ABSTRACT
Private education attracts about half a million children of school age in England and Wales, or about 6.4 per cent of the school population. The sector is much smaller than in most industrial countries, much more selective both academically and socially, and much more closely associated with recruitment to occupational elites. It is hardly associated at all with promoting or maintaining religious and cultural diversity, whereas the debate about private schooling in other countries is often dominated by relationships between church and state, and the defence of the private sector is largely a defence of the right of parents to educate their children within a particular religious tradition (Mason, 1983; Praetz, 1983). Although many English public schools were religious foundations and continue to include a strong Christian tradition among their qualities, most church schools have been incorporated within the state system as a result of the so-called ‘historic compromises’ of 1870, 1902, and 1944. These are the voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled schools which contain about 17 per cent of secondary pupils. In Australia, on the other hand, all church schools are in a non-government sector which caters for just over a quarter of the school population - about the same proportion as are in English independent and voluntary schools taken together - and pluralist arguments are widely used in its defence. An alliance has developed there between a Catholic hierarchy, anxious to avoid state aid being debated as a sectarian issue, and representatives of elite independent schools (catering as in England for about 6 per cent of secondary pupils), anxious to avoid being isolated as ‘bastions of privilege’ (Edwards et al., 1985). It is exactly that kind of isolation of an ‘elite sector’ which has dominated debate about the private sector in England, both 9politically and
