ABSTRACT
The question of whether private education is superior to state education has been fiercely debated in Britain and elsewhere. School examination results and figures on entry to elite universities suggest that pupils at private schools in Britain perform considerably better educationally than do those in the state sector. For example, whereas less than 10 per cent of the age group attend private schools, nearly half the student entry into Oxford and Cambridge universities comes from the private sector. Advocates of private schooling have claimed that, since the British private sector is a highly competitive market-based system, and since private schools must respond to parental demands in order to survive, private schools will be better run and more effective than state schools. Opponents of private schooling sometimes seem torn between the view that private schools give an unfair advantage to the children of the rich, and the claim that the academic success of these schools is entirely due to their intake of able students from affluent backgrounds (Griggs, 1985). Yet there is surprisingly little research in Britain to answer the question whether the private schools actually achieve better results than the state sector once students’ individual and family characteristics have been taken into account.
