Feedback Effects in Comprehensive vs. Selective Schooling and the Strategies of Political Parties in England and Austria

This Paper will focus on the organisation of secondary schooling, in particular issues around academic selection and comprehensive schooling. Selective schooling, where 10 or 11 year old children are sorted into different educational tracks based on some form of ability testing, has become unpopular in many European countries in the 1960s. Subsequently, many governments have abolished traditionally selective schools such as grammar schools and introduced models of comprehensive schooling, hoping to reduce educational inequalities related to family background. This Paper will discuss feedback effects from such policies in two outlier cases. In England, the introduction of comprehensive schooling has remained incomplete and highly controversial. Since the 1980s, there have been numerous moves to reintroduce grammar schools and/or increase parental choice in schooling. In Austria, the introduction of comprehensive schooling has repeatedly failed. While a selective system survived, many reforms have since aimed to increase permeability between school tracks and to provide alternatives through quality vocational education. This paper will address how resource and interpretive feedback effects arising from previous school policies have been perceived and also shaped by political actors wishing to change the status quo in the organisation and governance of secondary schooling. The discussion draws on historical and interview data from a doctoral research project on the relationships between political parties and comprehensive schooling policies in England and Austria, 1960s-2000s. This research has found significant resource effects of comprehensive/selective school policies on the organisation and unity of teaching unions and their desire in defending the status quo. It has also found considerable symbolic or interpretive feedback effects both relating on the attitudes of the general public, such as views on the fairness or economic effectiveness of the national education system, and effects on the aspirations of particular groups of voters and their policy preferences relating to the schooling of their children. However, general popular attitudes and voter preferences have rarely been straight-forward. While selection has remained rather unpopular in both countries, popular images of the grammar school and the gymnasium as the ‘good school’ remained persistent. Much understandings of the nature of and support for comprehensive schooling has varied across time and context – often influenced by the particular opportunities education systems at given times provided for different groups to realise their aspirations. There are many instances where political parties have taken such interpretive effects seriously by tailoring their policy platforms, discourses and electoral strategies accordingly. However, parties have also actively tried to shape such attitudes. Supporters of comprehensive schooling and proponents of selection regularly discursively exploited fears and aspirations of the public and tried to reinforce or reshape the symbolic meanings of comprehensive and grammar schools. Feedback effects can be seen as providing both constraints and opportunities for actors seeking policy change. By contrasting examples from England and Austria, the paper highlights the role of political agency in mediating how policy feedback effects enable or prevent policy change.