7 - England

Summary

This chapter studies the role of public opinion in the politics of education reforms in England from 2010 until early 2018. We find the influence of public opinion to vary depending on the salience and coherence of public opinion. When issues were highly salient and public opinion was coherent (loud politics), the government appealed to public opinion. It expanded free access to childcare and partly corrected its original attempts to cut public spending on schools and increase tuition fees for higher education. With high salience on the issue but conflicting preferences across partisan constituencies (loud but noisy politics), the government pushed through its reform agenda, which targeted the preferences of its core constituencies. It was able to continue to do this provided it possessed sufficient strength in parliament (in the case of its attempt to expand selective grammar schools) and as long as public opinion remained sufficiently split between supporters and opponents of the government (in the case of tuition fees). When salience was low, quiet politics predominated. Several reform issues related to the governance of the education system failed to capture much public attention, which gave interest groups an opportunity to insert their preferences into the decision-making process.