Egalitarianism and Merit in a Non-Ideal World: The Problem of Two-Tier Education

1. Like many other countries, Britain has what one might call a ‘two-tier’ educational system, in which parents who are sufficiently wealthy to afford their fees can send their children to independent schools (which are idiosyncratically and misleadingly known as ‘public’ schools). These schools are widely thought to provide a superior-quality education on average to that available for free in state schools. The higher quality is said to be due to the facts that independentschool teachers are often better paid, better qualified and more highly motivated than many of their state-school peers, consequently teaching their pupils more effectively. The latter also benefit from what are usually superior facilities and supplementary educational and extra-curricular opportunities. Their class sizes are typically much smaller, which generally allows greater attention to be paid to the individual’s particular pedagogic needs. And the whole effect of these benefits, it is said, is to encourage a ‘high-achieving’ academic ethos which is sometimes diluted or even absent altogether in the state sector. This two-tier structure has long generated controversy in British politics. Partly, this has been so because, Britain’s class system being what it is, the very fact that one has attended a particular independent school – regardless of the quality of its education – often secures advantages for its beneficiaries in later life (this is sometimes known as the ‘old-school-tie’ phenomenon). But the central bone of contention is that the two-tier system instantiates ‘ability to pay’ as a decisive distributive principle in educational provision. If we accept the claim that there is a significant difference in quality of education on average between the two, we can see how this arrangement represents a flagrant violation of what John Rawls calls fair equality of opportunity (Rawls, 1971: 73), which would stipulate that each child receive the same standard of education regardless of the wealth of their parents.