Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- About the authors
- List of abbreviations
- one Introduction: the social transformation of East London
- two Changing economy and social structure of East London
- three Changing ethnic and housing market structure of East London
- four Moving on, moving out, moving up: aspiration and the minority ethnic suburbanisation of East London
- five Social reproduction: issues of aspiration and attainment
- six The limits to parental decision making under conditions of constrained choice
- seven Reputation and working the system
- eight Conclusions: achieving aspiration?
- References
- Index
seven - Reputation and working the system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- About the authors
- List of abbreviations
- one Introduction: the social transformation of East London
- two Changing economy and social structure of East London
- three Changing ethnic and housing market structure of East London
- four Moving on, moving out, moving up: aspiration and the minority ethnic suburbanisation of East London
- five Social reproduction: issues of aspiration and attainment
- six The limits to parental decision making under conditions of constrained choice
- seven Reputation and working the system
- eight Conclusions: achieving aspiration?
- References
- Index
Summary
‘I think you’re going into the background of … the people who live in the surrounding area are, I mean in Hainault there are lots of white working-class people who live around there and who are just not very concerned in their children's education, or in the discipline. There is also the fact that the school doesn't really help themselves within the structure of the school itself, so put the two together and it gives a disaster, really, for everybody concerned. And I think definitely plenty of parents would like to have a school like Seven Kings because they see it, you know, as the beacon of all schools. But I don't know to what lengths they’d be prepared to send their children there. And there is very much the sense – again from the parents who live around the Hainault area – that they do despair of having to send their children to Kingswood, because of the nature of the intake of the schools.’ (White British, female, Barkingside)
Introduction
In the previous two chapters we developed our focus on how education has been the means of realising parental aspiration for the respondents’ children's future. We have done so largely through an analysis of published statistics, our dataset from the PLASC and our own survey and interview data. Aggregate quantitative data are invaluable as a source of information but they do not give us the ‘thinking’ behind the way in which individuals are making choices (or not) about schooling and where to live. Our analysis so far confirms what may be blindingly obvious to most people – that schools with pupils from advantaged backgrounds do well and vice versa – but our combination of PLASC with Mosaic has enabled us to attach some numbers to these findings rather than relying solely on the kind of qualitative data which typifies this kind of research.
Nevertheless, without reference to the ‘voices’ of those concerned in the process if we just look at the ‘facts’ we understand little of the reasoning behind them. In this chapter, therefore, we listen to the respondents both through the boxes they ticked in the 300 face-to-face survey responses we carried out and, more tellingly, from the transcripts of the 100 follow-up in-depth semi-structured interviews undertaken across the five study areas.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethnicity, Class and AspirationUnderstanding London's New East End, pp. 195 - 228Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2011