Holloway, Sarah L;
Whewall, Sam;
Pimlott-Wilson, Helena;
(2025)
Parental choice of private tuition: Valuing attention, judging quality and navigating access in England's underregulated supplementary education market.
British Educational Research Journal
10.1002/berj.70015.
(In press).
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Abstract
Private supplementary education is burgeoning worldwide, and over 25% of English children have received private tutoring. The neoliberalisation of education and parents' responsibilisation for children's attainment have driven market growth, but not all can afford to participate. Curiously, in contrast with school choice, there is a lacuna in knowledge about parents' roles as consumers, specifically how they choose tuition services, with such practices in this ‘shadow education’ sector remaining hidden from view. This paper challenges this occlusion, utilising qualitative research in three English regions. The research explores parental choice of private tuition, considering: what parents value in different services; how they assess provider legitimacy/quality; and how classed and racialised parents navigate access to group or individual tuition. The paper makes three contributions. First, it reveals different perceptions of children's need for attention associated with the choice group or individual tuition. This sets a new agenda for research into the diversity of educational products sold. Second, it spotlights parental strategies for assessing tuition providers' legitimacy. This pinpoints an urgent policy issue as their actions are necessary but insufficient to ensure safeguarding and quality. Third, the paper elucidates how Bourdieu's diverse capitals and place-specific field intersect to reproduce classed and racialised inequality in parental choice, disproportionately funnelling working-class and racialised-minority children into group rather than one-to-one tuition. This signifies that the conceptualisation of supplementary education as an ‘arms race’ between tuition ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ must be reframed, as participation in the market also reproduces classed and racialised inequalities between consumers.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Parental choice of private tuition: Valuing attention, judging quality and navigating access in England's underregulated supplementary education market |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1002/berj.70015 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.70015 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). British Educational Research Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Education markets, private tuition, responsibilised parents, shadow education |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216416 |
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