Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1997 89 ;Spoilt for Choice': the working classes and educational markets DIANE REAY & STEPHEN J. BALL ABSTRACT Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study of market forces in secondary education, this paper explores the ambivalence displayed by many working-class parents in the research to the idea of choice of school. School is frequently associated with powerful memories and images of personal failure. The authors argue: that for working-class parents choice can sometimes involve complex and powerful accommodations to the idea of 'school' and is very different in kind from middle-class choice making; that social class remains a potent differentiating category in the analysis of home-school relations; and that choice is a new social device through which social class differences are rendered into educational inequality. Extracts from interview data are quoted to support and illustrate these arguments. INTRODUCTION In this paper we attempt to develop an analysis of working-class school choice which recognises the complex and sometimes painful accommodations working-class parents have to make. We suggest that working-class decision-making in education is infused by ambivalence, fear and a reluctance to invest too much in an area where failure is still a common working-class experience [1]. When understandings of working-class choice are expanded beyond simple comparisons of lists of criteria, to include psycho-sociological processes and the conditions of experience, then contradictions that they have to deal with, and the compromises inherent in their decision-making in relation to schooling, become apparent. While we employ working class in a fairly crude and all-embracing way here we do not wish to deny either the complex and shifting nature of social class in 1990s Britain or the many different factions which comprise the working classes. It is clear from our data that a small number of working-class parents do engage with the educational market in similar ways to middle-class choosers (Ball et ah, 1996). However, as we point out later, in doing so they are involved in a very different process to middle-class parents. Furthermore, the working-class category remains useful in so far that the economic and social context within which educational choices take place is one of increasing social inequalities and social polarisation (Hutton, 1995). In the new consumer age, class analysis which addresses and exposes social inequality, rather than rehearsing social pathology, offers an important oppositional discourse to set over and against the tide of neo-liberal individualism. The 'new' consumption class divisions generated by the establishment of social markets (in education, health, housing, 0305-4985/97/010089-13 © 1997 Carfax Publishing Ltd