Introduction

This chapter is about English education and its democratic deficit, although, when data specific to England is unavailable, the chapter draws on UK-level data. However, it is important to point out that England is increasingly an outlier relative to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a more fragmented and privatised educational system that has left many teachers, pupils and parents feeling powerless in the face of rapid educational policy changes. As Tim Brighouse (2017), former London schools commissioner, asserted: ‘England remains the poor relation of the four nations with its centralised system and weakened local government. If a sense of powerlessness is the enemy of democracy, England is more at risk than the other three countries.’

In England political education is something to be avoided. Throughout their schooling young people are rarely taught about politics. Instead, they are provided with a citizenship education where the focus is often on a depoliticised curriculum of personal ‘responsibilisation’ that concentrates on building character and social capital rather than political literacy and active citizenship (Kisby, 2017; Weinberg and Flinders, 2018). This creates what Conover and Searing (2000, p 108) call ‘a privately orientated, passive understanding of citizenship’. The emphasis is placed on individual social and moral responsibility through volunteering and charitable giving rather than any active political engagement (Osler and Starkey, 2001; Power et al, 2021). One consequence is a lack of confidence in governments to address citizens’ needs, and a belief that charities rather than the state are better at meeting people's needs. This could be viewed as a neoliberalising of citizenship education that encourages ad hoc individual action rather than collective political engagement. Involvement is primarily seen in terms of charitable giving and volunteering rather than actual political participation.

Recent research (DfE, 2022) found that even this anaemic form of citizenship education failed to reach a significant minority of English secondary school students; 24 per cent reported weekly lessons in citizenship education, while a further quarter had never received a lesson. The school workforce census of 2020 reported that only 16 per cent of the 2,876 schools surveyed had a trained citizenship education teacher (DfE, 2022).

Epilogue: thinking through class

In Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden included an appendix that was nominally about further research, but in essence was the two authors thinking through class in education. I would like to end with a personal reflection on thinking through class that attempts to capture some of their ‘visionary gleam’ and transpose it to the 21st century.

Keeping people stuck in segregated areas, in demeaning jobs without sufficient income and consigned to a life with little hope and prospect that things will get better can breed racism, bigotry, ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Such attitudes have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the people themselves and everything to do with the consequences of their circumstances. So the important thing to do is to change those circumstances – in the workplace, in the local area, and also in schools and classrooms. And we should not expect people to transform their own lives when they haven’t been given the resources to make that possible. That’s unfair, it is expecting miracles when miracles very, very rarely happen.

But I see the direction my own life has taken as a kind of miracle. Pierre Bourdieu, who had a similar miraculous trajectory, said in an interview in 1992:

I have a similar need to understand, and this book has been part of a process of thinking through class – both my own changed class position and also relationships between the class I am now ambivalently part of and the class I have left. That leaving was at times traumatic and laden with grief, even as it was being desperately yearned for.

Introduction

Social class is a relational concept in which working-class experiences do not make sense unless they are contextualised within the wider class hierarchy. We cannot understand working-class experiences of education without looking at how both the upper and middle classes are positioned within education, their educational practices and how these in turn impact on working-class students. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first looks at the ‘elite’ middle and upper classes who send their children to private school, while the second section examines the middle classes who send their children to predominantly working-class, urban schools; in both cases, the upper- and middle-class understandings of their relationships with their ‘class’ others are foregrounded. In the last section I return to the consequences for the working classes of middle- and upper-class attitudes and actions at university level. A specific focus within the chapter is the status of the middle classes as ‘the ideal normative class’ within state education, and the consequences for the working classes. The conclusion argues that although the upper and middle classes benefit from an educational system that historically has been set up to serve their interests, they are also, to an extent, damaged by the invidious workings of an inequitable system that emphasises divisions and hierarchy at the expense of commonalities and what different groups in society share.

The narratives of the privileged class groups reveal both potent defences and a sense of superiority, but also the power of emotions. All these elements are explored through a number of case studies that highlight complex moral and ethical dimensions of upper- and middle-class identity and, in particular, emotional responses to the class ‘other’ that both feed into and arise from ‘principled’ and ‘not so principled’ choices. Upper- and middle-class relationships to those in other class and racial groups are central to their class identities, and the chapter examines the powerful affective work that both relationships and representations do in the formation of upper- and middle-class identities.

The upper classes and the certainties of privilege

In this section I draw on data to show the implicit, taken-for-granted elements of elite middle- and upper-class choice. In a research project on higher education choice 28 students who attended two elite private schools and 15 of their parents were interviewed.

Introduction

The function of schooling is to preserve the class and select the elite.

In this chapter I present a brief historical overview of policy and practice before making a detailed attempt to answer the question ‘What have been the historical processes whereby working-class educational failure has become legitimised and institutionalised?’ Whereas the last chapter focused on the relationships between education and the wider economy and society, this chapter focuses on the workings of the educational system. I start with a concise overview of the history of working-class education in Britain before focusing on the recent history of class in education.

The history of working-class education in the UK is short and stark. It was only in the early 19th century that ‘voluntary schools, mostly run and organised by the churches, became widespread. Even so, in 1818 only 7% of children were in day elementary schools, and shortly before the Education Act of 1870 was introduced still less than half of all primary aged children attended school. It was only when voluntary schools were supplemented by a state-supported system after the Education Act of 1870 that a majority of primary school-aged children went to school. However, right from the beginning the class system dictated the nature and remit of schools. State-supported schools, or board schools as they came to be called, became the schools for the working classes, with a sharply different curriculum to those schools that served the middle and upper classes. As Margaret McMillan, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, makes clear:

Was it possible that the children of the working class, however fortunate, however plucky, could hold their own later with those who in the formative years drank deep and long of every fountain of life? No. It’s impossible. Below every strike, concealed behind legislation of every order, there is this fact – the higher nutrition of the favoured few as compared with the balked childhood of the majority. Nothing evens up this gross injustice.

Andy Green, in his survey of the rise of education systems in England, France and the US, singles out England as the most blatant example of the use of schooling by a dominant class to secure control over subordinate groups.

Continuities and transformations: what has changed since Jackson and Marsden and what has remained the same?

The continuities

This book has been an attempt to follow in the path of Jackson and Marsden’s ground-breaking book on education and the working classes. Although their book is commonly seen to focus on the successful working classes, a haunting presence in the book are those working classes who were not educationally successful, those in the lower sets, technical schools and secondary moderns – the vast majority of the working classes, then as now, who are left to fail. I hope I have demonstrated that a further theme throughout their book was the damage done to the working classes, even those who were seen to be educationally successful. While the differences and changes between Jackson and Marsden’s 1950s and 1960s and today are what immediately strike the reader, this first section of the conclusion also focuses on a number of arresting continuities. In particular, it is argued that, despite myriad educational policy changes, the English educational system is still one that educates individuals according to their class background. It remains a segregated system where different social classes are largely educated apart rather than together. Also, the ways in which social mobility operates to dislocate the educationally successful working classes from their communities of origin is just as pervasive as it was at the time when Jackson and Marsden were writing.

The most troubling continuity is that most working-class children and young people experience education as failure. I have tried to explain why this is still the case in the face of so many policy initiatives to improve working-class educational attainment. I have argued that in place of ‘the usual suspects’, namely either working-class culture or the ‘failing’ schools that invariably have predominantly working-class and BME intakes, we need to focus on the operations of power within education. This involves looking at relational aspects of educational achievement and examining the actions and attitudes of the middle and upper classes as well as those of the working classes. It also requires a historical, contextualised perspective that recognises over a century of class domination within state schooling, and the symbolic power of the private sector that continues to be held up as embodying all that is best in English education.

Introduction

The school system increasingly seems like a mirage, the source of an immense, collective disappointment, a promised land which, like the horizon, recedes as one moves towards it.

Building on the empirical case studies drawn on in the last chapter, this chapter explores in more depth how the working classes deal with the constant spectre of failure and the elusiveness of success that they encounter daily in schooling. They also increasingly have to deal with a lack of recognition, both as successful learners and as valuable individuals, so a key question this chapter engages with is ‘How do the working classes experience a relative educational failure that has come to be seen as “a personal lack”?’ These working-class dilemmas will be explored through empirical case studies. The case studies focus on interviews with working-class young people about their experiences of being in the bottom set, as well as those young people whose only educational option is low-status, inner-city comprehensives seen by both themselves and others as demonised and pathologised educational places.

I was struck by an assertion made by one of the respondents in the Great British Class Survey, a survey of social class in the United Kingdom carried out by Mike Savage and his colleagues at the University of Manchester in 2013. A male professor commented that he would prefer to think of people for their inherent value rather than their class. But the problem in England is that the question of an individual’s inherent value can never be disentangled from their class position. This differential valuing of the upper, middle and working classes not only infuses the educational system, but has shaped its structure, influenced its practices and dictated the very different relationships that different social classes have to the system. Despite an expectation that the working classes should have the same relationship to state education as the middle classes, unsurprisingly – in view of the history of state schooling – they do not. As Andy Green shows, the history of working-class education has been one of control and cultural domination. It would be hard to portray working-class experiences in education as generally fulfilling, as being about ‘bettering oneself’ in the classic middle-class mode.

Introduction

So far this book has focused on the majority of the working classes who are set up to fail in English education. This chapter focuses on the minority who are seen to succeed academically, the working classes who are socially mobile through education. In doing so it attempts to unpick the challenges in putting clever and working class together (as opposed to the endlessly bright middle and upper classes). The chapter also engages with the painful compromises that can arise if you are working class and educationally successful.

Social mobility has an iconic place in English political discourse. It appears as if the less mobility there is, the more it becomes a preoccupation of politicians and policy makers. It is nearly always seen in straightforwardly positive ways, particularly within political, policy and media discourses. In contrast, this chapter argues that it constitutes a problematic solution to educational inequalities where the negatives have consistently threatened to undermine the positives. In the first part of the chapter these problematic aspects are explored in the 1950s and 1960s, the period in which I was growing up and the time that Jackson and Marsden were writing about; I then draw on case studies relating to the 1980s and the more recent period of my own research.

The 21st century has seen an opening up of new educational horizons for the educationally successful working-class. Yet, at the same time, social mobility is a process that is constantly troubled by questions of differential values and valuing. It is also one in which the working classes are seriously disadvantaged by their lack of access to privileged social networks. Recent governments, Labour, Conservative and Coalition, have viewed creating aspiring students as more effective, and clearly cheaper, than putting money into education. Yet again, as I have argued in earlier chapters, this constitutes a policy approach that makes the working classes responsible for their own educational success without providing them with the resources to make that success possible.

The second part of the chapter unpicks the assumption that more working-class young people going to university is an unmitigated success, and examines the extent to which a working-class student’s degree has the same value as a middle- or upper-class student’s degree in the 21st century.

Introduction

There is another working class: what we might call the working class of the mind.

This chapter focuses specifically on the emotional landscapes of class, showing how schools can become the source of all kinds of fantasies, fears, anxieties, hopes and desires. In particular, it attempts to expose the injuries of class that are perpetuated through the educational system. While the greatest damage is inflicted on the working classes, the chapter also draws on data to reveal the damage exacted on the middle and upper classes.

In earlier chapters we have seen repeatedly the ways in which classed experiences generate powerful emotional responses, from Steve McQueen’s rage and disgust to the bottom-set students’ shame and abjection. This chapter presents interview data collected between 2000 and 2015 to illustrate the powerful dynamic between emotions and class inequalities. Arguing that class is always lived on both a conscious and an unconscious level, it focuses on affective aspects of class, revealing the complicated combinations of guilt, shame, anger, fear, defensiveness, empathy and conciliation that are generated in response to class inequalities in education. In the first part of the chapter I draw on a number of case studies in order to illustrate the intense emotional pressure that results from attempting to succeed ‘against the odds’. In the case of Shaun, the working-class boy, this pressure is caused by his working-class background; for Max, the middle-class boy, it is a consequence of context, the predominantly working-class comprehensive he attends. In the second part of the chapter I examine the powerful affective costs for working-class children of attending schools seen as being ‘second rate’ and ‘low status’ by both themselves and others.

Tales of trouble and turmoil

Shaun’s story is of a hard-working, well-behaved, poor, white, working-class boy trying to achieve academically, first in a predominantly working-class, multi-ethnic primary school, then in a ‘sink’ inner-city boys’ comprehensive school, while simultaneously trying to maintain his standing within the male peer-group culture. And, despite his efforts and struggles, Shaun ended up leaving school at 16 with minimal qualifications. In order to understand Shaun’s predicament I wanted to make sense of his psychic struggles as well as his educational trajectory; I wanted to understand how structures become embodied and generate ambivalences and tensions.

In this chapter I focus internally on the workings of the educational system, and what these have meant for working-class educational experiences. The key points of the chapter are illustrated through a number of case studies, mainly from young people whom I interviewed between 2000 and 2016 for a range of different research projects, but also from a working-class parent, Josie, whom I interviewed six times over a period of 20 years. But before I look at the lived experiences of working-class students and their parents I want to present an up-to-date snapshot of the social class attainment gap. Over the three years 2011/12 to 2013/14 disadvantaged students (those on FSM, in receipt of pupil premium and nearly all working class) were 27% less likely to achieve five or more GCSE grades A*–C including English and Maths (Table 3.1).

The most recent statistics from the DfE (April 2017) present a bleak contrast between the poorest children on FSM and those from families with incomes of £78,000 and above: an attainment gap of 47% (Figure 3.1).

If we then consider how this compares with other nations across the globe we find that in 2009 England was bottom of the league table for the percentage of working-class children achieving high academic levels (Figure 3.2).

This is the scale of the problem confronted by those concerned with the class gap in educational attainment; and it is this gap that the new diversity in educational provision – academies, free schools and now super grammar schools – is intended to address.

Academies: working miracles in deprived areas?

The hype surrounding academies is that they will address the social class attainment gap displayed in Table 3.1. They have been heavily promoted as a means of pulling up working-class achievement. In 2008, six years after the first academies were opened, Andrew Adonis claimed that academies were ‘establishing a culture of ambition to replace the poverty of aspiration’. In 2012 the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, claimed that they were ‘working miracles in some of the most deprived parts of our country’. So, the political rhetoric is all about improving both working-class achievement and working-class experiences of education. Yet the reality is much murkier.

Education and the Working Class was one of the first sociology of education books that I read, and the first to have a lasting impact on me. When I read it I was an 18-year-old working-class girl, totally ‘at sea’ in higher education and failing to make sense of my own experience of social mobility at an elite university. There have been few books in my life that have elicited such a shock of recognition, but Education and the Working Class was one. Yet, it clearly was not describing my own working-class experience. Jackson and Marsden’s text focused primarily on working-class students from families that constituted very specific fractions of the working class. They either were part of ‘the sunken middle class’ or came from the respectable, aspirant working class who limited their family size and saved up to buy their own home. Their politics were conservative, with both a small and a large ‘C’, and most of the young adults whom Jackson and Marsden interviewed lacked ‘any radical impulses’. Rather, they were described by Jackson and Marsden as ‘over-accommodating and emollient’ as they struggled to fit in with a new, unfamiliar, middle-class milieu. In contrast, my working-class background provided a counterpoint to the many orthodox analyses of social mobility, including that of Jackson and Marsden. In my family it was not middle-class dispositions and attitudes that facilitated and enabled social mobility, but instead a strong, oppositional, working-class value system and political consciousness. I grew up on a sink council estate, the oldest of eight children, and was a free school meal (FSM) pupil throughout my school education. It is this complexity around the many different ways of embodying working-classness that I hope to capture in the text, and to further complicate through a strong engagement with differences of gender and ethnicity. It is important to recognise that I am also writing this book as a sociologist. This means that I understand social class in terms of relationships; not just economic relationships but, as referred to by Harriet Bradley, a much broader web of social relationships, including those of life style, educational experiences and patterns of residence.