ABSTRACT
In England, compulsory state education is funded by the central government and delivered mainly by local education authorities. It is an implicit principle of policy, though a poorly implemented one, that delivery should be place-blind-in other words that children should get the same standard of education, no matter where they live. To this end, the government’s fi nancial settlement with local authorities, and theirs in turn with schools, has been used redistributively, albeit to different degrees, with extra allowances to take account of area conditions and additional needs. This strategy has had limited success in evening out educational opportunities (Lupton, 2005) and from time to time, central government has also made use of additional ABIs: special programmes offering extra inputs in particular targeted areas to compensate for poverty and disadvantage. While I focus explicitly here on the English experience, it is worth noting that ABIs are not an exclusively English phenomenon, perhaps the closest parallel being the Zones d’Éducation Prioritaires, a long standing ABI in France (Bénabou et al., 2005).
