‘Trying to find the extra choices’: Migrant parents and secondary school choice in Greater Manchester’ Bridget Byrne and Carla De Tona University of Manchester Introduction Since the 1980s, the rights of parents to chose the schooling of their children has been a focus of education policy. Successive governments have claimed that they support this right, although there has been an accompanying discourse of the lack of choice from parents. Nonetheless, the emphasis on choice brings to centre stage the role and capacities of parents in making the right choice of schools for their children. School choice has also become the object of intense anxiety, with the allocation of school places frequently the subject of national debate and media coverage. The motivations of parents in making these choices and the ways in which they might 'beat' the system have been a particular focus of both scholarly and popular attention. 1 Stephen Ball argues that ‘education as a field of distinctions and identities is crucial in high modern society in changing and reproducing the borderlines of class and distributing unevenly and unequally forms of social and cultural capital’ (Ball 2003). Ball argues that education policy is ‘aimed at satisfying the concerns and anxieties of the ever anxious middle classes. The market rules of exclusion offer possibilities for strategic action which many middle-class families are very willing and very able to take up’ (ibid: 27). Burgess et al (2005) have shown that parental choice in schooling can lead to concentrations in school populations (as opposed to resident populations) not only in terms of class but also race or ethnicity (Burgess et al. 2005 see also Bagley, 1996). It appears that the system is working for some but not for all and certainly not for those who are already disempowered and disadvantaged (Barnardos 2010; Shepherd 2010; Weekes-Bernard 2007; Reay 2008b; Reay 2004; Reay et al. 2007; Byrne 2006, 2009; Barnardos 2010; Crozier et al. 2008). Social scientists have concentrated their critique of school choice on class, largely ignoring how class interacts with other social positions and have tended to focus on the choices of the white majority. Thus, we know very little of how different ethnically and racially marked groups choose schools or indeed, as Weekes-Bernard puts it, whether they choose at all (Weekes- Bernard 2007). 1 Public debate was reflected in the recent BBC 2 series ‘The Big School Lottery’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/schoolseason/ 1