policymakers demonstrate

4 Education Systems: Assignment, Admissions,
Accountability and Autonomy
Simon Burgess
Abstract
This chapter focuses on education market systems, as one of the key issues
for policy in education. Research suggests that a coherent market structure for
schools is very important for attainment. The key elements are: assignment
of pupils to schools and admissions policies, and school accountability and
autonomy. The central element of the market structure is the assignment mechanism,
which allocates each child to a school. There are different such mechanisms
available: school choice, neighbourhood schooling and elite schooling
or ‘tracking’, which assigns pupils on the basis of an exam. Other key elements
include governance rules and hierarchy: school accountability and school
autonomy. Finally, the nature of school leadership is tied up with the degree of
autonomy – leaders are far more important in autonomous schools.
4.1 Introduction
Education is crucially important for many of the policy outcomes that citizens
and politicians care about. At an individual level, your education affects your
earnings, your employability and your chance of succeeding in life starting
from a disadvantaged neighbourhood. It also affects your health, future family
structure, intellectual fulfilment and other aspects of a good life. At a national
level, a country’s stock of skills matters hugely for its prosperity and growth
rate. The distribution of skills is a big determinant of inequality, and the relationship
of a person’s skills to their background is central to the degree of social
or intergenerational mobility.
Providing education costs a lot: on average in 2011 OECD countries spent
over 6 per cent of their GDP on educational institutions; and it accounted for
almost 13 per cent of total public spending in the OECD (http://www.oecd.org/
edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf), so governments are keen to make it as
productive as possible. And schooling takes up a lot of time in young lives –
if you’re under 20 years old, being at school, thinking about school and doing
159