Best Practice

Social justice and schools: Collaboration vs competition

Government policy Whole-school issues Poverty
In this seven-part series, teacher and school leader David Anderson considers how schools can be a key driver for social justice and offers us a blueprint for how we can make our education system more equitable. In part two, he looks at why we must end our system’s obsession with competition – and how we can do this


SecEd series: A school system that drives social justice


In my first article in this series, I presented the all-too familiar situation of a town, city or area with a well-defined hierarchy of school provision. You can imagine it – a prestigious independent or grammar school at the top and less well-regarded, comprehensive state schools at the bottom (Anderson, 2020).

In this article, I want to consider how competition between schools contributes to this stratification in our education system and will argue that it is through collaboration, rather than competition, that we will ensure greater equity in our schools.

In the English education system schools compete with other local schools to attract students. This has been the case since the 1988 Education Reform Act, which placed parents as consumers, able to choose their product – the school of choice for their child – from a market place.

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