Parental choice of private tuition: valuing attention, judging quality and navigating access in England’s underregulated supplementary education market

<p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">The paper makes three contributions. First, it reveals the different perceptions of children’s need for attention associated with 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.</p>