patterns of take‐up, and reports on detailed studies of the Scheme's operation in three local areas. It considers whether the intended target groups are receiving assistance, the influence of the Scheme on parental choice of secondary schooling, and the extent to which prognostications about the harm the Scheme would do to state schools have been justified. The authors argue that the Scheme's creation in 1979‐81 was as much the outcome of sustained lobbying by a group within the independent sector and by a key political ally as it was a logical derivation from the central ideological commitments of a new Conservative government. It was broadly conceived as a ‘scholarship ladder’ that would benefit bright children from poor homes whom it was felt would be inadequately stretched in neighbourhood comprehensive schools, and it has therefore revived long‐standing arguments about the merits of comprehensive and academically selective schooling systems. Although the overall rate of take‐up of assisted places has been high, and about 40 per cent of places have been awarded to families on incomes low enough to warrant full remission of fees, the study shows that, in some respects, the Scheme has not been as successful as these figures suggest. Some schools have experienced difficulty in recruiting their allocated number of place holders, especially boarding schools and a significant number of girls’ day schools, while there have been more general difficulties at sixth‐form level. Moreover, although the Scheme has brought into the independent sector some pupils who otherwise would not be there, it has not attracted large numbers of pupils from inner‐city areas or from manual working‐class backgrounds. Nevertheless, it is clear that advocates of the Scheme have had some success in convincing parents of a close link between independent schooling and academic excellence. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the potential consequences of the Scheme for the educational system as a whole and considers its relationship to more radical proposals for the extension of parental choice.

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