The impact of school autonomy and education marketization in the United Kingdom.

The Education Reform Act 1988 in England proposed by the Conservative Party caused over 1100 public schools to "opt out" of local school authority control by becoming autonomous grant-maintained schools. Using a regression discontinuity design, this paper finds a causal effect of party control on school autonomy with British local election dataset. That is, a Labour party (not a Conservative party) win would consequently stimulate a considerable increase in local schools opting for autonomy. This could be the first empirical evidence of a remarkable cross-party consensus in education policy, which has so far been stressed only on theoretical grounds. Our findings not only improve the understanding of current government education policy but also suggest the role that government would play in future policy-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]