Introduction

I want to begin with two different school situations. The first is a city academy that was formed from the closure of two ‘failing’ secondary schools (policy launched in 2000), and where data shows how the children were bewildered about the process they had been forced to accept and responded to this by often absenting themselves. The second is a comprehensive school, where in working in a research team one of the students stated: “You know, this research we’re doing, could really change things in this school.” Both situations speak differently to the capacity and the opportunity for children to do something new. For the city academy students the world is one that positions children like them as objects to be moved around and impacted upon, and so children have learned that the world is hierarchical, structured, and is one that holds limited prospects for active participation. Whereas in the second school the student voiced a twinkle of recognition that teaching enables them to see the world as a space where they can make a contribution through collaborative knowledge production. Both data extracts have something to say about what Arendt (1958) identifies as natality or the fact that when children enter the world they can do new things. For some, as in the first case, students are being structured to fit the world but in the second case students are learning they can change the world. For Arendt (2006a) education ‘turns children toward the world’, and so ‘it is care for the world, not technical skills or moral development, that is its hallmark’ (Zakin 2017, p122). However, in this chapter I show how the trend in this ‘turn to the world’ is usually the first rather than the second case as a form of regulated natality within a segregated education system, where biopolitical distinctiveness means that ‘elite’ children know their entitlements while the majority of children know their place. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) to the reforms of school restructuring in England enables an examination of direct interventions by the state as a form of depoliticisation by personalisation.