Introduction

In this chapter we develop the theme of ‘choice’ about schooling in East London, reflecting the importance placed on schooling and the difficulties faced in getting their children into a favoured school articulated by the survey respondents and interviewees. The parents were undoubtedly responding to increasing pressures (moral as well as strategic and instrumental) to maximise their children's opportunities by getting them into a good school – ‘doing the best for one's child’ is now a top imperative for being a ‘good parent’. A good school, as we have already intimated, is often judged by its attainment, although most of our parents pursued a more sophisticated optimisation strategy in which they balanced a number of criteria – attainment, educational ethos, social mix, physical accessibility and, crucially, judgement about whether they were likely to succeed in getting their child into their favoured school. As we shall show in this chapter, parents often chose the school that they felt they had the best chance of getting their child into rather than their ‘preferred’ school. Their chief fear was failing in their preferred choice and then finding themselves allocated to a school they felt was completely unacceptable. The overarching theme of this chapter is a consideration of the ‘choice agenda’, which now dominates school selection in East London, in the light of the very real constraints on achieving that choice.