Introduction

The welfare state has always been associated with attempts to forge a cohesive sense of British identity and a contractual reaffirmation of the relationship between state and citizen. It is no coincidence, for example, that the housing pillar of publicly funded welfare during the 20th century was strengthened in the aftermath of the two world wars that so powerfully shaped the understanding of Britishness: the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign after 1918 and Aneurin Bevan's programme of council housing and new town developments after 1945. Bevan himself recognised the potential for the welfare state to promote cohesion and residential integration between income groups, with his vision of council estates epitomising the ‘lived tapestry of the mixed community’ (Cole and Goodchild, 2001, p 353).

Similarly, an expanded provision of publicly funded education was a defining characteristic of the emergence of the Western European nation state, and schools were (and are) often arenas for the historical struggle between secular and religious authorities over governance structures (Burleigh, 2005). Schools are a particularly important pillar of the welfare state and its relationship to national identity and civic obligation as they are regarded as vehicles for the inculcation of shared values and norms to future generations, evidenced for example in the citizenship component of the National Curriculum (Underkuffler, 2001).

The other pillars of the welfare state – health, employment and social insurance – also have important links to definitions of citizenship and consequences for cohesion: for example the ‘postcode’ lottery and growing privatisation of health services; the increasingly conditional employment and social insurance rights of the unemployed and new arrivals to the UK; and underclass theories linking welfare dependency to the socio-spatial segregation of deprived neighbourhoods from ‘mainstream’ British society (see Fletcher, Chapter Five, and Reeve, Chapter Nine, in this volume). This chapter focuses on schools and social housing organisations as neighbourhood institutions, and examines how particular forms of these institutions have become problematised within the community cohesion discourse. The chapter also assesses the evidence of the impacts that these institutions have on social cohesion at the neighbourhood level.

Schools, housing and secessionary spaces

Schooling and housing interact in closely analogous ways to affect the dynamics of neighbourhoods (Bramley and Karley, 2007).