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The notion of selecting students based on academic achievement into different schools at certain points in their educational careers is one that has long been contested in education. In this paper I consider the role selective schooling may play in driving families' demand for private tutoring – a phenomenon currently growing in many regions of the world. The paper explores the 'extreme case' of South Korea – a country with some of the highest spending on private tutoring globally and also a long history of selective schooling. Drawing on interviews with experts and key stakeholders in the Korean education system, the paper reports a number of findings. Interviewees for this project were in many respects critical of a 1970s 'equalisation' of Korean schooling, though they also viewed moves back towards selection as fuelling 'shadow education'. Concern about this has driven governments to curb selective schooling for a second time in Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions charting the changing role of local government in education have often focused extensively on 'concrete' policy changes over time, but have provided less detail on the contribution to changing power relations of less tangible shifts. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, in this paper, detailed rationalities of local third-sector and other 'arm's length' actors in English education are explored, with a focus on their relationship to local authority (LA) school admissions teams. The paper aims to provide deeper understanding of tactical struggles for authority which happen within competitive local sociopolitical spaces. Data is utilised from a study of 'Choice Advice' (CA) in 10 LAs, within a background context where arm's length agents deployed to deliver CA have been co-opted into central government marketisation regimes, but local state planning of schooling is arguably more equitable for vulnerable families than are logics advancing a marketisation of education. The research reveals: (1) discourses valourising 'independence' and 'distance' from local state 'agendas'; (2) discourses separating the interests of 'parents' and 'schools', with LAs positioned as representing the latter; (3) dehumanising representations of LA officers as 'faceless', obstructive and requiring regulation from 'critical friends'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]