The Urban Review, VoI. 22, No. 2, 1990 CREEPING PRIVATIZATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOLING IN THE INNER CITY Geoff Whitty During the 1980s, the Conservative government introduced a number of measures to enhance choice and diversity in education. It claimed that these would be particularly beneficial in Labour-controlled inner-city areas, where too many children were currently receiving an inadequate education in poor neighborhood comprehensive schools. Three of the government's initiatives--the assisted places scheme, city technology colleges, and grant-maintained schools--are reviewed in this paper in the light of the evidence so far available and the claims of critics that they are a subtle form of privatization. Despite any benefits they may offer to individual children or schools, they are not seen to constitute an adequate response to the problems facing education in the inner city. Only about 7% of children of compulsory school age (5-16) in England and Wales currently attend private schools. Since the 1940s, the vast majority of children have attended state schools maintained by county, borough, or district councils acting as local education authorities (LEAs), although some of these schools, known as voluntary schools, have been run by the LEAs in conjunction with the Anglican or Roman Catholic churches. Children of primary school age (5-11) normally attend common schools taking all the children from a local catchment area. Until the mid-1960s, children of secondary school age (11-15 +) were usually segregated by ability into academic grammar schools, technical schools, or secondary modem schools that provided a general education for those who did not demonstrate a particular academic or technical aptitude at the age of 11 or 13. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, these schools were increasingly merged into comprehensive secondary schools Geoff Whitty, Faculty of Education, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, U.K. Parts of this paper draw upon work carried out with Tony Edwards, John Fitz, and Sharon Gewirtz under ESRC Research Grants C00230036 and C00232462 and with membersof the Bristol Polytechnic Education Study Group. 101 0042-0972/90/0600-0101506.00/0 © 1990 Human Sciences Press, Inc.