Positive Discrimination by Area in Education: the EPA idea re‐examined

The main concern of this paper is with the policy of positive discrimination by area in education, and with a re-examination of the educational priority idea (EPA). But I want to begin by placing this discussion firmly in the present context of cuts, and pessimism about the future prospects for education. For we cannot ignore these major problems and concentrate narrowly on small areas; nor in looking at national policies and priorities can we afford to neglect the local area level. It is here that the effects of such national policies are played out. Faced with cuts in educational expenditure it is reasonable that those in education should protest and fight back vigorously, particularly where what is being cut has for long been an established part of the system not some new and expensive addition. The danger is that we adopt an essentially defensive position hanging on grimly to what we have got and waiting for better times, while everybody else does the same. This would be fine, if there were strong and positive reasons to hand for educational advance and expansion, and if the present cuts were merely a temporary check on an otherwise onward and upward path. But the squeeze could not have come at a worse time for education. Many of the arguments that fuelled educational expansion in the previous decade have been seriously challenged, and the breaches not repaired. Yet we continue to use these same arguments as if nothing had happened. In that sense we have lost our way, and need to retrace our steps and study the map again. It is far from clear that 'the great debate' on education and its outcome have provided the necessary chart for navigation. To mount an effective campaign for education requires not only resistance to cuts, but positive arguments about priorities, where expenditure should be increased and services extended. We need arguments powerful enough to take on the critics of educational expansion, and challenge the crude but increasingly dominant economic theory that tends to write off public expenditure, including that on education, as a drain on resources that could otherwise be turned to more productive use, or places excessive emphasis on the link between education and the workplace, and the role of education in industrial regeneration. Arguments about priorities are the best form of defence against cuts. Merely to reassert the importance of the educational system and educational expenditure in a technological society is likely to have a declining impact. Recent performance has not matched up to expectations. Nor is the formal educational system any longer automatically central to these developments. We may well see more of the apparently paradoxical cases, where the Manpower Services Commission recruits unemployed school teachers, whom the schools cannot afford to take on, and uses them, for example, to carry out educational research in primary schools [I].