Questioning the crisis account: a review of evidence for increasing polarization in schools

This paper reconsiders three sources of evidence that have been presented to suggest that polarization of pupils both between and within schools is increasing, thus creating an increasingly divided system of 'winners' and 'losers'.The project from which this paper emerges has shown, in an analysis over ten years of all schools in England and Wales, that schools are becoming more mixed in terms of their social composition in many respects. Despite this reasonably comprehensive evidence, it has been argued by others that polarization is taking place below the level of the indicators used in our analysis (polarization by stealth), or thatwhile school compositions may be converging, school outcomes are definitely diverging, both within and between schools. The primary evidence presented for these three arguments is reviewed here, and it shows that none of the objections has any serious empirical foundation as yet. Of course, evidence may emerge in the future, and so the paper concludes by suggesting a few ways in which research in this area might proceed.