White Middle-Class

Identities and Urban

Schooling
Diane Reay
Gill Crozier
and
David James
White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling
Identity Studies in the Social Sciences

Series Editors: Margaret Wetherell, Open University; Valerie Hey, Sussex

University; Stephen Reicher, St Andrews University
Editorial Board: Marta Augoustinos, University of Adelaide, Australia; Wendy
Brown, University of California, Berkeley, USA; David McCrone, University of
Edinburgh, UK; Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths College, University of London,
UK; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University, USA; Harriet B. Nielsen,
University of Oslo, Norway; Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of
London, UK; Mike Savage, University of Manchester, UK

Titles include:

Will Atkinson
CLASS, INDIVIDUALIZATION AND LATE MODERNITY
In Search of the Reflexive Worker
John Kirk and Christine Wall
WORK AND IDENTITY
Historical and Cultural Contexts
Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor
MOVING HISTORIES OF CLASS AND COMMUNITY
Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England
Margaret Wetherell (editor)
IDENTITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
New Trends in Changing Times
Margaret Wetherell (editor)
THEORIZING IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ACTION
Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James
WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS IDENTITIES AND URBAN SCHOOLING

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences

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White Middle-Class
Identities and Urban
Schooling
Diane Reay
University of Cambridge, UK

Gill Crozier
Roehampton University, London, UK

and

David James
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
© Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James 2011
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Contents

List of Tables vi

Series Editors’ Preface vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: The White Middle-Classes in the Twenty-First

Century – Identities Under Siege? 1
1 White Middle-Class Identity Formation: Theory and
Practice 11
2 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 23
3 Habitus as a Sense of Place 44
4 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 61
5 A Darker Shade of Pale: Whiteness as Integral to
Middle-Class Identity 82
6 The Psycho-Social: Ambivalences and Anxieties of
Privilege 101
7 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive: Remaking
Cosmopolitan Citizens or Reproducing Hegemonic White
Middle-Class Values? 124
8 Reinvigorating Democracy: Middle-Class Moralities in
NeoLiberal Times 145

Conclusion 163

Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology 168

Appendix 2: Parental Occupations and Sector 174

Appendix 3: The Sample Families in Terms of ACORN Categories 178

Notes 182

References 183

Index 197

v
List of Tables

2.1 Secondary schools attended by parents in the study – to

nearest whole percentages 24
2.2 Parents’ highest qualifications – to nearest whole
percentages 25
3.1 School performance indicators and demographic details 48

vi
Series Editors’ Preface

The concept of identity has had a long and chequered history in the
social sciences – many chafe at its ambiguity and frustrating complex-
ity – yet it remains the pivotal site for exploring the relations between
social life and subjectivity. Who we are is always complicated – a matter
of social classifications, shifting social categorisations and group mem-
berships, and a matter, too, of the ways in which social and cultural
materials are organised as psychology and taken on as personal projects.
Identity draws attention to ‘names’ and ‘looks’. It is lived out in grand
narratives and performances which construct sometimes passionately
invested ‘imagined’ routes and destinies as well as in the more mun-
dane arenas of everyday interaction, inter-subjective relations and in
social institutions. Identity guides and predicts social action. It high-
lights positions and intelligibility defining what is possible and liveable
and what is unthinkable and excessively troubled.
We suggest, in short, that identity is one of the most interesting
points at which the trajectories of post-colonial societies, globalisation
and assumptions about ‘liquid modernity’ come into focus along with
new formations of social class, gender relations and issues of inequal-
ity, rights and social justice. Identity is at the heart of some of the most
intractable and troubling contemporary social problems – community
conflict, racism, discrimination, xenophobia and marginalisation.
It is the key laboratory, too, for any social psychologist focused on the
interface of personal lives and social lives.
Identity Studies in the Social Sciences brings together psychologists,
sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, social policy researchers, edu-
cation researchers and political scientists to address this territory.
The interdisciplinary reach of the series is matched by the degree of
theoretical diversity. The books reflect on and take inspiration from the
many ‘theory wars’ in the social sciences which have used identity as
their hinge and also develop new theory and critique for current times,
including new ontologies and new politics to do justice to contemporary
amalgams of practices and subjectivities. The series includes empirical
work, scholarly debate and research reviews on the core social categories
and the intersections of these including ‘race’, ethnicity, social class,
gender, generation, disability, nationality and sexuality along with less

vii
viii Series Editors’ Preface

easily nameable social and institutional categorisations and affiliations.

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences highlights the ways in which identi-
ties are formed, managed and mobilised in contexts and spaces such as
schools, workplaces, clinics, homes, communities and streets. We wel-
come you to this rich collection of accounts from the various front-lines
of identity studies.

Margaret Wetherell, Valerie Hey and Stephen Reicher

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the other members of the team with whom
we conducted the research project Identities, Educational Choice and the
White Urban Middle Classes on which this book is based – namely Phoebe
Beedell, Sumi Hollingworth, Fiona Jamieson and Katya Williams. We are
also very grateful to Margie Wetherell for her excellent leadership of the
Economic and Social Research Council-funded Programme Identities and
Social Action, which we found offered support and challenge in exactly
the right balance. As series editor, Margie also provided very helpful
comments on an earlier draft of the book. We are indebted to the par-
ents and young people who were so generous with their time and so
willing to share their views and experiences during our fieldwork, and
to the school head teachers who helped us to make contact with some
of our participants.
We also wish to acknowledge the Economic and Social Research
Council whose grant (ref. RES-148-25-0023) made this work possible.

Diane Reay, Gill Crozier, David James

ix
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction: The White
Middle-Classes in the Twenty-First
Century – Identities Under Siege?

Mike Savage (2003 p. 536) argues that ‘the unacknowledged normality

of the middle-class needs to be carefully unpicked and exposed.’ This
book unpicks the unacknowledged normality of both whiteness and
middle-classness. It does so through an analysis of white middle-class
identities and privilege and the importance of personal and family his-
tories in this. We take the globally topical and salient issue of school
choice as the central lens through which we examine the ‘normality’
and identity formations of the middle-classes. School choice is a par-
ticularly apposite lens for examining contemporary white middle-class
life. Choice and the ability to make choices across a wide range of areas
lies at the heart of white middle-class identity. And as social reproduc-
tion becomes a more risky and uncertain process for the middle-classes,
greater psychological, social and economic resources are invested in
making the ‘right’ school choice. School choice then is used here as
an analytical tool for understanding white middle-class identities and
identity formation in a global age characterised by uncertainty, financial
crises and the hegemony of self-interest.
Our analysis looks back to the twentieth century for the antecedents
of middle-classness becoming an ideal social identity, and at developed
countries across the globe, in particular the United States (Brantlinger
2003; Lareau 2003; Weis 2008), the United Kingdom (Ball 2003, 2008)
and Australia (McLeod and Yates 2008), in order to interrogate the
continuing hegemony of white middle-class privilege. Throughout we
engage with dominant discourses of neoliberalism, arguing that these
have changed the landscape, reduced the spaces for mutuality and
respect in Western society and had powerful consequences for white
middle-class identities in the twenty-first century. Despite the advent of
the ‘age of anxiety’, the emergence of the ‘super-rich’, and economic

1
2 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

upheavals (Apple 2010), it appears that the white middle-classes con-

tinue to thrive, their social position strengthened and consolidated.
However, there are also growing signs of unease, the exacerbation of
anxiety and a lack of ontological security, ‘the sense of continuity and
order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual envi-
ronment of the individual’ (Giddens 1991 p. 243). These insecurities
are particularly evident in regard to their children’s education, and the
book’s main focus is white middle-class relationships to education.
In both the United States (Lareau 2003; Van Galen and Noblit 2007;
Weis 2008) and the United Kingdom (Savage 2000; Ball 2003; Skeggs
2004; Sayer 2005), scholars have also begun to focus on the lived expe-
rience of class, and this is a central concern of our book. As Weis
(2004) asserts, with the growing ascendancy of neoliberalism accom-
panied by an intensification of social inequalities in the United States
(Apple 2003, 2010), the United Kingdom (Blanden et al. 2007; Seager
and Milner, 2006) and more widely (Freeman-Moir and Scott 2003;
McLeod and Yates 2006), the need for serious class-based analyses could
not be more pressing. However, the focus of much social justice work
has traditionally been on the working-classes (Sennett and Cobb 1973;
Willis 1977; Weis 1990; Skeggs 1997), and this has also been our focus
in the past. We have written about both the white and black working-
classes (Reay 1998b; Crozier 2000), but as Curry-Stevens (2008) argues,
it is increasingly necessary to shift our gaze from the margins to the
centre. So this book is different because it is about ‘people like us’, the
white middle-classes, and more specifically, public sector liberals com-
mitted to the welfare state and to ebbing notions of collectivity. As such
it generates difficult, uncomfortable feelings. Driven by the data, the
analysis that it develops undermines the integrity of the ‘we’ that in
optimistic moments the authors and people we know like to think we
belong to, a particular fraction of the white middle-classes who both
pride themselves on their liberal values and are still basking in the glow
of cosmopolitan multiculturalism. Our findings question any easy, com-
fortable sort of belonging along these lines. In part, this is because of the
wider social and economic context in which the white middle-classes in
the global north find themselves (Connell 2007). It is a context that
generates troubled and uneasy white middle-class identities that are
far removed from earlier depictions of a complacent and comfortable
white middle-class that dominated research in the last century. As Jacob
Hacker (2006) asserts in relation to the United States, ‘the insecurities
that were once limited to the working poor have increasingly crept
into the lives of middle-class.’ In particular, the stable, middle-class,
 Introduction 3

emotional economy, in which satisfactions, entitlements and a sense

of ease balance fears and anxieties is now beginning to topple, as risks
threaten to outweigh familiar securities (Kalleberg 2009). The sense of
being right and being secure that permeated perceptions of the white
middle-classes in the last half of the twentieth century, including those
of the white middle-classes themselves, is increasingly questionable.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century research points to a grow-
ing class polarisation within the most economically advanced societies
(Blanden and Machin 2007; Foster and Wolfson 2010). This growth in
inequalities is seen to be underpinned by two major trends. Firstly, the
disappearance of collective institutions capable of mitigating the effects
of global capitalism, a process involving the repositioning of the uni-
versal values associated with the idea of the public realm (Ben-Ner and
Putterman 1998). Secondly, processes of individualisation (Beck 1992)
which it is argued have developed directly out of the disintegration of
welfarism (Dobbernack 2010). As Graham Crow contends, while in the
past the welfare state used to institutionalise commonality of fate, cur-
rently ‘the sense of all citizens engaged in a collective endeavour and
enjoying common entitlements has broken down as individuals have
come increasingly to calculate whether they are winners or losers in such
arrangements’ (Crow 2002 p. 35). For some sociologists this has led to
the imposition of ‘a sort of moral Darwinism’ that ‘institutes the struggle
of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour’
(Bourdieu 1998 p. 4), resulting in cultures that stress individual choice
and responsibility, and which promote high levels of competitiveness.
One consequence, according to Ulrich Beck (1992 p. 141), is that ‘com-
munity is dissolved in the acid bath of competition.’ As Berking (1996)
argues, processes of privatisation and social protectionism appear to
have generated a society where accrual and acquisitiveness are priori-
tised, and assets in solidarity have been exhausted. The irony is that
current debates have moved from an earlier view of the family as the
bedrock of society and a haven from competitive individualism, greed
and the rampant consumerism that characterised both the workplace
and the wider social world (Lasch 1978) to progressively positioning
the family as central in the making of a selfish, acquisitive, uncaring,
hyper-performance culture (James 2008). Recent moral panics focus not
on the traditional object of moral concerns, the working-classes, but
on parenting more generally, while a national survey of contemporary
UK childhood singles out selfish parents and excessive individualism
as contributing to high levels of unhappiness among children (Layard
and Dunn 2009). The very qualities that, in the past, secured white
4 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

middle-class privilege are now seen to be destabilising the white middle-

class sense of security and equilibrium. It could be argued that Barbara
Ehrenreich’s (1990) prescient commentary on the America of the 1980s
is even more valid today. Ehrenreich presents an analysis of a white
middle-class in retreat from values of democracy and fairness as they
struggle to protect their class and ethnic privilege. This may be a viable
explanation of contemporary English white middle-class practices in the
field of education.
Such trends seem to be pervasive. One possible way of countering
them lies in revitalising notions of ‘the common good’ in particular
through a continuing commitment to, and defence of, the public sector
by the middle-classes who are not its main intended beneficiaries. Tony
Crosland, a prominent champion of the Welfare State, saw universality
of provision as a vital stepping stone in achieving social equality and
commitment to the common good (Crosland 1962). The study upon
which we draw in the book gives particular consideration to this possi-
bility through its focus on middle-class choice of ordinary public sector
schools. However, Sayer (2005) stresses the need to recognise the conun-
drum the middle-classes are caught up in, forced to address the troubling
issue of how to balance ideals against social privilege and tactical imper-
atives for social reproduction. This is particularly difficult as the new
century moves into its second decade, and the fragility and volatility
of national economies in a still largely unregulated global free market
becomes evident (Hutton 2010). Economic commentators (Mishel et al.
2009) view the economic downturn affecting both North America and
Europe as greatly undermining the security and stability of the white
middle-classes (Behreandt 2007; MacWhirter 2008). One of the US Pres-
ident Barack Obama’s first White House economic briefings predicted
that job losses would double in 2009 from their already high 2008 lev-
els and that many of these losses would be white-collar jobs (New York
Times 2010).
The majority view emerging from these debates is white middle-
class identities are increasingly under threat, subject to economic forces
beyond their control and sharing in a growing sense of insecurity that
was once the preserve of the working-classes but now permeates almost
the whole of society. If this is the case it could be further argued that just
as the integrity and value of the working-classes was undermined over
the last decades of the twentieth century (Skeggs 2004), the beginning
of the twenty-first century may herald the unravelling of white middle-
class identity. The view of Pearmain (2008) and many experts on the
left is that we are indeed now witnessing an equivalent disintegration
 Introduction 5

of the comfortable, complacent, settled middle-classes. The contem-

porary moment then can be seen as a pivotal one for the white
middle-classes. The current crisis could result in retrenchment and a cul-
ture of protectionism and safeguarding of white middle-class privileges
or it could produce a more creative and generative questioning of the
status quo; one that might lead to more openness, reflexivity and fair-
ness. The irony has been that throughout our recent ‘age of reflexivity’
there has been a lack of reflexivity, especially with regard to degrees of
privilege, social inequalities and the consequences of class.
Historically the academic and political consensus around white
middle-class identity constructed it as an idealised one held up for the
lower classes to aspire to. Currently, in the 2010s the white middle-
classes, and in particular the images of them as they are inscribed
in policy discourses, best fit the traditional notions of the democratic
citizen – individualistic, responsible, participatory, the active chooser.
However, more and more research on social class and whiteness both
in the United Kingdom and in the United States is disrupting such
comfortable notions of the white middle-classes. It points to particu-
larly disquieting aspects of this normative white middle-class identity.
We can glimpse the ways in which neoliberalism has seeped into the
middle-class soul, via Tony Giddens’ excluding and exclusive white
middle-classes (Giddens 2000), Tim Butler and Gary Robson’s isolation-
ist non-mixers (Butler with Robson 2003), and Stephen Ball’s strategic,
self-interested profit maximisers (Ball 2003). In the United States, there
are Barbara Ehrenreich’s anxious paranoid middle-classes with their fear
of falling socially (Ehrenreich 1990) and Elaine Brantlinger’s selfish
white middle-class parents hell-bent on their children outperforming
their peers (2003).
It increasingly appears that the still idealised norm of the success-
ful white middle-class as ‘go-getting’, high-flying, winners take – all
no longer works against a backdrop of excessive greed, political rapa-
ciousness, financial irresponsibility, deception and mismanagement on
a global scale. Competitive individualism and self-interest, middle-class
qualities that have been particularly valorised over the last 30 years,
are argued to be the very ones that have led to economic and politi-
cal implosion (James 2008). This book engages with, but also attempts
to move beyond, this social and conceptual terrain. Butler and Hamnett
(2010) distinguish between the urban-seeking and the urban-fleeing white
middle-classes. The parents we have studied epitomise the urban seek-
ing. Not only are they living at the heart of three urban conurbations,
but they are also sending their children to schools which encapsulate
6 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

the rich cultural diversity of the cities they live in. Our focus then is on
middle-class identities that appear to be grounded in sociality and an
openness to difference. We want to understand how these might work
against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be ‘middle-
class’ in the twenty-first century, though we are also interested to see
whether, and if so, how they might continue to re-inscribe class and
‘race’ privilege.
The workings of identity-making are particularly visible within the
educational system. Traditional notions of ‘the bourgeois self’ have pri-
oritised individuality, self-interest and self-sufficiency, alongside civic
commitments. However, it has been argued that developing market
forms in education and the wider public sphere are producing new
kinds of moral subjects (Rose 1998; Miller and Rose 2008). The con-
temporary educational market also draws upon ‘classical liberal views
underpinned by a political and economic liberalism which is deeply
embedded in modern Western societies’ (Ball 2003 p. 112). The indi-
vidualised, self-interested and self-sufficient self remains the ideal, in
which the centring of rational choice and a capacity for transcendence
both occludes group-based harms of systemic oppression and conceals
the complicity of individuals in the perpetuation of systemic injus-
tices (Applebaum 2005). It appears that what is being progressively
marginalised in white middle-class identity formation is civic commit-
ment and a sense of communal responsibility, the commitment to ‘the
common good’ that we mentioned earlier. This is not really surpris-
ing when contextualised within a contemporary ‘post-politics’ culture.
As Chantel Mouffe asserts, ‘our present Zeitgeist is characterized by
a profound aversion to the political’ (Mouffe 2005 p. 110). For Zizek
(2006) politics has not only become ‘a dirty word’ but the language
of political intervention no longer appears to make sense of, and in,
the contemporary. Similarly within the field of education leading soci-
ologists such as Stephen Ball have argued that values of the market,
choice and individualism have stood out and triumphed over those of
the fragile discourse of welfare (Ball 2003). One of the main points of
continuity between Conservative–Liberal coalition and both the Labour
and Conservative administrations which preceded it has been a growing
disenchantment with the public sector and the welfare state. Succes-
sive administrations have presided over the destruction of the system of
meanings and values which founded the welfare state and rendered it
coherent as a project, and over its replacement by doctrines and rituals
of instrumental rationality (Cooper 2000). While this process has been
evident across all sectors of the public sphere, it could be argued that it
 Introduction 7

is particularly apparent within contemporary educational systems. For

sociologists ranging from Ulrich Beck to Richard Sennett the dominance
of neoliberal doctrines of instrumental rationality and untrammelled
choice can be seen to have been at enormous costs for all sections of
society. Beck (1992), Melucci (1996) and more recently Bradley (2010)
emphasise the link between the growth of choices and escalating social
anxiety. More specifically within the field of education, research increas-
ingly shows that contemporary education policies promoting parental
choice, competitive school enrolment, performance league tables and
school specialisms generate an ethical framework that encourages and
legitimates self-interest in the pursuit of competitive familial advantage
(Oria et al. 2007; Martin 2010). Increasingly, winning has become the
‘be-all and end-all’ of education which has, to an extent, degenerated
into an obsessive race for credentials.
There are, then, plenty of reasons to focus on those white middle-
classes who do not fit traditional mainstream notions of what it is to be
middle-class, and to focus on how their identities as middle-class and
white are played out within the sphere of socially divided urban state
schooling. The white middle-class families we studied (both parents and
children) constitute a particularly interesting case study for two princi-
pal reasons. First, in sending their children to urban, socially diverse,
state comprehensives, they are managing far higher levels of risk in rela-
tion to education than the majority of white middle-classes tolerate.
Second, in doing so, they are active at the boundaries of both class and
ethnic difference at a time when class and ethnic segregation and polari-
sation are growing (Webber and Butler 2007; Butler and Hamnett 2010).
So while they share much in common with the white majority middle-
classes who continue ‘to put their children first’ (Jordan et al. 1994)
by seeking more exclusivist educational choices, they also represent a
bolder, more risk-taking white middle-class cohort, and simultaneously,
perhaps a more hopeful, open one. The rest of this chapter provides a
summary of the book followed by a brief overview of the research which
is described in more detail in Appendix 1.
Chapter 1 explores white middle-class identities as they have tradi-
tionally been, and currently are, theorised. It examines representations
of the white middle-classes both historically and in the present, and
attempts to delineate the specificity of English middle-classness by con-
trasting it with images of the middle-classes more widely, in the United
States, Australia and Europe. Chapter 2, ‘Family History, Class Practices
and Habitus’, looks at our white middle-class sample through a focus
on family histories. Family narratives are drawn on to demonstrate the
8 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

power of restructurings and reactivations of the habitus as some parents

deliberately chose social and educational trajectories for their children
that were very different to their own. Chapter 3 focuses on the ways
in which the spatial and thus locality is crucial in middle-class iden-
tity formation. The chapter assesses data from interviews across three
very different urban locales to generate insight about whether differ-
ent urban spaces are repositories of distinct middle-class sets of values,
or share more commonalities than differences when it comes to white
middle-class attitudes and practices.
Chapter 4 draws out the contrast between dominant models of choice,
couched in terms of individuals engaged in rational action based on
available information (such as league tables and other proxies for edu-
cational quality), and the subtleties of the cultural facets of school
choice as revealed in our analysis. It addresses the less-than-expected
incidence of moral and political orientations in white middle-classes
choosing socially diverse urban schooling, and explores the more preva-
lent instrumental and pragmatic considerations of many parents, and,
additionally, the provisional nature of choices that are seen as reversible.
Chapter 5 then interrogates whiteness as integral to white middle-class
identity. For many parents and children, there are very positive gains to
be had from a socially diverse school, and ethnic diversity is often valued
for its educative potential. Nevertheless, we show that even these white
middle-classes committed to multi-ethnic schooling face the perils of
middle-class acquisitiveness, extracting value from, as they find value
in, their multi-ethnic ‘other’. The chapter examines these processes of
generating use and exchange value in which the ‘multi-ethnic other’
becomes a source of multicultural capital.
The main focus of Chapter 6 is the frequently overlooked anxieties,
conflicts, desires and tensions within middle-class identities created by
operating within contemporary education choice policy. The chapter
explores the psychic costs and tensions for these parents of having dif-
ferent notions of ‘the best’ for their child to those normative within
white middle-class culture. Chapter 7 focuses on the impact on chil-
dren of parents’ choice of socially diverse urban schooling. We look at
how their views and attitudes echo or diverge from those of their par-
ents, examining the complex dynamic between echoing parents’ views
and asserting independence and difference. The chapter also looks at
the difference between social mix and social mixing, drawing on both
children’s and parents’ interviews.
Chapter 8 emphasises the democratic possibilities that emanate from
middle-class identities that are grounded in sociality and an openness to
 Introduction 9

difference and the ways in which these might work against, and disrupt,
normative views of what it means to be ‘middle-class’ at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. The chapter explores discourses and prac-
tices of civic engagement and democratic citizenship, and an important
focus is the significant minority of white middle-class families who still
possess a strong ‘vocabulary of association’ (Jordan et al. 1994 p. 43).
However, the chapter also describes the difficulties of converting these
commitments and investments into more equitable interactions with
class and ethnic others.
The final concluding chapter comes back to issues of wider structural
inequalities, arguing that the white middle-class parents in the study
are negotiating an impossible situation that individually they can do
little to improve. It discusses the ways in which the wider social context
of structural injustices throws up impossible moral dilemmas and leads
to all sorts of morally inconsistent behaviour. It goes on to outline the
challenges for democratic citizenry and the importance of developing
critiques which, whilst recognising how people negotiate inequitable
situations, also constantly keeps in play the structural injustices within
which they are situated. The final section synthesises the new ways of
thinking and understanding white middle-class identity that emerge
from the findings, before outlining the challenges the data present for
education and wider social policy.
The research study involved in-depth interviews with 125 white
middle-class families (181 parent and 68 children interviews in total)
who had chosen inner city comprehensive schooling in three UK cities
in three different geographical areas. These were London, Riverton in
the South West and Norton in the North East of England. ‘Riverton’ and
‘Norton’ are pseudonyms. Strictly speaking Norton data is not confined
to one city as we involved a few participants from beyond the city limits.
We interviewed 63 families in London, 30 in Riverton and 32 in Norton.
All names of people, places and institutions have been anonymised and
disguised where necessary and as much as possible, except for London
and London boroughs.
We strove to include a number of fathers as well as mothers in our
sample, also ensuring that there was a balance between families with
daughters and those with sons. Those middle-class parents who ‘work
the educational system’ by choosing and getting high-status compre-
hensive schools at the top of league tables were only a tiny minority
in our sample. At the time we carried out the fieldwork, three quarters
of the comprehensives the families sent their children to were perform-
ing at or below the national average. This is because our main target
10 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

group was middle-class parents that appeared committed to compre-

hensive schooling as an educational principle; those who deliberately
eschew ‘working the system to their advantage’. We also collected rig-
orous demographic data. The interviews with 68 middle-class young
people were composed of 39 interviews with young women and 29 with
young men (28 in London, 20 in Norton and 20 in Riverton). A major-
ity (41) of these were 18 years or over at the time of the interview.
They were interviewed in order to find out about their school experi-
ences, but also to explore their identities and identifications and the
extent to which these were constructed in accord with, or against, the
orientations, commitments and dispositions of their parents.
In the next chapter on white middle-class identities we outline wider
sociological understandings of middle-class identity in order to be
able to specify what distinguishes the middle-classes who have been
the focus of our study, and position them within a complex diffuse
landscape of middle-class heterogeneity.
1
White Middle-Class Identity
Formation: Theory and Practice

Introduction

Contemporary theorizations of class, unlike many of their prede-

cessors, are less concerned with class as a form of socio-economic
classification, a position in the labour market or as a relationship to
the means of production, and more concerned with the ways class as
an identity is forged and experienced.
(Dowling 2009 p. 2)

Identity continues to be the place where collective action, social

movements, and issues of inequality, rights and social justice come
into focus and demand attention.
(Wetherell 2010 p. 1)

In this chapter we are examining both the history and geography of

white middle-class identity formation, as well as normative understand-
ings of what it means to be middle-class, both historically and currently.
In a later chapter we focus on whiteness as a powerful aspect of identity,
but here it is ‘middle-classness’ that is scrutinised. Our intention is to
map out the broader landscape of middle-class identity in order to be
able to specify what distinguishes the particular section of the middle-
classes who have been the focus of our study, and draw out their sim-
ilarities and differences with normative ‘middle-classness’. This means
that heterogeneity within middle-class identities is an important focus.
We ask to what extent the middle-classes share a common relationship
to each other, despite this diversity, that is largely exclusive of every-
one else? We also ask about the role that education plays in middle-class
identity formation and identifications. Can we view education as central
in understanding what sort of middle-class person an individual is?

11
12 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

However, first we need to define and position the middle-classes as

a social grouping, outlining how they came to be central in English
society and their changing character over time. Historical accounts for
the most part agree that the term ‘middle-class’ came into usage in the
mid- to late eighteenth century (Seed 1992). According to John Seed, the
middle-classes:

were distinguished from the landed aristocracy and the gentry by

their need to generate an income from some kind of active occu-
pation. And they were distinguished from the labouring majority by
their possession of property . . . and by their exemption from manual
labour.
(Seed 1992 p. 36)

Implicit rather than spelt out in this definition of the middle-classes

of the eighteenth century is a presumption of power. One of the key
enduring attributes of middle-class status was, and still is, the ability to
wield power over others (Gunn and Bell 2002). Absent is a further defin-
ing characteristic of the middle-classes, namely their values. Perhaps
above all the distinguishing feature of the middle-classes is a partic-
ular set of values, commitments and moral stances. Yet, while these
have inevitably shifted and changed over time, certain attitudes have
remained constant. As we have argued in the introductory chapter, the
hallmark of both contemporary and past middle-class identity is a sense
of responsibility, underpinned by individualism combined with agentic
citizenship and a propensity for choice. Middle-classness is seen to be
embedded in a range of virtues and positive attributes such as ambition,
sense of entitlement, educational excellence, confidence, competitive-
ness, hard work and deferred gratification. In this way the perpetuation
of middle-class privilege works in and through what are seen to be
individual qualities within the control of the individual. But a further
consequence is that the middle-classes have now replaced the working-
classes as ‘the moral identifier’ (Butler with Robson 2003 p. 17) that lies
at the heart of English society.
Another significant attribute of the middle-classes is the ability to
erect boundaries, both geographically and symbolically. In the twenti-
eth century such boundary building was visibly manifest in the suburbs.
Suburbanisation, a process that began in the 1920s and continued
into the 1980s, was primarily about creating social as well as geo-
graphical distance from others, about constructing a different, distinctly
middle-class way of life. As Thompson asserted:
 White Middle-Class Identity Formation 13

It was only in the setting of this sort of house, where the family
could distance itself from the outside world in its own private fortress
behind its own garden fence and privet hedge and yet could make
a show of outward appearances that was sure to be noticed by the
neighbours that the suburban lifestyle of individual domesticity and
group-monitored respectability could take hold.
(Thompson 1982 p. 8)

The suburbs are associated with both the rise and the sprawl of the
middle-classes. As Willmott and Young (1967 p. 15) pointed out, ‘the
move outward was also a move upwards’. Suburbanisation was a pow-
erful process of middle-class formation in which the suburbs gained
meanings and resonances that were deeply socialising of those who lived
there. Traditionally, research has focused on the relationships between
distinctly middle-class ideals of home and family and suburban residen-
tial space (Duncan and Duncan 2004; Knox 2005). There has been a
veritable cocktail of evocative and nostalgic images, from the poet Stevie
Smith’s homage to Potter’s Green in 1949 to the Conservative Prime
Minister John Major’s paean to ‘invincible green suburbs’ in the 1980s.
For Stevie Smith:

We are not only this healthy suburb where babies may flourish but
we are also to be envied and congratulated because we have our rich
community life and are not existing in a bored box-like existence that
is what most people think of suburb life.
(Smith 1981 p. 97)

For most of the twentieth century suburbia represented a powerful

image of the middle-class ‘good life’ (Watt 2009). But underneath a nor-
malising, and at times idealising, of ‘the middle-class suburbs’, lay, as we
glimpse in the Stevie Smith quote, a less attractive snobbery and petty
class-consciousness, an implicit sense of superiority and a mapping out
of social difference. Describing the inter-war years Gunn and Bell (2002)
point out that anti-working-class feeling was an essential ingredient of
what it meant to be middle-class at the time.
It is through their association with the suburbs that the middle-classes
came to be depicted as ‘middle England’ in policy and the media, a
label that also assumed a degree of homogeneity. In reality the middle-
classes are striated by a proliferation of cross-cutting differences. The
most researched differences are occupational ones that operate either
horizontally, dividing the middle-classes into professionals, managers
14 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

and the self-employed, or vertically, conceiving key differences amongst

the middle-classes according to levels of income and status (Bottero
2004). However, less researched but also important are divisions that
emerge out of geography and political persuasion. In the next section
we explore these intra-middle-class differences in order to further engage
with middle-class heterogeneity.

Differences within the middle-class

Horizonal differences
It is horizontal differences between the middle-classes that have
attracted the most attention from sociologists over the last 30 years.
Since the late 1970s Basil Bernstein and others have argued that one
of the main cleavages within the middle-classes is the divide between
public and private sectors of employment (Bernstein 1977; Dunleavy
1980; Perkin 1989). However, as Sally Power and her colleagues demon-
strate through their empirical study of the middle-classes and education
(Power et al. 2003), the old twentieth-century distinctions between
managers and professionals, private and public sector workers have
become blurred. The old binaries no longer work in a contemporary
world where there are tensions and increasingly complex differentia-
tions within intra-middle-class categories. Divisions have opened up
within divisions. In particular, public sector workers are divided into
those who continue to espouse a public sector ethic and those who
have developed as entrepreneurs, while the growing privatisation of the
public sector has resulted in private sector workers working in public
sector settings (Ball 2008). Sectoral differences have diminished con-
siderably as ‘the opportunity to hide from capitalism’ (Bagguley 1995
p. 298) is rapidly vanishing in the professions generally and the public
sector specifically (Vincent and Ball 2006). This inability to any longer
escape the logics of capitalism and the reach of neoliberalism impacts
on all middle-class groupings but particularly those in our sample who
traditionally come from middle-class groups who have espoused anti-
capitalist sentiments and oppositional attitudes to neoliberalism or to
right-wing political beliefs.
One generative approach to recognising the blurring and messiness of
differences within the middle-classes is that of Mike Savage and his col-
leagues. Their (1992 pp. 127–128) ‘assets plus lifestyle’ approach to intra-
middle-class differences is not based simply on occupational differences
but attempts to incorporate lifestyle differences as well, connecting
 White Middle-Class Identity Formation 15

lifestyle categories with types of occupation. They distinguish between

three groups: (1) the ascetic public sector welfare professionals, a group
reliant on cultural assets rather than money; (2) the post-modern private
sector professionals and managers, who are equally at home consuming
both high and low culture; (3) and the corporate undistinctives, man-
agers and government bureaucrats with indistinctive patterns of con-
sumption. However, they also recognise that these three categories are
cross-cut by differences of age and location. Together with those of other
leading analysts in the field (Ball 2003; Vincent and Ball 2006), the anal-
ysis of Savage and colleagues draws upon Bourdieu’s concepts of capital.
In Distinction Bourdieu (1984) saw the main divide among the middle-
classes in the late twentieth century as one between intellectuals on the
one hand and entrepreneurs and industrialists on the other. Bourdieu’s
‘field maps’ of French society in the same work recognise more nuanced
and refined intra-middle-class differences defined by both the volume
and composition of capital possessed by individuals. However, despite
the extensive academic interest in horizontal divisions, it is probably
vertical divisions that are currently most pronounced.

Vertical differences
Fissures among the middle-classes have been forced apart recently by
the ongoing banking crisis. It is increasingly evident that a rich exclu-
sive coterie of upper middle-classes heavily invested in moneymaking
and profiteering now has a tenuous connection with the vast majority
of middle-classes who are middle-ranking employees on average salaries.
Giddens (1998) argues that the upper echelons of the middle-classes are
separating themselves off from the rest of society and that this poses
new problems for democracy and social inclusion. He uses the term ‘dis-
embedding’ to describe the processes whereby the upper middle-classes
create a regime of power without responsibility, generating new forms
of exclusivity.
Alongside this focus on the top echelons of the middle-classes,
Vincent et al. (2008) have led a renewed interest in the intermedi-
ate classes, once described as the lower middle-classes (Mayer 1975;
Halsey et al. 1980). In doing so, they problematise the boundaries of
what constitutes the middle-classes. Other contemporary research also
focuses as much if not more on vertical as opposed to horizontal differ-
ences within the middle-classes. Bennett et al.’s (2009) impressive study
mapping British cultural taste divides the middle-classes into two: (1)
a smaller upper-middle-class grouping of executive professionals and
16 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

managers and (2) a larger intermediate-middle-class grouping which

includes lower managers and higher supervisory staff. In their work on
the middle-classes choosing higher education Reay et al. (2005) devel-
oped conceptions of established and novitiate middle-class groupings,
characterised by intra-class differences based on family history, disposi-
tions and the type and quantity of capitals they possessed. In this study
we have developed more tightly specified vertical fractions in order to
help make sense of the intra-middle-class differences that emerged from
the data. As we describe in more detail in Chapter 2, 20 per cent of the
parents were first-generation middle-class, a larger group (40 per cent of
the parents) were second-generation middle-class, while the remaining
36 per cent of the parents could be described as established middle-class.
However, muddying an already complex picture, such vertical and hor-
izontal differences can oppose and confound each other as in the case
of composite families where the partners work in different vertical strata
and/or occupational sectors of the labour market.

Geographical differences
We have touched on the impact of geography on middle-class formation
in the earlier discussion of suburbanisation but more recent research by
social geographers has revealed that contemporary white middle-class
formation is associated more strongly with the urban than the subur-
ban. As Butler with Robson (2003 p. 29) point out, ‘today’s middle-class
does not want to live in the safe suburbs in which it was mostly brought
up; after university it wants the excitement and difference of living in
socially mixed areas with a cultural infrastructure.’ One consequence
is that complex middle-class differences exist within the urban as well
as between the rural, suburban and urban middle-classes. In particular,
Butler with Robson (2003) argue that although the London middle-
classes can be differentiated in terms of locality, what they share dwarfs
their differences and makes them a distinct middle-class characterised
by a metropolitan habitus which sets them apart from both the middle-
classes in rural areas, suburbs and county towns, and their ‘sisters and
brothers in provincial cities’. The reason, in part, for their distinctive-
ness lies in the opportunities different urban fields provide. By including
provincial cities in our sample alongside London we are able to exam-
ine the extent to which white middle-class families differ according to
geographical location, and ascertain the extent to which London both
attracts and sustains a metropolitan habitus that is distinctive from
those of our two provincial cities, Norton and Riverton. Like Vincent
 White Middle-Class Identity Formation 17

and Ball’s (2006) research on the London middle-classes, Butler with

Robson found different ‘metropolitan habituses’ in different city loca-
tions. What both studies conclude in the context of London is that the
metropolitan white middle-classes share a common relationship with
each other that is predominantly exclusive of everyone else. Vincent and
Ball (2007) describe a taste for enriching educational activities (that are
clearly distinguishable from working-class practices) as a commonality
binding their urban middle-classes together, while Butler with Robson
(2003 p. 2) conclude that they ‘huddle together into essentially white
settlements in the inner city’ and that both they and their children,
for the most part, have friends just like themselves. Our anticipation
(and, to some extent, our hope) in conducting this research was that
those white middle-classes making a positive choice in favour of social
mix in their children’s schooling would have a more open and inclusive
outlook.

Political persuasion
There has been a longstanding link between middle-class radicalism and
public sector employment. In both the United Kingdom and the United
States there is a sociological tradition that associates well-educated pro-
fessionals (Parkin 1968; Gouldner 1979; Lash and Urry 1987) with
challenge to the established order and radical potential. Gouldner’s
(1979) theory of ‘the new class’ held that highly educated profession-
als, especially those employed in public and non-profit organisations,
shared a culture of critical discourse engendering anti-authoritarian
and oppositional political beliefs. This tradition, fuelled by middle-class
involvement in new social movements over the second half of the twen-
tieth century (Bagguley 1995), has portrayed sections of the middle-class
across the Global North (Connell 2007) as ‘dynamic change-makers, key
actors in social transformation’ (Bennett et al. 2009 p. 178). In the 1970s
US theorists linked the rise of left-wing ideas in sections of the middle-
class (Bruce-Biggs 1979; Brint 1984) to increasing levels of education.
They suggested ‘a struggle for power and status in American society
between a rising “new class” of “knowledge workers” and a still dom-
inant “old class” of business owners and executives’ (Brint 1984 p. 31).
This new liberal left-leaning middle-class was seen to be related to two
labour market developments, the growth of occupational groups such
as service sector and social-cultural professionals, and the decline of
the industrial sector in the economy. For Brint, the radical attitudes of
some middle-class occupational groups (for example, those that are not
18 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

directly instrumental to profit maximisation like arts, education, social

and other services) were largely due to higher education. Lamont (1987)
however disagreed with this conclusion, arguing that such liberal atti-
tudes can be explained by the common class situation of the ‘relatively
autonomous cultural capital workers’ (Lamont 1987 p. 1505). In her
words:

The common interests of relatively autonomous cultural capital

workers are to maintain and increase their autonomy and to expand
the non-profit realm by encouraging the development of the public
sector, promoting policies to increase business taxation, and support-
ing values and political ideologies that favour non-economic aspects
of social life, such as post-materialist values, environmentalism, or
New Left politics.
(Lamont 1987 p. 1504)

More recently a scepticism has set in as to the radical inclinations of the

middle-classes and, in particular, their ability to disorganise capitalism.
While once university education and employment in the cultural and
service sectors appeared to generate radical dispositions, their power to
do so seems to have waned considerably in the present. Recent UK sur-
vey findings (Bamfield and Horton 2009) indicate that while the highly
educated middle-classes continue to hold permissive views in relation
to race and homosexuality, their views in relation to social class are less
tolerant. According to Goldthorpe (2007), the middle-classes, despite
intra-class differences, will always protect the status quo, and in the
twenty-first-century act as bastions of the social order just as much as
they did in the past. As Vincent and Ball (2006 p. 164) point out, ‘val-
ues and attitudes cannot easily be read off from occupational categories’
and, certainly in relation to the middle-classes, historical evidence from
the last 50 years supports their reservations.

A common class?

However, as well as trying to distinguish the differences within the

middle-classes it is important to focus on the commonalities that exist
across difference. Most of these are rooted in the privilege and relative
power that comes with middle-class identity. What is shared to varying
degrees is class power and dominance, infused, as Butler with Robson
(2003 p. 28) wryly comment, ‘with a good dose of moral superiority’.
Regardless of all the complex differentiations the negative connotations
 White Middle-Class Identity Formation 19

placed on working-class practices, values and aspirations across the

middle-classes appear to remain intact (Maxwell and Aggleton 2010).
As Vincent et al. (2004 p. 242) conclude, ‘despite differences, there are
also important and maybe overwhelming similarities, an internal homo-
geneity’. Power (2000 p. 142), drawing on the findings from her study
of the middle-classes ‘Destined for Success?’, argues that ‘the differences
within the middle-classes may be only superficial rather than deeply
secured.’ A quality that the middle-classes share across difference is a
strong commitment to education as key to middle-class cultural repro-
duction, and we turn to middle-class relationships to education in the
next section.

Education, education, education

The middle-classes have a very long history of successfully securing their

cultural reproduction by ensuring that their children got the best kind
of education. As David Lockwood (1995 p. 10) pointed out, ‘they have
always used their superior moral and material resources to full effect,
above all by giving their children a competitive edge in the main site of
social selection, the educational system’. While we may wish to dispute
whether occupying ‘the moral high ground’ is the same as possessing
superior moral resources, what is incontrovertible is the middle-class
propensity for capitalising on their capitals in order to guarantee educa-
tional success. The educational system has become a central mechanism
of white middle-class identity formation.
Historically speaking, the assumption or pretence that education is
primarily a level playing field in which anyone could succeed is quite a
recent viewpoint or position. Tomlinson reminds us that:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, education was

openly intended to reinforce a class structure based on ascription by
birth and wealth. ‘The different classes of society, the different occu-
pations, require different teaching’, as a major Schools Inquiry Report
put it in 1886 (Taunton Commission 1886). This translated into ‘pub-
lic’ schools for the aristocracy and upper classes, minor public schools
and a hierarchy of grammar schools for the middle classes, and an
elementary education for the masses.
(Tomlinson 2005b p. 164)

Eighteen years earlier, in 1864, the Clarendon Commission had reported

on the state of the ‘nine leading schools’, the ‘public’ schools that are
20 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

still regarded by many as representing excellence in secondary educa-

tion. But as Tomlinson goes on to point out, the Taunton Commission’s
report reflected the demands of an expanding middle-class who desired
that academic education and credentials should replace ascription. The
report alludes to ‘a great body of professional men who have noth-
ing but education to keep their sons on a high social level’ (Taunton
Commission 1886 p. 93). We might understand this in Bourdieusian
terms as a transparent demand for the opportunity to convert com-
fortable incomes into cultural capital, all the better to sustain a social
advantage. It contributed to the social elevation of an academic curricu-
lum, and the relegation of more practical forms of craft and technical
education to lower classes, which in turn ‘set the scene for the twen-
tieth century two-tier system persistently associated with social class’
(Tomlinson 2005b p. 164). One point to take from this is the rela-
tively simple one that the growth of secondary schooling (to become
‘universal’ following the 1944 Education Act) had social class differenti-
ation in its very foundations. The middle-class to some extent defined,
and was then defined by, the extension of secondary schooling in
forms that continue to be celebrated, emulated and in many cases,
revered.
In this research project we have been concerned with what we can
learn about white middle-class identity formation from a particular kind
of school choice and relationships to schooling and education. But it
is worth pointing out that there are two ways of thinking about the
social world, and identities within it, that we find unhelpful and seek to
avoid. The first is the idea that a social position in terms of (say) class
and ethnicity somehow determines everything that is important about
identity, that we can predict or ‘read off’ people’s beliefs and actions
from a category like ‘white urban middle-class’. Hence we use the con-
cept of habitus, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, because it
captures in a much more subtle way the dynamic relationship between
social structures and selves. Social structures and situations do indeed
normally establish a sense of reality, a sense of limits, or dispositions:
It is important to find out what these are like and what they seem to
influence without falling into the trap of determinism.
The second way of thinking that we avoid is in a sense the opposite
of this first one, and is one that is quite close to much common-sense
thinking. It posits that categories like ethnicity and class are of little con-
sequence in a modern age of individualisation in which identity itself
has lost its class and community moorings. A helpful summary of this
‘individualisation thesis’ describes how it argues that people
 White Middle-Class Identity Formation 21

. . . must now develop their own life worlds, unanchored by tradi-

tion, constructing identities that are more negotiable, looser, reflexive
and autonomous. People’s senses of self are thought to be more pro-
visional as a consequence, less firmly rooted in the ethics of duty,
responsibility and self-sacrifice, dominated instead by the ‘religion of
me’. Life as a result is said to have become more risky and uncertain,
although exposure to this risk remains highly unevenly distributed.
(Wetherell 2009a p. 5)

Collectively, the larger programme of research of which our project was

a part supports critics of the individualisation thesis (e.g. Savage 2000;
Skeggs 2004) in showing that whilst there are examples to be seen, these
are characteristically over-generalised, with individualisation being ‘a
“now you see it, now you don’t” phenomenon’ (Wetherell 2009a p. 8).
So is it possible to talk about social class and identity whilst avoiding
the extremes of social determinism and individualisation? The answer
is yes, provided care is taken to focus on those practices, actions and
experiences that are about identity formation. An important part of the
formation of identity is the laying down of dispositions in social set-
tings and social structures. Education is particularly important in the
development of the habitus. As Bourdieu puts it:

The habitus acquired in the family underlines the structuring of

school experiences . . . and the habitus transformed by schooling,
itself diversified, in turn underlies the structuring of all subsequent
experiences (e.g. the reception and assimilation of the message of the
culture industry or work experiences) and so on, from restructuring
to restructuring.
(Bourdieu 1977 p. 87)

Schooling is, then, a high-stakes business in the formation of identi-

ties. It is ‘diversified’ (increasingly so – see Chapter 4), and the choice
of a school appears as the one real chance that parents get to structure
a significant slice of socialisation beyond the home. There is plenty of
evidence of the correspondingly vast emphasis, effort and anxiety sur-
rounding school choice, especially (though of course, not exclusively)
in middle-class families (Ball 2003).
As we reached the end of our research project, we were able to say with
some confidence that ‘against the grain’ school choices led to a confir-
mation of the white middle-class identities of the young people. Yet
these identities had been forged whilst participating in a schooling that
22 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

differed markedly from mainstream white middle-class practices, and

also differed from that experienced by most of the parents themselves.
There are several quite different ways in which one might theorise
the question of the relationship between identity and social action (see
Wetherell 2009b). Our primary interest is in social practices of identity-
work, and we acknowledge that this leaves some classic concerns in the
study of identity untouched. In taking a mainly Bourdieusian approach,
we attempt to do more than simply study sets of individuals and then
draw parallels between them. Of course we are interested in individuals,
but we are just as interested in what they show us about social prac-
tices, spaces, positions and relations. Our data and analysis show that
whatever else it is, identity is always both a reflection and an enact-
ment of these social dimensions. This is firstly because people cannot
simply choose to ignore the ‘steer’ that their own habitus gives them,
or simply choose to act without recourse to the various forms of capital
at their disposal: As Bourdieu put it, though we might ‘dream of social
flying’, we cannot ‘defy the gravity of the social field’ (Bourdieu 1984
p. 370). Secondly, and equally important, participating in social spaces
always changes things for other people. In attending a particular school,
a young person and a family are not simply choosers and recipients of a
‘service’ with particular ‘qualities’: the act of participation itself changes
the nature of what is on offer, in various and sometimes contradictory
ways. Recognising such things requires a ‘break with common sense’,
and we have commented elsewhere that this can be likened to shift in
perspective from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian physics: Whilst the for-
mer concentrates on individual items and their interactions, the latter
treats positions and the spaces between them, that is the field, as just as
important (see James et al. 2009). To put this another way, people are
always embodying and enacting the social world, and understanding
something of how this works is an important task. In the next chapter
we continue to explore the idea of segmentation within the middle-
classes, drawing on the concept of habitus to link intra-middle-class
differences with family histories.
2
Family History, Class Practices
and Habitus

Introduction

Given the dominance of ideas like ‘choice’, ‘diversity’ and ‘the market’
in educational policy and implementation, it is perhaps tempting to see
secondary school choice through the most apparently simplistic of eco-
nomic perspectives, as if it was best understood through choices made
by rational, calculating individuals in an increasingly information-rich
environment. Yet even the most casual of conversations with parents
making such choices, or with school head teachers, or with young peo-
ple, will quickly expose other kinds of consideration, and indicate that
school choice is much more than a sum of intelligent use of market data
and the odd pragmatic consideration. For this reason, we cannot begin
to understand it unless we bring to bear some appropriate tools.
Habitus is one such tool. It is variously defined and characterised,
though perhaps most usefully as a set of ‘durable, transposable dis-
positions’ (Bourdieu 1977 p. 72) or ‘the active presence of past expe-
riences . . . in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action’
(Harker 1992 p. 16). There is a strong sense of embodiment too, so that
a person’s habitus is a taking on board of various elements of the social
positions they occupy and have occupied. In addition, it is meaning-
ful to speak of habitus as ‘the amalgam of accumulated history, both
personal and collective’ (Adams 2006). We are concerned to explore
something of what Pat Allatt describes as ‘relational aspects of school-
ing choice which reverberate within and down the generations’ (Allatt
1996 p. 170). The family can be said to have a habitus, and rich pat-
terns emerged from the family histories of our sample, patterns that
were textured not only according to location and type of schooling but

23
24 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

also by the extent to which the families were established within the
middle-classes.
In this chapter we begin by setting out some basic details of the
parents in the 125 families we studied. We then offer a brief discus-
sion of the concept of habitus and the idea of segmentation of the
middle-class, before presenting some of the patterns in practices that
link against-the-grain school choice and family backgrounds.

Parental educational backgrounds

The 250 parents were a highly educated group. At 58 per cent, the
proportion of parents in the sample who had attended either private
or selective state grammar schools was very high (26 per cent and
32 per cent respectively). Some 5 per cent had attended secondary mod-
ern schools, and 18 per cent had attended comprehensive schools. If we
set aside the category ‘other schools’ for a moment, 163 parents were
wholly or mainly educated in the state sector (71 per cent) and 66
of the parents were wholly or mainly educated in the private sector
(29 per cent). The latter figure is more than four times the national aver-
age rate of private secondary schooling (see Table 2.1). It is also notable
that the proportion of those who had attended Grammar (selective state
secondary) schooling is considerably higher than national averages.
Whilst private school attendance was high in the sample, in the major-
ity of families there were strong intergenerational associations with state

Table 2.1 Secondary schools attendeda by parents in the study – to nearest

whole percentages (actual numbers in parentheses)

Mothers Fathers Parents

Secondary Modern 5 (6) 5 (6) 5 (12)

Grammar 36 (45) 28 (35) 32 (80)
Comprehensive 22 (27) 14 (17) 18 (44)
Other state schoolsb 9 (11) 13 (16) 11 (27)
Private schools 26 (33) 26 (33) 26 (66)
Other schoolsc 2 (3) 14 (18) 8 (21)
Totals 100 (125) 100 (125) 100 (250)

Note:
a Where parents attended more than one type of school they have been allocated to the

category representing the greatest portion of their schooling.

b This category includes five fathers who attended State Boarding schools.
c The cases in this row include schooling overseas.
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 25

Table 2.2 Parents’ highest qualifications – to nearest whole percentages (num-

bers in parentheses)

Mothers Fathers Parents

Degree level 54 (68) 59 (74) 57 (142)

Degree plus postgraduate 34 (42) 19 (23) 26 (65)
Qualifications ‘below’ degree 12 (15) 22 (28) 17 (43)
and others where not
known
Total 100 (125) 100 (125) 100 (250)

schooling. In terms of social reproduction, almost all of those schooled

privately came from the established or second-generation middle-classes
where private schooling was already common.
As Table 2.2 shows, the parents in the study were also very highly
qualified indeed – 83 per cent to degree level, with over a quarter
also holding some form of postgraduate qualification as well (and with
mothers holding nearly twice the number of postgraduate qualifications
as fathers, making them front-runners in a marked shift from the male
dominance in postgraduate qualifications up to the 1960s – see House
of Commons 1999).
Many of the largest single group by schooling – the grammar school
attendees – were the first in their family to go to University, a highly visi-
ble marker of the role education played in their class mobility. However,
a more detailed look at the parents’ schooling also revealed consider-
able variety and movement, including various faith and secular schools,
schools overseas, boarding and different systems within the collective
experience, and in some cases, as indicated above, of individual experi-
ence. There were no clear-cut associations between the type of school
attended and the quality of the experience, although many of the
parents did report a sense of loss at being separated from their friends
at transition from primary to secondary schools (usually after passing
the 11+); or feeling barely rich/clever/good enough at private schools.
Across the sample, negative school experiences were most often asso-
ciated with an old-fashioned school ethos, including highly gendered
expectations or environments, or with strict religious teaching. A liberal
or progressive ethos, whether at private or state institutions, was more
commonly valued.
The school careers of this group of parents had often been profoundly
affected by changes to the status quo including job insecurity, reloca-
tion, divorce or other parental absences. This drew our attention to the
26 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

importance of a range of life events in terms of the impact they can have
on schooling. However, we have no way of knowing whether our par-
ticipants had experienced particularly high levels of turbulence in these
respects. What we can say is that with very few exceptions, the adults
we interviewed were at secondary school between 1965 and 1975 and
were either the last of the school cohorts to take the 11+ or amongst
the first of the cohorts to avoid it. Some had personal experience of
the transition from one system (selective) to another (comprehensive).
Thus, during their own periods of adolescence, our respondents were as
a whole subject to the formative effects of segregation by class and abil-
ity to pay for private education; class-related re-segregation according to
academic ability in grammar schools (or though personal circumstances
in state boarding); and of desegregation through the introduction of
comprehensive schooling.
As we will see, family history, and especially parental and previ-
ous generations’ experiences of schooling, appeared to function as key
points of reference for contemporary and recent choices of school.

The concept of habitus

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the concept habitus. Probably

the most common error is to regard the term as more or less equiv-
alent to ‘personality’, then find it wanting as a predictive category.
Also common is the suggestion that the term brings with it an under-
lying determinism in Bourdieu’s whole position. However, we do not
find habitus to be deterministic in the ways that some (e.g. Jenkins
1992, 2002) have suggested. We would agree with Harker (1984) and
Harker and May (1993) that such a view is based on a misconception
of the nature and purposes of the approach within which it is located.
We would also suggest that the view arises because a great deal of
Anglo-Saxon common-sense thinking gives primacy to the individual –
conceived as fundamentally a free agent – in any explanation of social
phenomena (Robbins 2006). Bourdieu’s theoretical tools are helpful in
many ways, one of which is that they facilitate units of analysis other
than the individual. This is particularly important in dealing with some-
thing as multiply-defined as social class. It is also a specific help if one is
trying to understand how sets of habits, attitudes, assumptions, expec-
tations and practices come to the surface in families, all of whom have
histories. The question is – categorically – not one of ‘what is a middle-
class habitus and what set of behaviours does it produce’. Rather it is a
question of using a theoretical tool which helps us understand practices
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 27

for what they are, namely complex, situated actions with a range of
precursors and a range of consequences, anticipated, unanticipated,
highly visible or less visible.
None of this is to deny that the concept comes with difficulties
and challenges. One concern is how it is that the dispositions that go
to make up the habitus are acquired or laid down in the first place.
Sayer notes that in much of Bourdieu’s writing, dispositions seem to be
acquired ‘. . . though a process of osmosis and shaping, through accom-
modation to material circumstances and social relations, like living in
crowded housing or being accustomed to hard manual labour or serv-
ing others’ (Sayer 2005 p. 27). These are indeed important examples of
the sorts of mechanisms through which ‘a sense of reality’ or ‘a sense
of limits’ could be established. However, drawing upon a discussion
in Bourdieu’s Distinction, Sayer also reminds us that the habitus gen-
erates not only meaningful practices but perceptions that give meaning
as well:

Ways of thinking can become habitual. Once learned they change

from something we struggle to grasp to something we can think with,
without thinking about them. In other words, for much of the time
our conceptual apparatus is not itself the subject of reflection. One
can therefore acknowledge the conceptual and concept-dependent
dimensions of social practices without assuming that this necessarily
takes the form of an ongoing rational discussion . . . Orientations and
behaviours such as condescension and deference involve habit, feel-
ing and comportment but they also imply tacit understandings and
evaluations: they involve ‘intelligent dispositions’.
(Wood 1990 p. 214)
(Sayer 2005 p. 27, emphasis in original)

To this we would add that habitus is also a dynamic concept, in that

it is subject to continuous re-adjustment, a point we illustrate with
examples from our fieldwork below. As we mentioned in the previous
chapter, perhaps the main reason that school choice is such an impor-
tant and emotive topic is that it represents (or at least appears to represent
or is presented as if it was) the only real opportunity outside the family
and immediate home environment where parents might exert a major
influence on the habitus of the child. But the main reason we need
the concept of habitus is that, put together with field, it helps us to
understand practices, and also the
28 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

generative principles underlying practices . . . Particular practices

should not be seen, then, as simply the product of habitus, but as
‘the product of the relation between the habitus, on the one hand, and
the specific social contexts or “fields” within which individuals act,
on the other’.
(Thompson 1991 pp. 13–14; original emphasis)
(Mills 2008 p. 85)

Thus it was that in a study of interactions between parents and primary

schools, Reay (1998b) pointed out that parents’ engagements with the
primary school differed in ways attributable to differences in habitus
and the different kinds of capital held – and some of them did not
have the right ‘currency’ in the particular field. Similarly, in a study of
teaching and learning in Further Education, James and Diment (2003)
showed how a set of professional dispositions and capitals generated and
celebrated in one set of circumstances could quickly become devalued
and driven ‘underground’ in the face of powerful shifts in definitions of
learning and assessment which changed the social space of work (that
is, the field) (see also James and Biesta 2007).
The families in our sample are a good example of how social class and
the structures of educational opportunity are not deterministic in any
simple sense. Here we have middle-class families making choices which
appear to go against self-interest, to be counter-intuitive. Yet, as far as
we can tell, the experiences and outcomes of this process do not appear
damaging to position or prospects: on the contrary, they appear to rep-
resent the generation of new forms of capital, and to secure identity and
opportunity. We are, therefore, as much concerned with choice, agency
and strategy as we are with notions of how such things are constrained
or framed or determined.

School choice and middle-class segmentation

In Gouldner’s (1979) terms the parents in our study would be defined

mainly as New Middle-Class, in that most worked in the public sec-
tor. However, our interviewees’ responses to some of the early questions
in our interview schedule alerted us to the need to develop a classi-
fication along the lines of historical class location. Around a quarter
(24 per cent) of the parents were from aspiring working-class back-
grounds and were the first in their family history to be in a professional
occupation: We term these first-generation middle-class. Some 40 per cent
of the parents in our sample were themselves children of people who
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 29

were first-generation middle-class, and we term these second-generation

middle-class. Finally, 36 per cent of the parents could be best described
as established middle-class (the old middle-class in Gouldner’s 1979 terms
or ‘inheritors’ in Bourdieu’s: see Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979). Most of
this latter group attended private schools as well as university and their
own parents and grandparents often went to private schools and univer-
sity, including elite universities, at a time when very few people in the
United Kingdom went to university. In such families there were often
clear markers of wealth and positions of power, status and influence (see
Crozier et al. 2008).
We use these ‘generation’ terms where it helps us describe themes in
the data, and occasionally there are glimpses of how the classification
suggests further hypotheses. One example of this would be how some
parts of our data suggest that ‘against the grain’ secondary schooling
may be more anxiety-ridden (and more closely managed and mon-
itored) amongst first generation than amongst established middle-class
families. Yet whilst there are some powerful examples of this, there
are sufficient counter-examples to prevent us declaring it as a general
tendency.
In their study of education and the middle-classes, Power et al. (2003)
show that whilst a majority of the parents saw educational success as
crucially important, and the choice of the ‘right’ school as pivotal, there
were nevertheless ‘. . . wide differences . . . about what the “right kind” of
school looked like that can be related to tensions between the old and
new middle-class’ (Power et al. 2003 p. 32). This ‘horizontal’ distinction
drew upon a development of Durkheim’s concept of organic solidar-
ity, the ‘social glue’ that keeps societies more or less integrated but
which is not reliant on the more explicit contractual arrangements of
mechanical solidarity. Bernstein proposed that organic solidarity could
itself take two forms in contemporary society. The first was based on
radical individualism, corresponding to values of enterprise and pro-
fessional control developed in the nineteenth century, and this form
still underpins the actions of the old middle-class. In families, this
leads to an emphasis on positions, unambiguous roles, hierarchy and
reproduction. The second form of organic solidarity rose quickly along-
side the twentieth-century emphasis on culture and communication,
and was more person-centred. New middle-class families are person-
focused, have weaker ‘boundaries’ and authority relationships that are
less defined by position held. Having earlier classified the schools in
their sample on Bernstein’s (related) ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’
orders, Power et al. argue that whilst
30 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

. . . the most ‘elite’ members of the middle class chose the most elite
schools, and . . . those in the lower socio-economic groups tended
towards the lower end of the prestige hierarchy . . . there was no sim-
ple linear relationship between socio-economic and school status.
Horizontal divisions reflected different orientations towards learn-
ing and school organisation which Bernstein’s distinction between
old and new middle class helps us to understand. In general, the
former tended to favour schools with the more hierarchical ethos
found in state grammar schools and the ‘respectable’ private sector.
New middle-class parents, more likely to favour more differentia-
tion and openness, could find this both in elite schools and in some
comprehensives. They were also more likely to have given weight to
their child’s preference.
(Power et al. 2003 p. 41)

This is a helpful analysis, and it is worth mentioning that in the few

cases where it occurred, a liberal or progressive ethos was a celebrated
facet of the earlier schooling of the parents we interviewed. However, as
discussed in Chapter 1, the new middle-class is itself far from homoge-
neous. Bernstein’s own sub-divisions of it denote quite disparate – even
contradicting – interests and orientations.
Our study did not set out to produce generalisations about these kinds
of class categorisations, and in any case our sample size would not
support such an endeavour. We do not see this as a significant weak-
ness: Like Ball’s study (Ball 2003) our research is not directly concerned
with the refinement of class categories or indeed with class theory, but
takes class practices as its core concern. Ball points out that ‘. . . there is
relatively little empirical or conceptual development around middle-
class practices apart from the important work done by Savage and
Butler and their colleagues and one of two others . . . .’ Like Ball we
are ‘. . . attempting to return to an emphasis on the lived realities, the
situated realizations, of class and class reproduction’ (Ball 2003 p. 6).
This focus led us to look at parental biographies across the sample,
and to note two recurrent themes within them. Firstly, there was a high
valuing of education per se. The vast majority reported that their own
parents (and often previous generations) had a keen sense of the value of
education, although there was wide variation in what particular actions
this appeared to justify, and in whether particular aspirations for edu-
cational achievement had been fulfilled or thwarted. Secondly, there
was a high incidence of what we might term a ‘sociological’ perspec-
tive on the relationships between education and social class, and with
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 31

this a marked awareness of the historical development of parts of the

education system. In particular, the emergence of comprehensive sec-
ondary schooling was a frequent historical point of reference in parents’
accounts.
As we examined our data, it became clear that recent and con-
temporary school choices were frequently understood, expressed and
explained with reference to durable (though adaptable) dispositions.
However, these were not purely individual dispositions, but collectively-
held family educational histories, or family habitus. The ‘generational’
intra-middle-class groupings discussed earlier were significant aspects
of this habitus. We now explore some examples of the relationship
between family habitus and contemporary secondary school choice.

Reactions to family habitus

A number of the parents shared in some detail their wish to avoid certain
features of their own schooling being repeated in that experienced by
their children. Negative experiences of private schooling were the most
frequently cited feature of this kind. John Levy (London, established
middle-class), who described his own parents as upper middle-class, had
attended a well-known public school for boys:

My own experience of education has had an enormous effect on me

not just in terms of my views about my children’s education but I’d
say just about everything, my outlook on life, how I view the world.
I think I could trace it all back to what happened or rather started to
happen to me at seven. At seven I got sent away to a prep boarding
school. That was bad enough, the sense of being exiled. I missed my
family, my mother in particular, terribly. But you know that was what
families like ours did and it was bruising.

John’s account gives us a strong glimpse of a particular habitus forma-

tion, including the ways in which earlier experiences are internalised,
becoming layers of dispositions onto which later layers are melded:

I took on the ethos, absorbed it to the extent I began to think it

was normal and I suppose that isn’t unsurprising because alongside
the brutality there was friendship, support, you know, a whole lot of
nurture. You bought into the package and to an extent just got on
with it but in retrospect a lot of it was horrific, as I said brutal and
brutalising. But there was another aspect I found deeply troubling
32 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

when I looked back that we all just took for granted at the time, that
it was incredibly limited socially, a sort of complacent sameness.

Whilst habitus reflects the social position in which it was constructed,

it also carries within it the genesis of new creative responses which
are capable of transcending the social conditions in which it was pro-
duced (Bourdieu 2000). John, speaking of his brother who became very
ill during schooling, reflects ‘public school was supposed to make upper
middle-class men of us but it crushed my brother’. A strong family tradi-
tion is therefore challenged by his experiences and those of his brother,
leading John to declare that private schooling is ‘something I just would
not contemplate for my own children’:

I knew I never wanted that for my own children. Pat [his partner]
must have told you about my parents’ trust fund for the children.
Well I knew despite any trust fund that I didn’t want either private
or selective schooling for my own children. But then it was so diffi-
cult because that was the accepted behaviour in my family, that’s just
what everybody did in my family, go to private school. And I think
the seminal moment came when I read that Daniel Day Lewis had
been to an urban comprehensive. I remember thinking that’s alright
then. I don’t know how many qualms his father had but he’s come
out creative and fairly sussed so you can choose that for your kids
and they can survive. And I do remember thinking when I read it –
and the children were very young at the time – this is good.

John worked as a criminal lawyer, a job that needed empathy with

a wide range of people and a capacity to deal quickly with difficult
situations. He was adamant that it was not his schooling per se, but
the witnessing of his brother’s illness and some subsequent voluntary
work (translating benefit claim forms and rules for claimants) that had
equipped him for this work: ‘People just know. They can see . . . if you
are some middle-class kid with no depth, or you have got a sympa-
thetic approach, you know, someone who is going to listen.’ Despite his
established middle-class background, John’s assessment is that private
schooling, and even the more selective kinds of state schooling, were to
be avoided. As he put it, ‘I wanted (my own) . . . kids not to be detached
from society really.’
This last point, rather than specifically negative experiences of the
sort outlined by John, was the most common reason for parents to
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 33

react against their own schooling as part of the making of choices

and decisions for the education of their children. Ella Rosen (Norton,
established middle-class) spoke of the narrowness of the social group
in most private schools, and the worrying tendency for those in power
in government and civil service to have been to those schools them-
selves, making them detached from the lives of everyone else. In another
family, Libby Greensit (Norton, established middle-class), a GP, argued
that both schools and the health service needed to ‘work for everyone’.
Sarah Rhymes (London, established middle-class) described a lengthy
and intricate process of considering several schools for her daughter
Naomi, but ruled out private schooling ‘on principle’. The privilege she
herself experienced whilst still in her teens now appeared distasteful,
and she described her dismay when at 19 years old she found that her
chosen university was

. . . full of public school children! I took a gap year and just as

I thought I’d escaped those kind of people I ended up being right
in the middle of them again. So actually my closest friends were from
State schools. I did get on with those from private schools, but I just
couldn’t believe that I’d ended up in a university that was full of
them, full of the types I thought I’d escaped. That put me off even
more. I just couldn’t bear their arrogance, just their whole attitude to
life just turned me off.

One of our cases illustrates the tenacity of family habitus in that a

father’s own experiences and views of secondary schooling contin-
ued to have a strong impact even after his death several years earlier.
Audrey Caisey (Norton – established middle-class) described how Neil,
her (second-generation middle-class) partner, had passed the 11+ exam-
ination and attended a selective boy’s Grammar school. However, he
had hated being at the school, for its academic emphasis, the fact it was
single-sex, and for how it separated him from his friends who ‘all went
to a local secondary modern school’. This experience had reverberated
through their discussions about where their own son should go:

we had sort of slight arguments all through [the time of] Christopher
at primary school because Christopher’s a very bright child and Neil
often thought, is he being pushed enough or should we maybe have
sent him off somewhere else? . . . [we discussed] do you think you
know, Christopher would do better in a private school?
34 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Christopher went to The Park, the local state comprehensive, partly

because the experiences and wishes of his father had a continued pres-
ence. However, there were other factors. Audrey also talked at length
about the ‘security’ or reassurance that she and other parents gained
from a critical mass of middle-class young people going to the nearby
state comprehensive. Following this, a strong perception of private
schools (based in part on her experience as one of six children in a
totally privately educated family) provided a compelling rationale:

. . . he’ll get more introverted and more shy if he goes to a little boys
school, than getting out into the world. And I just think you know,
okay Christopher mixes with the same old people and he doesn’t
bring Darren White and all these children who go [to the school]
home . . . but he knows they’re there, and he meets them in school,
and I know when he grows up and he’s going to be a lawyer or teacher
or whatever, at least he knows where people have come from, what
people are like and he’s not going be like the people I see who are
barristers and doctors who never actually met anyone in the world
at all except for their narrow little band, and yes we still exist within
our nice narrow little middle class environments. I’m not saying that
I go out having tea with my patients [she is a GP] . . . but I know they
are there and I know what they are about and I know what lives
they lead and it gives you a slightly greater understanding of different
people.

Audrey’s apparent certainty about Christopher’s occupational future was

a widely shared feature of parent interviews, and one we return to later
in the book. Meanwhile, she went on to suggest that in some cases the
choice of a private school is made with an element of ‘snob value’. She
also thought that some of the children in a particular private school
nearby were ‘not bright enough to exist anywhere else’, and contrasted
them to ‘the top stream at The Park School (who) are much brighter,
more with it, more alert’. Audrey wanted her own children to be exposed
to a breadth of people:

I don’t want my children to think you know, that everybody’s got a

holiday house in Sardinia, and everyone’s daddy drives a four by four
and you know and everyone, you know, can go to tennis club and
squash club and blah, blah, blah, have holidays skiing and this that
and the other . . . they’ve got to realise that not everyone does that,
we’re not all the same . . . and I just think god if everybody would just
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 35

go to state schools it would be so much better, but a lot of people

don’t.

In a few families there was a firm decision not to choose private

secondary schooling despite (a) a long familial tradition of private edu-
cation, (b) the clear availability of funds from other family members
and (c) parents themselves having had a positive personal experience of
it. Josie and Jimmy Baker (London, established middle-class) had both
been privately educated up to age 18. Both now worked in jobs with
a ‘political’ dimension and described themselves as having friends in
the ‘left spectrum’. Jimmy described how they wished to avoid private
education if they could. For both of them, the exposure to a breadth of
different kinds of people was fundamental:

. . . I think for me definitely I felt that the thing I missed out on in

growing up was being able to get on with, you know, all sorts of
people. As time has gone on that is less of a problem [for me] . . . when
she [Angela, their daughter] hits teenage years we want her to get on
with pretty much anyone. And then also because the local secondary
school . . . was a good one. I think it might have been different if the
local school was really rubbish, I think it might have been different,
but to us at the time it was . . . well it’s not brilliant but it is going to
be fine.
(Jimmy)

I think it (private education) just goes against our politics very, very
strongly. Having said that if Angela was deeply unhappy . . . I do know
someone in Manchester whose child was being bullied and you know
was having a horrible time, and he decided to send him to private
school and I don’t have a problem with that actually. For me what it’s
about is doing the best thing for your child, and I currently believe
that the best thing for my child and for most children on the whole
is to go to a school where they meet a whole range of people. If that
stops being best thing for her then yes I would consider it. It would
hurt – but I would do it.
(Josie)

The theme of schools providing the opportunity to meet ‘a whole range

of people’ was a strong one in Ball’s research amongst parents choos-
ing state over private schools (see Ball 2003 p. 138), and for some of
the new middle-class families in the study by Power et al. (2003) who
36 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

sought out secondary schools with a wide social mix. Amongst the par-
ents we interviewed, it was, additionally, a reason given for the choice
of ‘ordinary’ state schools over more selective or higher-achieving state
schools. We will return to the effects of this social mix in later chapters.
It is however worth noting that for most of the parents in families
we have referred to as ‘established middle-class’, and for many others,
private schooling remained a kind of safety-net, something that could
be activated if things went wrong with the choices that had been made.
Furthermore, the negative assessment of social narrowness did not mean
that the private sector was seen as homogeneous: there was recognition
that private schools themselves differed greatly (c.f. Edwards et al. 1989).

Re-creations of family habitus

As we have described, several established middle-class families used

against-the-grain school choice to counter or disrupt parts of an histor-
ical familial habitus. By contrast, for others who were mainly amon-
gst the first-generation middle-class families, against-the-grain school
choice seemed part of a deliberate re-creation of elements of the parental
trajectory.
Despite some pressure to ‘go private’ from parts of the extended fam-
ily, Angela and Anthony Smith (Riverton, first-generation middle-class)
were keen not to ‘buy privilege’ for their children, and wanted them
to have to work hard for what they achieved. Angela attributed this
to her own working-class background, saying ‘I feel very much on my
kind of background tramlines here, you know, you’ve got to do it and
that’s what you’re going to stick at.’ However, at the same time she
acknowledged the experimental nature of the undertaking, pointing to
the presence of relative privilege as a safety-net:

. . . if we had to, we could sell the house and move, or if we really

had to, we could just about afford private education . . . but we don’t
want to, but we thought, well, we could . . . if we really think it’s not
working for Sadie, there is a choice

Interviewer: Why is it something you wouldn’t want to do?

Just politically . . . a principle . . . really, it’s just that thing of buying

privilege and all that . . . but it’s also about wanting her to be able to
participate in the wider world and understand, in that actually we’re
very lucky as it is . . . life is good, we’ve got a comfortable house, we
have an income . . . you know, there is nothing . . . we don’t go hungry,
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 37

we don’t do any of that stuff, by a long way, and wanting her to

experience a bit what it was like for us both when we were growing
up. You know that there is a bit more of a range there and you have
to be able to get on with other people.

Interviewer: Would it be true to say that for you schooling should be about
learning to relate to a very wide range of people?

Yes, absolutely, definitely . . . and also I think even more . . . you know,
Anthony works at Oldstone University and they have a huge intake
of kids from very privileged backgrounds. He says they are clueless,
they just haven’t kind of woken up to the world, a lot of the time
in the seminars he was doing with first years, he was really teaching
them to open their eyes to the kind of social structure of Britain even.
You know, they’re just not . . . a lot of them just aren’t tuned in yet, as
I was saying. And I just don’t want, we don’t want our children to be
like that.

Here and in some other families we noted that against-the-grain school

choice was part of an educational project with a much wider remit
than schooling (though schooling always remained central). For exam-
ple, the Smiths put considerable effort into broadening the range of
young people with whom their children had social contact, and their
efforts here included running a youth group. They held fast with their
choice of the local state comprehensive school despite their daughter
Sadie wanting desperately to go to a private secondary school along
with her best friends from primary school, and despite a protracted
episode of bullying during the first year. In addition, the Smiths closely
managed many aspects of schooling and this included using personal
contacts in the school (see James and Beedell 2009). But whatever the
level of such intervention, many first-generation middle-class parents,
like the second-generation and established middle-class parents, valued
exposure to social diversity. They also shared a view that those schools
described as most successful in conventional terms would be less likely
to provide it. Christine and Robert Locke (Norton, first-generation and
second-generation middle-class respectively) had a daughter, Amy, who
was about to transfer from a largely middle-class primary school, charac-
terised by ‘some cultural diversity’, to a more socially mixed secondary
school. There she would ‘probably meet people who don’t have as much
as she does, which she might hopefully learn from that . . . that she can’t
just have everything she wants all the time’ (Robert). As Christine put
it, Amy would be alongside
38 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

. . . children from disadvantaged backgrounds. I don’t think that’s a

bad thing at all. I don’t think that the children should grow up feel-
ing that what they’ve got everyone has, is not a good thing, that’s not
something I want my children to grow up with. I want them to realise
that they do have some advantages in life and that all people don’t
have that.
(Christine)

Christine also mentioned that her children had ‘friends from other back-
grounds’ and that for them this was simply ‘part of life’. She mentioned
that the family had employed au-pairs since the children were small,
and explained that this provided exposure to other countries and lan-
guages. This familiarity with diversity was closely coupled with a general
view of education as a ‘life-changing experience’. Christine herself had
grown up living on a council estate and had attended a comprehensive
school which at the time had just ceased being a secondary modern
school, and which she now regarded as having had low standards and
low expectations. She nevertheless did well academically, and following
‘A’ levels had attended a redbrick university and also completed a post-
graduate teaching qualification. This (in the context, unusual) trajectory
remained an explicit reference-point when it came to her own children:

I think education is still the one thing that can genuinely give you
a life changing experience, that can give you access to opportunities
and experiences that you would otherwise struggle to find, and that’s
still the case. So I do believe in education in that respect. I think I’m
living proof of that, so that in terms of my experience, my upbringing
compared to the kind of opportunities that my children now have are
because of my education really.

In these and similar cases there are middle-class families making similar
kinds of school choice but with differing underpinning rationales: put
most simply, for some families the choice of an ordinary state school
might amount to an opportunity to avoid history repeating itself, whilst
for others the same choice can provide an opportunity for making his-
tory repeat itself. Yet in both sets of cases, there is also a strong common
feature – the desire for contact with social diversity. Examples like these
illustrate the importance of background social class locations in shap-
ing current practices, but they also suggest that even with something
as specific as against-the-grain secondary school choice, it is much too
simplistic to think of ‘the middle classes’ in an undifferentiated way.
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 39

Against-the-grain school choice to meet specific needs

The choice of an ordinary secondary school was usually characterised by

difficulty and anxiety in most of the families we studied, at least in the
initial stages. But in a small number of cases, the choice of such a school
was such a great departure from the family habitus that it deserves closer
attention. One such example was in the Denton family in Riverton.
Annie and her husband were both from established middle-class back-
grounds, and like their own parents, both had been privately educated.
The discovery that two of their three children had learning difficulties
led to the Dentons seeing educational processes in a new light:

I suppose we sort of thought that we might educate them privately in

a very abstract way, because that’s what our experience was. So I think
that obviously became a non starter, so I think it (the identification of
special educational needs) made us rethink everything really. It made
us re think a lot of our own attitudes to things and it liberates you
from that whole middle class thing actually.

By ‘that whole middle-class thing’ Annie was referring to the difficul-

ties faced by some of her friends of choosing between private schools
and high-performing state schools, and also to the assumption that all
their children would go to university after an increasingly pressurised
and narrowly academic process. She had taken her son Ralph to look
at the special needs provision in Mountstevens, a high-performing,
ex-grammar state secondary school, and had come away very disap-
pointed. The provision seemed poor, the school seemed overly con-
cerned about its league-table position, and a teacher had surreptitiously
advised her ‘don’t send him here’. Annie then recounted what happened
when Redwood, a secondary school located in a white working-class area
and with well below the national average level for GCSE results, came
into contention:

I was beginning to think . . . and I said ‘Redwood School’s our next

[option] . . . but no child of mine is ever going to go to Redwood,
you know, dreadful place.’ And all my middle class prejudices came
back. We went to see a solicitor who specialises in that sort of family
law and child admissions and she said ‘If you want to put him into
Waterford, you’re going to have to prove to a committee or who-
ever sits and decides these things, that (the local authority) can’t
meet your needs, so you’re going to have to go and have a look at
40 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Redwood.’ So I thought – it was a complete, you know, dragging

myself through the gates with my nose in the air, I’ll be brutally
honest. Went in, met the special needs lady and thought ‘She’s really
nice.’ Really nice room, nice feel to it, nice atmosphere, you know, gut
instinct really. And I just thought wherever he goes, he’s not going to
find it easy, but I think the support mechanism is here. So I came out
and thought well for better or worse, we haven’t got a lot of choice,
we’ll send him here. And then I thought ‘Well, I’m not going to think
about it because it’s too scary and it’s going to be too hideous . . . the
first day he’s there and it’s going to be like primary school, but about a
million times worse.’ So I just put that thought on hold because I just
thought we haven’t got anywhere else to go really. So, yes, I spent all
the summer holidays trying not to worry about it. He’s gone there,
I’m not sure academically he’s doing great things, but he’s incredibly
happy for the first time ever.

Later in the interview, Annie talked more about the kind of environment
that the school offered, and the potential benefits. Here she refers to
avoiding her son being ‘cocooned’, a point with a direct connection to
her own educational background in which she had become isolated in
small private provision that felt removed from the real world:

What I didn’t want was that he went somewhere where he was sort of
cocooned, because I thought at the end of the day he’s going to have
to go out to the outside world and I think actually, subconsciously
I suppose, I thought, well actually throw him in somewhere like that,
which is a pretty full on city comprehensive . . . it can’t be any worse
than the environment he’s been in, in primary school really. He’s
either going to sink or swim actually.

So Ralph attended Redwood, a below-average-performing state com-

prehensive school, not because it is his ‘catchment’ school (which it
was at the time) but because it had a very good special needs provi-
sion compared to Mountstevens, the ex-grammar, high-performing state
comprehensive in another part of Riverton. Redwood is seen as ‘a pretty
full on city comprehensive’. His two sisters went to Mountstevens and
Hammerton (an above-average-performing, out-of-town state school)
respectively. The one at Hammerton went to the induction day at
Redwood, and the experience speaks strongly of the family habitus and
how, if it is sufficiently adrift of field, the habitus finds itself as a ‘fish out
of water’:
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 41

I went for Redwood because we’d been lulled I think, by Ralph’s

experience. It’s not a popular school, it’s not the school of choice
for parents around here, Redwood just isn’t. So we didn’t even look
at another school for her, she was going to go to Redwood and she
was fine about it, but no girl was going from her (primary) school
and she went to the induction day, I just dropped her off – fine, but
how wrong I was . . . I picked her up and she was practically hysterical,
which is unlike her, she’s very straightforward, and she just looked at
me in that way that you think ‘I can’t actually ignore this . . . ’ She said
‘Please don’t send me there’ . . . So she went down for a day, absolutely,
absolutely hated it.

Interviewer: What did she dislike most or did you not get to the bottom
of it?

No, I absolutely got to the bottom of it and I knew the minute she
said ‘Please don’t send me there.’ I knew she’s too middle class . . . she
didn’t see anybody there that . . . she didn’t know anybody which
I think is a disadvantage for any child. And I think it does come
down to identity really. [I said] ‘well you can’t tell me that everybody
in your tutor group was horrible.’ She said ‘they weren’t horrible,
but nearly everybody came up to me and said, you’re really posh
aren’t you?’
Interviewer: And her friends had gone elsewhere?

All gone elsewhere. There were a lot going to the private sector.

Annie described to us how, following this episode, she realised that she
could not ‘fight for all three’ of her children and how she ‘took the
easy option’, securing a place at Hammerton. Her daughter had a friend
already going to Hammerton, and appeared to be ‘really happy there’.
But reflecting on this, Annie told us:

It’s worked out really well, but it went against all my judgement to
do that really. I found it really hard . . . I wrote a long letter to the
school (Redwood) saying our feelings for the school hadn’t changed,
we still felt it was doing a fantastic job, Ralph was still very happy
there, but at the end of the day, my sanity and her happiness just
had to come above all other worthy principles . . . I think sometimes,
you have to make a decision that . . . at the end you have to go against
your principles because actually I thought by sticking to them, I’m
actually not doing what’s right for her as an individual.
42 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

We will return to the theme of a tension between ‘principles’ and

‘doing what’s right for the child’ in Chapter 4 and subsequently. Annie
describes her engagement with school choice as having taken her
‘slightly outside the general soup of what parents . . . our social group,
looks at’. Whilst it may be going too far to call this an ‘out of habitus
experience’, it does seem to have given her a distance that is generally
unavailable to other parents in her geographical, economic and social
location. It generated new forms of reflection, which she articulated
when we asked her what she hoped her children might be doing as
adults:

Now almost without a shadow of a doubt, most of my contemporaries

see academic success, university . . . as absolutely the norm. And actu-
ally as not just the norm, its food and drink, there’s almost nothing
outside that. And within that . . . I am quite concerned that . . . our gen-
eration of children are becoming very narrow in our view of what a
human being is. Maybe having Ralph has allowed me to broaden my
thoughts on that. I think I would have been just like that had we had
three very able children who went to private school – I would have
absolutely been on that same escalator going up. Because I haven’t
been able to, it’s a very liberating thing because you can stand back
and look at it.

We came across several examples of families finding state compre-

hensive schools to be particularly responsive to the special needs of
particular children, and this responsiveness was highly valued.

Conclusion

We would argue that the concept of habitus provides a helpful lens

through which to view against-the-grain secondary school choices.
Habitus is not only ‘a sense of place’ (Hillier and Rooksby 2005), it
can also be ‘a sense of the past’ (Reay 2004). A high proportion of the
parents in our sample had themselves attended either selective state
or private schools for their secondary education, and they were also
a highly qualified, geographically mobile group. In the course of our
research we found that against-the-grain secondary school choices for
their children could be understood as expressions of elements of fam-
ily habitus. However, this did not operate in a uniform direction or
manner. Several of the established and second-generation middle-class
families made school choices that were a conscious reaction to the
 Family History, Class Practices and Habitus 43

perceived narrowness (socially and/or academically) of the parents’ own

schooling. On the other hand, particularly amongst the ‘first generation’
middle-class families, the choice of an ordinary state school sometimes
reflected a wish to reproduce in microcosm the trajectories of the par-
ents: there was a desire on the part of those parents that their children
should have to compete in ordinary circumstances for their success and
should experience something of the same climb they had themselves
made as part of their own upward mobility. In other cases, against-the-
grain school choices are both the product and expression of a disdain
for conventional views of school quality or educational success, or a
‘sociological’ confidence that characterises family habitus. We have used
the example of the Denton family to illustrate some of this because it
provides particularly clear examples of practices in which middle-class
habitus and school choice interact. Later, in Chapter 6, we return to the
link between habitus and the psycho-social.
In the next chapter we consider how ‘place’ and locality interact with
habitus in relation to choices of schooling.
3
Habitus as a Sense of Place

Introduction

The parents in our study reside in three urban locales which differ in a
variety of complex ways. These include size of city, ethnic diversity and
global links. London is the key global, cosmopolitan city which in turn
offers a rich variety of resources and experiences to those in a position to
exploit them, leading Butler with Robson (2003) to describe the London
middle-classes as embodying a ‘metropolitan habitus’. Whilst we do not
set out to explore the existence of a ‘metropolitan habitus’ in Riverton
and Norton, we draw on this idea to compare and contrast the simi-
larities and differences for the families in our study, extant across the
three sites. In particular we explore how different geographical spaces
impact on the parents’ choice of school. We look at the ways that geog-
raphy gives rise to differential distribution of goods and resources which
in turn exacerbates the competitiveness between social classes and class
fractions. This aspect is particularly salient for our parents in terms of
the availability of the ‘acceptable’ local school and the supplementary
educational support they often felt they needed to provide for their
children.
Therefore the main purposes of this chapter are to demonstrate per-
tinent similarities and differences amongst the parents in the three
locales; the similarities and differences in the three locales themselves;
and to identify the salience of these similarities and differences in terms
of school choice and identity formations. We discuss data from inter-
views across these three urban locales and consider the implications
these spatial differences make to white middle-class identities and as
part of that their choices for their children’s school. We build on the

44
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 45

concept of habitus as outlined in the previous chapter, though with a

particular emphasis on ‘habitus as a sense of place’ (Hillier and Rooksby
2005).

Local landscapes – Geographical Differences: the

significance of local educational and socio-economic and
cultural contexts

As seen in Chapter 2, it is possible to subdivide the middle-class fam-

ilies in our study in terms of classed generations. In this respect we
analyse what Bourdieu (2005) refers to as the ‘dialectical confronta-
tion between habitus, as a structured structure, and objective structures’
(p. 46). All of the parents are encountering conditions different to those
upon which their own habitus/dispositions were constructed, whether
this is in terms of their new or relatively new class locations, or within
the context of the urban comprehensive school itself. Both the school
and the home locality are spaces where these tensions and possibili-
ties for identity generation are played out. Moreover, socio-economic
and political contexts impact on parents’ perceptions and actions; for
example, in Norton only 8 per cent of the inner city population was
middle-class and there were far fewer ethnic minorities than in London
where over a quarter of the population was middle-class and in some
areas ethnic minorities made up the majority. As we will show in later
chapters these aspects influenced parents’ responses and attitudes to the
schools and their children’s school experiences.
Amongst the families studied within and across the three locales there
were considerable areas of overlap in terms of cosmopolitan dispositions
and left-leaning, pro-welfare tendencies. There were also differences
such as in terms of occupation: London had the largest percentage
of parents working in the private sector, 43 per cent, compared to
17 per cent and 12 per cent in Norton and Riverton respectively. London
also had the highest number working in creative industries (London
19 per cent; Norton 6 per cent; Riverton 7 per cent). Riverton had
the largest number of educational professionals, at 37 per cent, with
29 per cent in London and 21 per cent in Norton. The largest profes-
sional group in Norton were health workers with 38 per cent (mainly
doctors) (see Appendix 2 for more details). Given these profiles it is per-
haps not surprising that the majority of our participants were highly
committed to the welfare state. As indicated earlier, there were also class
differences in terms of their family histories. In London 40 per cent of
parents were established middle-class with the majority of these having
46 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

attended private schools as children and most having parents who

had been to university. Norton had the highest percentage, at almost
40 per cent, of first generation middle-class, whose own parents were
working-class; the second-generation middle-class grouping was more
evenly spread across the three locales although there was a slightly
higher percentage in Riverton. Although we cannot read too much into
such data we would suggest that these class locations have some impact
on self-concept of class and possibly on confidence and a sense of class
in/security.
There were also discernible spatial differences between the parents in
relation to political activism and civic engagement. Whilst most had
at some time been on political demonstrations, such as anti-Iraq war
demonstrations, few were politically active in terms of current trade
union activity or party political activity. Most of these were in London
with almost 25 per cent of the parents claiming to be involved in some-
thing of this kind. Whilst this is substantially higher than the other two
areas, Butler with Robson’s (2003) survey of London parents showed that
political interest was a ‘low scoring prime activity’ and even those who
were members of a political party tended to be largely passive (p. 134).
However, over a third of our London parents demonstrated their active
citizenship in terms of their role as school governors, although almost a
quarter of Riverton parents had been school governors too.
In terms of wealth as indicated by the ACORN1 categories of location
of residence, our families occupied similar types of residence indicating
similar income levels. Our research ranged across all areas of inner and
greater London, Riverton and Norton, although the majority of partici-
pating Norton parents resided in predominantly white areas which were
largely middle-class. Across all areas a substantial proportion of the par-
ents (London 48 per cent, Norton 47 per cent and Riverton 33 per cent)
lived in high-income areas. Almost a quarter of those in London lived
in ACORN category 15 areas, where only 1.17 per cent of the UK popu-
lation live. Just over a third of the Riverton parents, and a fifth of those
in Norton, lived in ACORN category 13, where only 0.87 per cent of
the UK live (ACORN 2006). These high-income areas are characterised
by large houses, with four or more bedrooms, often in Georgian and
Victorian terraces, or detached, owner-occupied by professional couples
and families. Of the other parents across the three locales, 29 per cent
lived in medium-income areas most of which are areas that have been or
are in the process of being gentrified; and only 4 per cent lived in poor-
income and multi-ethnic areas (one in Norton and four in London). (See
Appendix 3 for further details.)
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 47

As a global and cosmopolitan city, London has the scope and capac-
ity to offer the white, middle-classes immense opportunities. Living in
London is thus in itself potentially advantaging but even more so for
the already privileged. But living there is also highly risky, for example
in terms of the quality of education and the anxieties of social and eth-
nic mix (Butler with Robson 2003): indeed some Norton and Riverton
parents had moved out of London precisely in order to reduce such
risks. Arguably the relative wealth and social and cultural opportuni-
ties offered in London mediate these risks, making them worth taking.
Specifically for these parents, if the school experience didn’t work out
there were plenty of alternatives.
Place and time are important elements in influencing and impact-
ing on the parents’ attitudes and behaviours with respect to school
choice. In all three areas the majority of parents in our sample sent
their children to a local comprehensive school even though by con-
ventional measures the general quality of state education in Riverton
and London was particularly poor, thus limiting the landscape of choice
for even the advantaged. In Table 3.1 we present data on the participat-
ing children’s schools in terms of the Office of Standards in Education
(Ofsted) performance indicators and demographic indicators for 2004
and 2005.2 The key measurement that Ofsted and other agencies use for
secondary school academic achievement is the percentage of five A∗ −C
GCSEs; at the time of our research the national average was 57 per cent
of pupils gaining five A∗ −C GCSEs. In Riverton and Norton some of the
data were particularly difficult to access, therefore some of this is incom-
plete. However, the table below provides an indication of the types of
schools attended by the children in our study and the similarities and
differences across the three locales.
Although the choice of schools in Riverton and London may appear
to represent a challenge to middle-class expectations for class reproduc-
tion, with respect to London at least, Bridge (2006) argues that the scale
of the metropolitan area means that the range of strategies middle-class
parents employ can be accommodated within their desired neighbour-
hoods. As he says: ‘The size of London enables middle-class residents to
keep all social fields (in the Bourdieusian sense) in play at the same time’
(p. 725). Hence whilst risk of school choice is prevalent, if it doesn’t
work out there are alternatives. In Riverton the only real alternative was
the private sector, though for most families in the sample this was not
a real option on either ideological or financial grounds which suggests
that other considerations became part of the location decision-making
process for these parents.
 48
Table 3.1 School performance indicators and demographic details

Number of % of the schools % of the % of the % of the % of the % of the

schools performing at or schools with schools with schools with schools with schools with
participating below the Black and over 10% on 10% of between 10% 50% or more
children national Minority free school children with and 28% of of children
attended average of Ethnic pupils meals SEN children with with SEN
(57%) A∗ −C × 5 SEN
GCSEs

London 40 80 95 with 50 92 (60% had 13 8

or more BME over 25%)
Riverton 12 83 17 with over 75 75
50 BME
Norton 12 50 25 with 42 (33% had 67
10–17% BME between 20%
and 28%; the
other schools
had less than
13% i.e. the
national
average)

Note: Percentages have been rounded up.

 Habitus as a Sense of Place 49

As others have found (e.g., Butler with Robson 2003; Bridge 2006)
there are indeed a range of reasons for families’ choice of location.
For many of our parents choice of location was based less on con-
siderations of local schools and more on the ‘ready-made aesthetic
product’ (Bridge 2006 p. 725) such as those who bought into high-
income areas (for example, Mountvale in Norton or Hillside in Riverton)
or those gentrifiers who sought aesthetic satisfaction from character-
ful Victorian houses and vibrant, diverse and/or ideologically conducive
locales.
As Abby and Stuart Spedding explained in describing their area of
St Marks in Riverton:

It’s kind of middle class, I mean there’s a small . . . a certain diversity in

the ethnicity but not very large, so it’s what I would call kind of more
successful Afro-Caribbean . . . And a lot of white middle class public
sector professionals I think . . . Fairtrade coffee and that kind of thing.
Yeah, it’s the reason why certain shops we buy from in Whittington
Road . . . there’s a greengrocers where people serve you and . . . I mean
it’s actually, I think it’s just managed to survive from people who used
to have it like that but kind of buoyed [by] the new people coming
in . . . I mean Whittington Road’s just got an amazing array of little
shops hasn’t it? Most of the shops have been replaced by coffee bars
now but as I say. . . . they were talking about Fairtrade this and organic
veg box that . . . but people, I mean recently well to do, so there are a
lot of cars out on the street as you saw, you know two car families
and things and what we’ve seen is, we’ve been here 11 years, is more
and more families . . . fewer student houses or . . . it’s become more of a
residential area which we’re probably part of.
(Abby and Stuart Spedding, Riverton)

These are Savage’s (2010) ‘elective belongers’ for whom the aesthetics of
their home and the green credentials of the locality or colourful ‘ethnic’
shops are attractive. Similarly privately educated teacher Ella Rosen and
her family chose Marchfield in Norton for similar reasons, though in
addition to the local aesthetics of place she also indicated the desire to
experience difference: a different kind of world; a factor which was more
generally and explicitly articulated in relation to choice of the urban
school:

And that’s also why we chose City Road Primary, or I suppose why
we are living in Marchfield as opposed to Mountvale or Barchester,
50 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

because obviously we could afford to live in those places, is because

I wanted them to grow up and have friends who came from all
different kinds of background and just think that was the norm.
Which they have done, or they are doing. Now what will be inter-
esting is, to see if they kind of revert to type as they get older, to
sort of you know be quite choosy, you know seek out people who
are you know, people like George[her husband] and I. I don’t know
if they will or not really, but, I just feel it’s a much more balanced
experience of life for them.
(Ellen Rosen, Norton)

In London Julie Hextell talked in similar terms about the local diversity
or ‘mix’ as she put it, influencing their choice:

. . . we went to a local estate agent for somewhere to live and he said

‘I know where would suit you, Manor Park’ and it did. I mean he
described it as a Liquorice Allsorts area, that was his description of
it, for which I think he meant you know its racially mixed and ‘you
will like that’ . . . I like it here, yeah I like the mixture and I like the
sort of vibrant . . . there is lots happening; there are lots of different
things going on lots of different people . . . You know it is probably
the most racially mixed place you can find. I mean there are lots of
places where there are high numbers of non British, non British born
here, but it is the mixture here and yeah it’s fascinating.

Here we see active choosers of locality driven by particular desires of how

they wish to construct their and their families’ lives. For these families,
this is a lifestyle choice, driven by notions of community or getting close
to ‘real people’, ‘real experiences’, and possibly by elements of roman-
ticism or nostalgia (Savage 2010). This point about ‘mix’ is important
since it also emerged as a key driver in the choice of school. However,
it can be a misleading term since in practice it may not actually refer
to social mixing per se but rather to the social backdrop, the context for
living: the nature of the place without the realisation or actualisation
of the space (De Certeau 1984). The white middle-class parents inter-
acted little with these diverse surroundings and as Savage describes they
bracket out what doesn’t fit or work for them:

The landscape is one which is also defined by physical, rather than

social markers. Visual and other sensory perceptions are crucial,
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 51

whereas the values, attitudes and interests of other local residents

seem less important, unless they intrude.
(Savage 2010 p. 6)

The relationship to place for these ‘elective belongers’ and ‘gentrifiers’ is

fragile, and it ‘oscillates between belonging and not belonging’ (Savage
2010).
For some, choice of place was though very specifically about belong-
ing and identification with the other residents like themselves:

We found while we started looking further afield than Barchester

and into Mountvale, that we liked the people whose houses we
were looking at in Mountvale, more than we did the type of person
that was living in Barchester. It was an odd thing, so that’s how we
ended up being . . . We concluded that the kind of people who lived in
Mountvale were probably more like us than the kind of people who
lived in Barchester, just by judging the type of people whose houses
we were looking at.
(Carolyn and Fred Drummond, Norton)

Mountvale in particular is an example of a middle-class enclave.

It offered a village-like, safe space for the parents and their children
within an urban context. As Sheila Moss explained:

I’ve always been able to say to the kids if they were out and some-
thing happened there would be a hundred doors they could knock
on, really. You know, people [who] would even know their mum by
sight or that know them, I think that’s really quite important for
children.
(Shelia Moss, Norton)

For these parents Mountvale evoked a strong sense of place and belong-
ing. It provided a community of support and safety. It was a place to
locate their identities – ‘a place called home’ (Massey 1994).
Not surprisingly, there were fewer such choices for some of the new
first-generation middle-class families. Aspirant and reluctant to live
where they had come from, they sought affordable suburban enclaves:

It’s not town life . . . we couldn’t afford town life when we first moved
in, but it’s become a lot more affluent, over the last 7–8 years house
prices have rocketed. I mean we bought this house 12 years ago for
52 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

£45,000. It’s worth over 200,000 now and I think it’s the overspill
from Rivermouth that’s moved here so you’ve got lots of professional
people . . . I was just saying to [Mike] the other night there’s three con-
vertible cars in the street now and we never had convertibles, lots of
new cars, er, you know, it is quite an affluent area.
(Sarah Potts, Norton)

Geography and the impact on choice

Although all the parents in our study sent at least one, and in most
cases all, of their children to comprehensive schools, they do appear to
some extent, to have exercised their ‘choice’. In London, whilst a num-
ber of parents sent their children to schools performing at well below
the national average, a number of others were clearly active choosers,
‘playing the market’ in terms of assessing the league tables, the distance
from home, putting their children in for ‘entrance exams’ or an inter-
view and going to appeal if they weren’t allocated their choice of school.
In Riverton the Booths sent one daughter to a low-performing compre-
hensive (Rivermead, then with GCSE results of 29 per cent A∗ −C) but
then ‘worked up’ their Roman Catholic credentials for the younger, non-
statemented dyslexic daughter to get into Faithdown (46 per cent A∗ −C).
Riverton had experienced a prolonged period of white flight into the pri-
vate sector and to neighbouring local authority areas, arguably helping
to depress the average state school performance of 35 per cent five GCSE
A∗ −Cs across the Local Authority area (2004) – at the time amongst the
lowest in the country. The parents committed to the urban schools were
highly exercised to find a school they considered acceptable.
In London also many families sent their children to different
comprehensives according, in their view, to their children’s differing
personalities and needs: another aspect of playing the market and a key
feature of New Labour’s rationale for the right of parents to ‘choose’
their child’s school. In making this choice London parents frequently
weighed up the nature of the comprehensive school and whether their
child could cope with what they perceived as the challenges of class and
ethnic diversity.
In Norton only three families sent their children to those schools per-
forming well below the national average; one of these was a lone parent
living in one of the low-income areas who sent one of her daughters
to the local comprehensive in that area. Her older daughter went to
a high-performing Catholic school. In her case the choice was more
to do with her limited options and resources given that her younger
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 53

daughter failed the entrance exam to the Catholic secondary school.

Parents living in the gentrified area we call Castlewall, where their local
school had the largest minority ethnic population in the city, is pre-
dominantly working-class and in 2004, when we began the research,
gained 32 per cent on the GCSE ‘economy’, preferred to send their
children across the city to the more ‘acceptable’, ‘good enough’ compre-
hensive schools. Parents living in another gentrified area, Marchfield,
also favoured the Park Comprehensive over closer, more working-class
schools which included a Sports Academy.
Geography in terms of space and place of city and locale is clearly an
issue here. This includes: the size of the middle-class group (SEC 1–2);
the housing patterns of the middle-classes; whether or not there is social
integration or segregation and/or middle-class white flight altogether
from the inner city. In all three cities, we came across a number of low-
performing comprehensive schools in which, according to head teachers
and other contacts, there were no middle-class children at all.
Most of our Norton parents, as we have indicated, lived in the afflu-
ent Mountvale area. Therefore, for most parents their nearest primary
school (Mountvale Primary) had a majority of middle-class children.
Mountvale, like the majority of primary schools attended by children in
the study, was high performing, above the national average.3 As it hap-
pens for the Mountvale residents, their nearest comprehensive school
is The Park and whilst at the time most of our participants’ children
started there it was achieving below the national average; at the time of
writing it is achieving well above this (at 63 per cent), compared to the
national average of 59 per cent. The Park given its location and proxim-
ity to Mountvale is a, if not the, feeder secondary school and is therefore
patronised by a significant minority of middle-class children who had
known each other at Mountvale Primary School.
In starting our research we anticipated that sections of the middle-
classes engaged in a form of resistance in choosing not to play the
educational market and in sending their children to their local urban
comprehensive. Yet the reality is more subtle and complex, and shaped
by location. There is clearly less need for middle-class parents in Norton
to work the market. In Riverton many schools were immediately dis-
counted either because of geography, attainment or reputation. The few
schools regarded as acceptable were so regularly oversubscribed they
were not seen as worth applying for. Hence there were fewer ‘acceptable’
comprehensive school alternatives. House prices in Riverton were high
and were rising just as fast as in London. We can see a mutually reinforc-
ing situation developing in Riverton between the housing and education
54 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

markets: for example, the low house prices in the Broadway area in the
1980s led to a cohort of white middle-class children into City Wall Pri-
mary School feeding in to Redwood Comprehensive School, the school
where the largest number of our Riverton families sent their children
(13 families: 43 per cent).
In London urban comprehensives are more socially and ethnically
diverse and as such are considered to be challenging and generate anx-
iety. Whilst some parents settled for the local school many employed
their privileged knowledge to try and find the best possible acceptable
option. Where they lived, either by choice or otherwise, did impose risks
in terms of school choice. There is in a sense a tension between being an
active gentrifier and the consequences of this for the future of their chil-
dren’s education. Although many parents seemed to have considered
the potential consequences for schooling when choosing their homes,
others had not thought this through. In a few cases there was the happy
discovery that the local comprehensive school was, after all, acceptable.
In Julie Hextell’s case, for example, she found they were ‘lucky’ with
their children’s school:

I think that I have been lucky enough to live near a school where
I can practice what I believe . . . I believe in state education, I believe in
people being taught. I believe in the comprehensive system, I believe
in the comprehensive educational system, if done properly it works.
But we’ve just had too much tinkering around. But I was lucky in as
much as I lived in an area where I could send my child to the local
comprehensive school in Hackney. If I’d had a boy and my nearest
school was Hazelmere I’m quite sure I would have done what my
friends did who work at Friends of the Earth and are social workers
and are bang on socialists, they moved for a year to get their child
into Denisford. And they are much more, far more moral than I am.
I was lucky so where – so my financial ability to be able to live in
a house like this has enabled me to live by my moral choice, if that
makes sense. These things are never cut and dried. I got lucky. To be
able to say, ‘oh yes I sent my child to a comprehensive school in
Hackney, aren’t I good, look how well they’re doing’. But really I just
got lucky.
(Julie Hextell, London)

Maureen Evercroft, in Eastvale Park, London, said something similar but

in her case was saved by the critical mass of people like her:
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 55

I feel extremely lucky in this area because one of the things that
made the choice of schools relatively easy is there are a lot of normal
wealthy middle class people as teachers, and social workers. I have
got a friend who lives in Chiswick whose daughter has also gone to
a local comprehensive on a point of principle but because there is
so much more money in Chiswick she felt she was almost the only
person in her street whose child was at a state school let alone a local
comprehensive . . . The fact that (here) there is a mix and so there is
a mix of classes in the area but there is this sort of nexus of people
that I feel comfortable with as well as a bigger variety that my kids
feel comfortable with, made it a lot easier.

Feeling ‘lucky’ signals the parents’ relief at being able to act out their
principles with a less angst ridden and risky choice in sending their
children to these schools. However, it may also be a reminder that such
matters can rarely be cleanly categorised into ‘conscious decisions’ and
‘lucky outcomes’. For Bourdieu, social practices often entail factors that
are neither particularly conscious nor unconscious and which are ‘mis-
recognised’ (i.e. attributed to other realms of meaning) as they occur
(see for example Grenfell and James 1998).

Relationship to the local – rooted in or routed through?

Just under 70 per cent of all parents (for whom we have information)
were ‘incomers’ to the area in which they were living. If we look at
this in terms of family units, more than 50 per cent of families were
incomers in London, Norton and Riverton. In London and Riverton,
just less than 10 per cent of families (that is, both parents) are from
that area, but the figure is almost double in Norton, with 18 per cent of
families where both parents grew up and have remained in the area. The
rest of the family units are a mixture of one parent from the area and one
parent an incomer. Many of the incomers came to the area for university
and stayed or came for graduate jobs. In Norton and Riverton there was
a very small number of families (two in Norton and one in Riverton)
who moved there (out of London) specifically for a better quality of
life and cited the desire for better schooling as one of the motivating
factors.
Although the families tend to live in ethnically diverse and gentrified
areas, particularly in London and Riverton, as we have said, there was
very little social mixing between the families and their local commu-
nities, in any of the three locales. There was very little social mixing
56 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

amongst the children in their secondary schools (which we discuss

further in Chapter 7) and their primary schools are often predomi-
nantly white with majority middle-class intakes, although there is more
evidence of social mixing at primary school level.
Social geographers have written extensively on the significance of
place. In our study the significance of place plays out differently
across the three locales. Drawing on May’s (1996) analysis, the work
of Harvey, Massey, as well as May, can help us glimpse some under-
standing as to the parents’ relationship to their localities. Harvey (1989,
1993), for example, has argued that in contemporary society the urban
dweller frequently becomes defensive, territorial and competitive about
their urban space, creating spatial barriers or ‘bounded space’. Massey
(e.g. 1994) suggests a more optimistic view of (urban) space and the
relationship between place and identity. She argues that space should
be understood as multi-dimensional and comprising the ‘simultane-
ous coexistence of social interrelations at all geographical scales’, and
therefore that place can be conceived of in this way too (p. 168). Fol-
lowing on from this she argues that the ‘identity of place’ is therefore
more provisional than is most often acknowledged, and the identity of
place is actually formed through juxtaposition and interrelationships
and interactions outside of that particular space. Massey therefore sees
greater possibilities for more progressive and harmonious engagement
with space and place. May (1996) as he says himself, takes a third
view: one that is less polarised and which aims to acknowledge greater
complexity of ‘contemporary place identities’ (p. 195). In his analysis
(of Stoke Newington) he argues that there is evidence to show that peo-
ple are likely to draw on what he calls ‘multiple place identities’ (p. 210).
In his case study he demonstrates an instrumentalism amongst sections
of the community (the ‘new cultural class’) in their desire to accumulate
life-enhancing, aesthetically desirable opportunities and experiences as
defined by them, and what seems to have ‘cultural’ currency. In other
words, he argues, these residents have the control (over their locale) to
enable them to construct their locale as a space in which they ‘can have
it all’ (p. 210): perhaps this is akin to Butler’s ‘metropolitan habitus’
(Butler with Robson 2003). Although there is some evidence of all of
these types in all three of our locales, we could say that in areas of
Norton and the Mountvale area in particular, the middle-class inhabi-
tants tended to relate to their locale in terms of Harvey’s ‘bounded space’
(1993). This can in part be attributed to the desire for a critical mass of
‘people like us’ particularly for those Norton white middle-classes living
in the inner city where they constituted a tiny percentage (8 per cent) of
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 57

the urban population. In Riverton the relationship can be categorised as

‘a more progressive sense of place’ (Massey 1994), whereby local attach-
ment is less constrained to a bounded area of the city or indeed the
city itself. It is a more provisional aspect of identity influenced by ‘the
readymade aesthetic product’ (Bridge 2006) or ethos of the region as
well as areas of the city. In London the relationship is more akin to
May’s (1996) ‘multiple place identity’ in the sense of taking on differ-
ent identifications and moving in and out or between different milieu
and cultural experiences but not necessarily being wholly captured by
or committed to anything in particular. However, separateness between
the classed and ‘raced’ groups dominates relationships to the local across
all areas.
Community has always been a morally charged concept because it is
about the obligations to, and expectations of, the individuals one lives
closest to (Williams 1976; Revill 1993). It links personal responsibility,
commitment and identification with people other than the family. How-
ever, within dominant, including political, discourses on both the right
and left, and social policy theorists (Putnam 2000), there is seen to have
been a demise of community dating from the 1980s. In the twenty-first
century we still have powerful imagined communities, but there is scant
empirical evidence that communities, rooted in the local and with the
power to reach across class and ethnic boundaries, actually exist. People
may share neighbourhoods as a living space but this does not mean they
will interact together as a community (Lee and Newby 1983). Rather in
relation to social class, as we have indicated and as other research has
found, the ‘new’ professional middle-classes tend to be positive about
living in close proximity with working-class families within inner cities
without either wanting or having any social interaction with them (Ley
1996; Butler 1997; Savage et al. 2005).
Hence, despite citing a communitarian commitment to the local as
a contributory factor in choosing their children’s schooling, apart from
sending their children to local comprehensives, their most significant
social networks, comprising family and friends, were mainly indepen-
dent of the local area. We can glimpse this rhetorical allegiance undercut
by what is in effect a disengagement from the locality, in what Trevor
Wells, a London parent, says:

We believe in schools being a community project . . . If my politics

is anything to do with it at all it’s the politics of the community.
Interviewer: but are you a member of anything locally? I don’t think so,
Jackie will know. No, no, I don’t think so.
58 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

When parents were able to articulate a sense of belonging, an embed-

dedness in a tangible as opposed to an imagined community, the
communities they described were white middle-class ones. So Sheila
Moss asserted that:

We have settled here mainly because of the benefits of the commu-

nity and it really is a strong community and most of that is based
around the primary school for people like us.
(Sheila Moss, Norton)

In Riverton too we see the coalescing of a kind of middle-class bub-

ble centred around a popular school. Bakers Lane in Bakersville was
portrayed as a tight-knit middle-class community. Similarly, City Wall
School was located in a gentrified area that appeared to be developing
in a similar way:

The school changed in the time that we were there in the same way
that Broadway changed. There’s been a huge influx of young middle
class [professional] couples, who then grow like us really, get families,
move from the small houses to the bigger houses and it’s become a
lot more go getting and popular. The school is much more middle
class now.
(Ann Epsom Riverton)

The families were either detached from their localities with families
suspended in a global world that rarely made contact with the pre-
dominantly working-class residents of their city (Nayak 2003), or else
their communities of reality rather than desire, were, as Watt (2009) also
found, located in a small number of adjacent streets. These were almost
exclusively populated, as Sheila, above, pointed out, by ‘people like us’
and frequently focused on the predominantly white, middle-class pri-
mary schools their children had attended. Despite strongly expressed
desires, particularly in London, to be part of wider multicultural com-
munities, the majority of the families were most at home in small almost
exclusively white middle-class enclaves. So Lindsey Malone, living in
East London, felt like ‘a local almost as soon as I got here’. However, as
she indicates, her locality is very narrowly bounded both geographically
and culturally:

This street is a cul-de-sac which helps I think. In the summer there

are games of street cricket, things like that and people go in and out
 Habitus as a Sense of Place 59

of each other’s houses so I know people on first name terms, certainly

in this half of the street. I do feel very much part of the community.

Similarly Karen Sollazzi in Riverton asserted, ‘I am very into community.

We have street parties here which I was quite big in setting up’ but she
went on to describe her street as ‘a very homogeneous street, I must
say, very white homogeneous, safe though, a very nice place to bring
kids up’. There are similarities here with Butler with Robson’s (2003)
white London middle-classes grouped together in small tightly bounded
communities which provide the security they need in order to venture
further afield culturally (May 1996).
Amongst the parents therefore we have those occupying bounded
enclaves, with others acting as pioneers, largely in London, confident
in their sense of self in shaping the social space that they have occupied
as outsiders. According to Massey (1994) ‘a place is formed out of the
particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location.’
Hence the ability of a particular group sufficiently dominant to ‘produce
new social effects’ (p. 168).

Yes, it [City Wall Primary] is more diverse ethnically, but still it’s vast
majority white. Given it’s mainly middle class majority now, it’s still
got quite a high percentage of . . . like for example, free school meals.
[It’s] just below the cut off for being very high free school meals.
It’s a nice mixture, it lends itself for a very global feel actually of
being community . . . Even without the ethnicity, yes. Well, with and
without it [ethnic mix], it’s a nice place to teach, a nice place to hang
out because you get to meet on an equal level, all sorts of people and
working in a class there, you get the impression that some children
are dragged up by other children. It’s a nice [place] . . .
(Ann Epsom, Riverton)

Conclusion

The parents’ relationship to their geographic locality is aligned to their

relationship with their child’s school, not in the sense that they moved
house in order to access a desirable school but in the sense that they
made their ‘space’ work for them in a similar way to which they also
made the school work for them (Crozier et al. 2007). Given that over
half of the families lived in high-income areas, this was arguably not
challenging or risky. However, in London where 42 per cent of our
60 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

families lived in these areas, a ‘high-income street’ can run parallel with
a low-income, disadvantaged street or estate.
May (1996) argues against the polarised position of bounded space
and the notion of a progressive sense of place. He is also questioning of
the motivation of those he refers to as the new cultural class residents
who draw on multiple place identities (p. 210). The engagement with
difference or extracting the global from the local, as we have shown, is, it
would appear, about accruing cultural capital and generating metropoli-
tan habituses: both to enable operating in a twenty-first-century com-
plex and diverse world. The impact of the middle-class families on their
locales is often quite significant, but the effect is to further advantage
themselves such as in leading to house price rises and also raising the
status of local schools which then become oversubscribed.
In terms of school choice, within each of the areas, location pro-
vides different contexts for school choice which in turn has an impact.
Parents’ commitment to the local comprehensive school plays out
differently given the distinctiveness in the local school economy. Com-
pared to the other areas, for most of the Norton parents the choice was
relatively straightforward, since they lived near to an acceptable urban
comprehensive and one that was on an upward trajectory in terms of the
GCSE measure. In Riverton and London, choice of state schooling was
generally problematic and this minimised the options for the parents.
In all of the areas critical mass and the need for assurance that there
were other children at the school ‘like us’ was regarded as an important
issue. In Norton given the size of the middle-class as a small percent-
age of the population, there were fewer ‘like them’ to compete with for
an urban comprehensive school; therefore they were in an advantaged
position secure in the knowledge that they/their children would be
desired by schools. By contrast, in Riverton the competition for accept-
able school places was intense. In London, however, the opportunities
and availability of useful resources and networks were more extensive
and these mediated the risks and difficulties, to a greater extent than in
Riverton.
The three regions therefore provide different opportunities and chal-
lenges for this class fraction of white middle-class parents in their choice
of secondary school.
4
Against-the-Grain School Choice in
Neoliberal Times

Introduction

An appreciation of the practices and consequences of ‘against the grain’

secondary school choices needs to be set within some understanding of
the wider policy framing of choice, and indeed the nature of ‘main-
stream’ choosing, in relation to schooling. Accordingly, this chapter
looks briefly at the emergence and recent development of choice in edu-
cational policy in the context of neoliberal thinking. It then focuses on
practices of school choice, arguing that a finer distinction (that between
commitments and preferences) is necessary for understanding the gulf
between the rhetoric of choice and the much more nuanced sets of prac-
tices and effects revealed in the research. We then discuss the nature
of general orientations amongst our sample of parents, highlighting in
particular the low incidence of communitarian commitments and the
prevalence of instrumental orientations. Finally, the chapter looks at the
related issues of ‘hot knowledge’ and parental intervention.

Choice in neoliberal times

It is worth giving some consideration to the nature of ‘choice’ and the

context for the emergence of its contemporary significance in school-
ing. There are now several attempts to compare the rise of parental
choice between different countries and to weigh up its effects. For exam-
ple, Plank and Sykes (2003) present an edited collection accounting for
marked increases in parental choice in Chile, New Zealand, England
and Wales, Sweden, Australia, South Africa, China, Czech Republic and
Hungary. Whilst choice takes many different forms across these exam-
ples, Plank and Sykes argue that there are two essential features that run

61
62 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

through all of them in some form. The first is a ‘demand side’ shift,
in that policies give parents more choice about the schools to which
their children will go. The nature of this shift depends on the starting
point on a continuum, at one end of which is the state-centred system
in which children are simply assigned to schools using a set of criteria
typically including geographical residence and ability. The second is a
‘supply side’ shift, whereby there is more ‘explicit or implicit compe-
tition among schools for students and revenues . . . With the advent of
school choice policies . . . schools no longer “own” their students’ (Plank
and Sykes 2003 p. ix). Yet whilst these two features can be said to appear
in all their cases, the authors acknowledge that there is also considerable
variability:

. . . under some policies parents may be required to choose a school,

while under others they retain an entitlement to a place in the local
public school. Some policies restrict the competition among schools
to schools in the public sector, whilst others expand the market to
include private and religious schools as well. Countries also vary in
the extent to which governments provide ancillary services to sup-
port parents’ choices, including such things as student transportation
and the production and distribution of information about schools.
The extent to which these services are publicly subsidized has a
powerful effect on how the emerging market for schooling operates.
(p. ix)

As well as highlighting this variability, Plank and Sykes also address

the question of why these shifts are occurring. They write that it is
not so much due to the power of arguments for greater school choice,
but rather due to ‘the collapse of a plausible argument in favor of
standardized, state-centred educational provision’ (p. x). They identify
four points of view on this issue. The first is the argument that the
bureaucratisation and standardisation of schooling has undermined the
construction of community – both within and around schools. Sec-
ondly, there is support for extending school choice on equality grounds,
such as the argument that state systems have trapped some people into
unsuccessful provision. Thirdly, there are arguments based on dissatis-
faction with the nature of government, with levels of inefficiency or
corruption, and a related thrust towards decentralisation and the use
of private agencies to achieve state goals in the name of greater effi-
ciency. Plank and Sykes couple this line of argument together with the
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 63

desire to increase global competitiveness and the pressure this makes

governments bring to bear on education systems. Fourthly, they group a
set of arguments under the heading of ‘neoliberalism and free markets’,
in which:

The enthusiasm of economists and others for the ‘magic of the mar-
ket’ has produced recommendations for privatizing virtually all the
activities of the public sector, from pensions to prisons. In educa-
tion, these arguments have been deployed in support of vouchers
and increased private-sector participation in educational provision.
Arguments that urge governments to ‘unleash’ market forces in the
education system have been powerfully influential in a number of
countries, including Chile, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom,
and the United States.
(p. xii)

Plank and Sykes also point to the role of trans-national agencies like the
World Bank and the OECD in influencing governments, though they
do not offer an integration of these observations with their suggestions
about neoliberal ideology. This theme is however taken up by Forsey and
colleagues in their book The Globalisation of School Choice? (Forsey et al.
2008). They describe how ‘in the past three decades or so we have wit-
nessed and experienced a dramatic increase in the influence of economic
theory on social action and political practice’ (p. 11). This does not refer
to all kinds of economic theory, but to a particular form originally exem-
plified in Milton Friedman’s work and characterised by a strong model
of individual self-interest and its maximisation through rational choices.
Many have criticised this model and pointed to its inadequacies. As early
as 1977 the economist Sen described ‘purely economic man’ as a ‘social
moron’ [sic] and complained that economic theory paid too much atten-
tion to this ‘rational fool decked in the glory of his one all-purpose
preference ordering’ (Sen 1977 pp. 335–336). Nevertheless, there is no
denying the pervasiveness of this way of thinking at the level of the
political, and how its application in the Thatcher and Regan govern-
ments set in train a direction of travel that is still apparent and which
has ‘long since washed up onto many a shore around the globe’ (Forsey
et al. 2008 p. 12). This is not to imply a uniform effect: like other global
trends, policies for school choice take specific local forms depending on
historical and other aspects of context. Nevertheless, Forsey et al. point
to two important general ramifications. Firstly, that
64 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

choice frameworks can incorporate the interests of even those

actors who otherwise have little affinity with market thinking in
education . . . Beyond its neoliberal advocates, religious, ethnic and
linguistic minorities in many countries are adapting the phrasing of
‘choice’ to suit their assorted interests.
(p. 22)

And secondly, that

choice is often not the most appropriate term to use when describing
what has happened in recent reformation of school systems. While
the movement towards private educational options can in theory
open up educational opportunities in state sectors that always oper-
ate in a limited financial environment, in practice it often results
in further diminution of state-run schools . . . the options available to
people have all too often become more limited in the new choice
environments produced across the globe.
(pp. 22–23)

Forsey et al. argue that ‘current forms of neoliberalism are closely associ-
ated with the push for a globally unified economy’ (p. 13) in which the
state’s role becomes one of providing the conditions in which such an
economy can flourish. Similar points can be found across the now con-
siderable volume of writing about neoliberalism and its consequences.
For Olssen, the last 25 years or so have seen a trans-national pressure
to release economic activity from state regulation, presenting a major
obstacle to democracy and leading to ‘. . . a huge escalation of inequality
in the distribution of incomes and wealth’, both between countries and
within them (Olssen 2004 pp. 231–232; see also Blanden and Machin
2007; Rutherford 2008). Tabb has argued that the aim of neoliberalism
is ‘. . . to put into question all collective structures capable of obstruct-
ing the logic of the pure market’ (Tabb 2002 p. 7). But it is perhaps
Harvey’s account of the origins and spread of neoliberalism that does
most to explain the political forces accompanying the economic shifts:
‘The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom
of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking’
(Harvey 2005 p. 7). He adds:

to presume that markets and market signals can best determine all
allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 65

be treated as a commodity . . . The market is presumed to work as an

appropriate guide – an ethic – for all human action.
(Harvey 2005 p. 165)

So the notion of greater choice seems inherently attractive, and not just
because it goes with ideology that makes ‘the market’ appear to be the
natural order of things: choice is also easily conflated with ideas like
freedom and respect for individual rights. In part, and as Plank and
Sykes (2003) suggest, the rhetoric of choice appeals because it promises a
break with structures of state-managed provision in which nation-states
used bureaucracies to attempt to deliver services and social welfare in
an equitable fashion, but with quite variable success. For present pur-
poses, the central point is that neoliberal policies around school choice
have re-shaped earlier discourses of equity, inclusion and social welfare,
changing the meaning of the terms themselves. Although the rhetoric
of choice appears politically neutral, its introduction discursively shifts
the responsibility for social inequality to individual citizens.

Practices of school choice

The research evidence on whether choice policies ‘work’ is at best

equivocal. One study by the Organisation for Economic Development
and Cooperation showed that the introduction of choice policies had
increased social class segregation in schools in seven different countries
(OECD 1994). In the UK context, the rise of such policies from around
1988 ‘benefited all sections of the middle classes’ (Tomlinson 2005b
p. 174). Several studies in the United Kingdom explored the mechan-
ics of middle-class advantage in the period when choice policy took
real hold (e.g. Gerwirtz et al. 1995; Ball et al. 1996; and see Ball 2003).
For Tomlinson, governments adopting such policies have continued to
make it possible for the middle-classes to avoid both ‘the poor’ and those
types of educational provision associated with lower status:

The middle classes who could not afford private escape have usually
had at their disposal strategies to avoid their children being educated
with the poor, to ensure that their children attended well-resourced
schools, and avoided stigmatised forms of education.
(p. 177)

There has also been some research on parental views of choice. An ear-
lier small-scale study of secondary school choice in England reported
66 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

that ‘. . . three-quarters of parents said there were particular schools to

which they did not want their child to go’, and ‘the predominant reason
given was its “bad reputation” ’ (West and Varlaam 1991 p. 22). In their
research on British parents, Boulton and Coldron (1996) suggested that
even those who had not been particularly concerned about choosing
schools for their own children nevertheless placed high value on the
availability of choice. Yet in contrast to this, Tomlinson cites studies that
suggested that apart from those parents seeking to ‘go private’ or who
aimed for particular selective secondary education,

. . . what most parents wanted was a good local comprehensive school,

wellresourced and staffed and offering equality of treatment for all
children.
(Tomlinson 2005b p. 54)

Many observers have pointed to the rather limited meanings of the

terms ‘choice’ and ‘diversity’ in respect of actual parental interactions
with school systems. Without a doubt, our sample of parents had more
choice than their working-class counterparts, but most of them never-
theless felt that they had very little. It is likely that despite continuing
government pronouncements about the power of parental involvement
and parental choice, parents as a whole continue to have minimal
choice of secondary school unless they are part of the political and cul-
tural elites (see also Butler and Hamnett 2010). Perceptions of limited
choice were commonplace across all three locations. For a few parents,
there seemed to be an absence of choice. Choice was often described
as mythical or illusory. Oliver Dorling (London) expressed this view
whilst also recognising the link with the housing market and his per-
sonal desire to put a stop to the middle-class practice of moving house
for school proximity:

Interviewer: How would you describe the choices you’ve made about your
children’s education? Would you say they were moral choices, political
choices, pragmatic choices, or a mixture?

A mixture.

Interviewer: In what way?

Well, pragmatic in the sense that you’ve only got a local school or
you’ve got to pay for them to go to another school. This idea of
choice – I mean I don’t like the idea of choice, either, because it’s
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 67

a total fallacy. You don’t have a choice. It’s either you’ve got the local
school, or if you put another school down as a second choice, you
won’t get into that one. And what people need is a good local school
and a good local hospital. You don’t want to have to send, drive
halfway across London. So it’s meaningless having a league table. It’s
easier for the middle classes because they can buy their way into a
catchment area. Which is another bee in my bonnet. If I could work
it out, if I could think of a way that that could be clamped down
on, I would agree to it or vote for it. I’m not clever enough to work
it out yet.
(Oliver Dorling, London)

Oliver Dorling was unusual in our sample for his voiced opposition to
this practice, and as we noted earlier, some 69 per cent of parents were
‘incomers’ to the areas in which they now lived. Whilst some (such
as Julie Hextell – see Chapter 3) described as ‘lucky’ the proximity of
a particular school, others gave indirect acknowledgement of the rela-
tionship between choices of location and the reputation of a school.
In some families, choices were effectively made many years ahead of
any actual transition from primary to secondary school, through a deci-
sion about where to buy a house. Lynne Heslop (Norton), for example,
having described how happy they were with the local comprehensive
school, spoke about the semi-conscious figuring of school quality as part
of choosing a ‘nice area’ to live:

I suppose in some ways, because we lived near, we’d chosen a very,

very good school we’d selected by living here . . . I don’t know if I’d
have felt the same, if I’d stuck to my principles, in (another area of
town) or somewhere, I might have found that hard. And I think we
might have reconsidered something then.

Interviewer: This is very hypothetical but what would your choices have
been if you were living in (that other area)?

I would have had a problem

Interviewer: Would you have considered private school or would you

consider moving house, for example?

I think probably . . . I would have done, I don’t think my husband

would . . . he’s a very true sort of, state education for everything, end
of story, and wherever you are. But I think we actually were selective
68 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

in where we actually bought a house, if we’re honest. I mean, we lived

in a very nice area.

Interviewer: Do you think that was just fortunate that you happened to
be living here or do you think somehow, when you were even making the
choices in the first place about living here, you sort of assimilated that this
was a nice, safe area?

Yes, probably, probably. I mean we were guided by the people that

were already here. So we looked here, here and here at housing and
we didn’t know anything about Norton at that time, but obviously
they did, so we were guided to here. We have friends in (that other
area) who were in a very difficult position, he finally sent his children
to the church school. I mean that would have possibly been another
option, that we might have wanted a church education rather than a
state education. That would have been another possibility.
(Lynne Heslop, Norton)

Mongon and Chapman (2009 p. 114) note that ‘. . . Diversity across the
offer from publicly funded schools is largely marginal.’ However, they
also point out that there is always ‘a local pecking order that can be
influenced by style as well as substance and in which Choice is played
out for staff as well as parents’. ‘Playing out’ is a useful term for this
particular process, because the process has both real and imaginary ele-
ments at one and the same time. Even those parents who are dubious
about there being any real choice cannot avoid the way that the pro-
cess positions them as completely responsible: They could make ‘bad’
choices and would only have themselves to blame. At the same time, the
powerful idea that successful secondary schooling is the result of parents
making ‘good’ choices at the point of transition is itself something that
conceals the maintenance of inequalities:

national policies to promote choice and diversity are working within

and compounding existing patterns of inequity and social division.
What diversity there is in school provision owes more to histori-
cal factors . . . The ways in which parents exercise choices (or not)
reinforce inequities and local authorities are largely powerless.
(Ainscow et al. 2007 p. 7)

As we saw in the previous chapter, the operation of the housing mar-

ket means that many middle-class families will find themselves near
schools that already have a high proportion of middle-class students.
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 69

The historically high correlation between social class and educational

attainment will usually make these schools look ‘good’ in conventional
terms. Where they do not, or where even ‘better’ schooling is desired,
some parents will fight hard for places in specific, high-performing
schools. This may involve buying a new house and moving, renting
a new or an extra address, paying fees for private schooling, renewing
religious affiliations, or if all else fails, assembling a strong case in an
appeals process. Some parents are prepared to engage in fraudulent or
deceptive practices, such as using a false address so that they appear to
live closer to a desired school (BBC 2008; Harvey 2008).
A further problem here is that the positive halo around the con-
cept of ‘choice’ can make it harder to understand the social pro-
cesses at work. In what Hargreaves calls the political period of the
‘second way’, characterised by standardisation and market competi-
tion, ‘. . . many Anglo-Saxon governments . . . imposed prescriptive and
sometimes punitive reforms in the shape of increased competition
between schools fuelled by public rankings of high-stakes test and
exam results’ (Hargreaves 2009 p. 18). Hargreaves also notes that in
England, ‘. . . increased parental choice between schools and reduction
of local authority control’ were particularly evident (2009 p. 18). Many
such elements have persisted, despite the claims that ‘second way’ poli-
cies gave way to ‘third way’ policies that emphasise other routes to
‘improvement’, including cooperation rather than competition between
schools.

Choice, preference and commitment

In regard to public services such as education, there is still a widely

held view that greater choice, together with more or better information
which the public might use in making choices, is of itself a desirable
goal. As suggested earlier, one reason for this is probably that greater
choice appears on the surface to be a self-evident proxy for freedom.
However, there is an inherent tension in all this, which parts of our
study reveal. Firstly, standardisation and marketisation are only plausi-
ble if we can conceptualise the key parties as potential producers and
consumers. Secondly, these potential producers and consumers have
to be assumed to be striving for the same goals. To put this another
way, there must be a shared definition of ends, of what amounts to
‘a good education’. Our study shows up the inadequacy of this ‘con-
sumerist’ perspective for grasping the subtleties of practices that involve
choices of secondary school. Many of the white middle-class parents
70 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

we interviewed were dismissive of league tables of examination results

and were critical of the idea that these might tell one anything useful
at all about the qualities of an education or a school. Thus, whilst all
of them valued academic success per se, many also rejected the domi-
nant discourse and therefore much of the market information that was
made available to them. To understand this, it is helpful to differenti-
ate between different kinds of ‘driver’ or ‘motivation’ for choice. Sayer’s
(2005) work on ‘investments’ is particularly helpful in this task.
In his constructive critique and development of Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus, Sayer suggests that tensions between some of the philosoph-
ical streams underlying Bourdieu’s work led to an underplaying of a
range of ethical and emotional dimensions of habitus and social practice
which are nevertheless present in Bourdieu’s own writing. For exam-
ple, Sayer (drawing also on the work of Margaret Archer) discusses the
nature of investments and argues that a distinction between preferences
and commitments is especially useful in appreciating different kinds of
investment that people have in the social world. Preferences are what
we have when we choose between two items on the grounds that one
is liked a little more than the other. Choices during the purchase of
goods and services are often about preferences. Commitments are qual-
itatively different, going deeper than preferences and having a stronger
bearing on practice. They are the felt as well as the thought aspects of
social life, to do with habitus and the psychic dimension of social class
(cf. Reay 2005). They arise from values and have an emotional element,
forming part of an identity. As Sayer puts it, ‘I am committed to certain
people, ideas and causes and I can’t be bought off, for they are ends in
themselves, not merely means to other ends’ (Sayer 2005 p. 41).
Drawing upon Sayer’s distinction, the argument we wish to make
here is that policies based on standardisation and marketisation oper-
ate as if all school choices were in the realm of preference. Investments
that in fact entail a range of commitments and preferences are assumed
to be much simpler than they are. This homogenisation of ends in the
name of raising standards and educational achievements also pretends
that for all their differences, schools are really on a single continuum
and the key measures of position (principally league tables and Ofsted
inspections) can be taken to sum up all that really matters in school
processes and quality. In our interviews it became clear very early on
that many more factors were involved in the choices being made, and
these factors were often deeply rooted, derived from particular sets of
experiences, from family history (see Chapter 2), from values, and from
various forms of ‘hot’ and insider knowledge. What we have termed
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 71

‘parental managerialism’ (James and Beedell 2009) sees parents putting

great efforts into constructing a broad educational project in which
actual school choice is just one element, albeit the most important sin-
gle feature. Such parents have a commitment to particular notions of
society and to particular kinds of socialisation: Their choices make sense
in relation to their commitments.
In Chapter 5 we discuss the significance, for many families, of
the proximity of ‘the ethnic other’, derived from commitments to a
multicultural society. However, commitments were sometimes more
generic: Families like the Smiths (Riverton) valued academic success,
but they were also committed to a particular vision of ‘good socialisa-
tion’ which was in some conflict with dominant assumptions about how
educational success was to be secured. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 2,
one of them worked in a University in which they met students who
were highly successful in conventional academic terms, but whom they
found to be ‘clueless’ about the real world. The Smiths had commit-
ments that were of sufficient strength that they (a) put time and energy
into broadening their daughter Sadie’s group of friends during primary
school, (b) overruled Sadie’s desperate wish to go to a nearby private
school along with her three closest friends from primary school and
(c) held fast to their choice in the face of a protracted episode of bullying
during the first year of secondary school.
The distinction between preferences and commitments is also helpful
with regard to another feature of our data that were a little unexpected.
It appeared to us that most of the parents we interviewed were trying to
act ethically, or in accordance with certain beliefs and values that had
clear reference points in the political and moral landscape. However,
several mentioned a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘politics’
or ‘principles’, and on the other hand, ‘what’s right for your own chil-
dren’. We should add here that in terms of political orientation, the
parents we interviewed shared broadly ‘Centre-Left’ and ‘Green’ posi-
tions, and that direct involvement in party-political or pressure group
activity (such as the miners strike, Greenham Common, Rock Against
Racism, the Womens Movement and campaigns for gay rights) was a
frequent feature of background. However, and somewhat surprisingly
given the antecedents, there was also an uneasy ambivalence with con-
temporary Party politics, in many cases exacerbated or brought to a head
by the UK role in the Iraq war.
The contrast between ‘political principles’ and ‘what’s right for your
own children’ is both interesting and important. It is interesting because
it is a line of reasoning that one would expect to find with conventional
72 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

white middle-class school choices, and not so much with our ‘against
the grain’ choosers; it is important because it re-positions ‘politics’ or
‘principles’ (usually taken to mean deep commitments) as dispensable
surface phenomena, as belonging to the realm of preferences. At the same
time, ‘what’s right for your own children’ is seen as a more thorough
and authentic expression of interests or concerns. There is a notable
irony here too, in that several of the parents in our sample reported
that they had been accused by other parents of being selfish and of sac-
rificing their children’s education in the name of a political principle.
We give more specific consideration to civic engagement and the links
with political positions in Chapter 8.

Orientations, pragmatism and provisionality

Almost universally, the parents in our sample were supporters of the wel-
fare state, so as we began to analyse the data we were surprised at how
few of them seemed to explain school choices with reference to a polit-
ical commitment to comprehensive education. In just one or two cases
there appeared to be an orientation to secondary school choice that was
thoroughly centred on community, locality and a sense of solidarity,
and might be summed up by the phrase ‘this is where we live, the local
school is good enough, if it needs to be better we can help it to improve –
and if everyone did the same, all schools would be good’. Laura Franklin
(Riverton) described both the primary and secondary schools attended
by her children in these terms. We had been asking her how much she
knew about particular schools when they had moved into the area:

For us the school was just a school, we didn’t actually know if it

was technically good or not, it was just there. And I do remember
about a year before my oldest was due to start there, walking past
the playground and hearing one kid call the black kid in the play-
ground ‘coon’ and I thought ‘oh shit’. And had a slight wobble and
wondered if St Margaret’s would have a better racial mix, but then
thought ‘If this is what we’ve got, that’s the school they’re going to’.

Further into the interview, Laura described the ‘principle’ that under-
pinned decisions on school choice in the family:

We explained the principle to the girls and they completely under-

stood it, to the extent that towards the end of Year 5, my younger
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 73

daughter was under the impression that Hammerton School (an out-
of-city State school that many children of professionals go to) was a
private school

Interviewer: Explain that principle to me.

That comprehensive education only works if everybody sends their

child to their local catchment school . . . of course comprehensive
education truly only works if you close down private education and
everybody sends their child to the local catchment school. And that
is totally fundamental to what we think

Interviewer: So for you, there was no question of dithering?

No. Some people thought it was very hard. When the kids were about
5 and everyone thought that Redwood School (the local compre-
hensive) was all bullying and low achieving, a lot of people said
‘You’ll change your minds, you’ll suddenly move to Mountstevens
School . . .’. I thought ‘Redwood does look a bit hard’. But I thought,
they’ll be older by then. So we never went to another open day . . . the
kids wanted to go to Redwood

Interviewer: Is that where most of the kids from (the primary school)
went?

I think possibly in Claire’s year, the majority of her year possibly did.
Certainly half of her year went, I’d say, but amongst her friendship
group, a lot of them went somewhere else. It seems a long time ago
now. But she was quite happy, she felt that was the school for her, it
was her local school. We had discussed the whole principle with her
and she agreed with it and was quite happy with Redwood School,
a bit scared obviously, but she would have been just as scared if she
was going to Hammerton or independent (laughter).

Interviewer: And how was that process for you? How did you feel about it?
What were you aware of in that process? Did you notice any fracturing of
people into working class, middle class?
Well . . . one middle-class person after another informed you that their
child was just too clever to go to Redwood, or that they were too
arty to go there . . . [they would say] ‘I admire what you’re doing’.
Admire? – what is admirable about your child going to the local
school? I talk as if we were saying ‘This is our principle.’ It was far
more organic than that . . . It’s just the way it was, that’s what was
happening. But I did despise people who gave me all the reasons why
74 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

their particular child couldn’t do it . . . [saying for example] ‘I’m sure

Redwood’s very nice, but my child’s too clever’.

We have quoted Laura Franklin at length precisely because to our sur-

prise, the position she articulated, whilst it was shared by her partner
Alan, was so unusual across the sample. There were more instances of
a ‘softer’ communitarian orientation, where for example ‘walkability’,
convenience on environmental grounds, a desire to be ‘local’, or more
general notions of staying within the community, were important:

I think (for us) there was a strong feeling . . . about the significance of
‘local’. You know, so in the same way that I would choose to go to
small local businesses rather than out to North Park [a large out-of-
town shopping mall], I would rather support local schools.
(Martin Brandt, Riverton)

We return to this ‘softer’ communitarian idea in Chapter 8, where

we make reference to the idea of a ‘vocabulary of association’ (Jordan
et al. 1994). On the whole, however, the parents we interviewed were
not strongly committed to comprehensive education as a general con-
cept, and only a few were explicitly wedded to ‘the local’. There was
instead a combination of pragmatism and instrumental orientation
woven through most explanations of the choice of an ordinary state
secondary school and the outcomes it had yielded or was expected to
yield. Indeed, much of this book could be said to be about teasing out
the main themes amongst these instrumental orientations and their
ramifications.
Whilst the choice itself was often described as pragmatic, the conse-
quences of against-the-grain school choice were often described in terms
of benefits or gains of one sort or another. The most prominent of these
were to do with social mix. However as we go on to discuss in Chapters 5
and 7, a mix of ethnicities was far more likely to be sought out and cel-
ebrated than a mix of social classes. There was also much talk of how
the ordinary school provided the right context for the young people to
stand out or show their ‘specialness’ or ‘extraness’. Furthermore, some
parents acknowledged that they and their children were amongst a few
especially valued clients of the school, and felt more or less guilty about
their privileged access to resources, to staff or to influence.
A consciousness that a secondary school choice could be undone, that
it was in a sense provisional and conditional, was a frequent theme
in parent interviews, especially in Norton and Riverton. Janine Barker
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 75

(Riverton), a parent whose child was going to Meadowood school, told

us at length about how the parents of all of her child’s close friends were
either ‘going private’ or moving house a year or more in advance of the
primary–secondary transition, so that their children would be able to go
to Mountstevens school and could avoid Meadowood. They had consid-
ered these options in the family, but Janine’s own view was that moving
house or buying or renting a flat just ahead of the qualifying period
was a kind of antisocial behaviour. She had both personal and profes-
sional insight here, having worked in a Local Authority in Housing, and
said that sadly, the strategy was rife amongst the better-off families in
Riverton. Janine’s views on the benefits of exposure to ethnic diversity
were similar to many other parents in the study. However, later on she
acknowledged that there were particular risks associated with the choice
of school, and that the family was in a position to reverse the decision
they had made if that became necessary:

You know, I think we’ve got more options than a lot of people
around us have . . . and that if we really had to, we could do something
about it.
(Janine, Riverton)

Here, ‘doing something about it’ means getting their child into a differ-
ent school, and the ‘options’ include paying fees for private education.
The awareness of and reference to this ‘safety net’ underlines the extent
to which the transition is being managed, and monitored – in a sense,
the fundamental choice is provisional and can be undone should the
need arise. This suggests that for against-the-grain secondary school
choice, the analogy of a risky financial investment has some utility: in
such investments, profits are higher than average, but the arrangement
is also more volatile than a conventional one, and a high level of vig-
ilance is therefore required, plus a willingness to ‘change tack’. It is to
vigilance, and the importance of insider knowledge to support it, than
we turn next.

Hot knowledge and parental intervention

We were surprised by the high proportion of families in which at least

one parent was or had been a school governor, and we discuss the sig-
nificance of this in Chapter 8. Being a school governor appeared rooted
in a desire to make a civic contribution, and there were elements of the
community-minded building of social capital in the sense described by
76 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Putnam (2000). There were also many other connections with the world
of education: For example, 13 per cent of the parents in our sample were
university academics, and in Riverton alone, some 40 per cent of fami-
lies had at least one parent with a teaching qualification and/or working
as a teacher. Proximity to the school offered by such roles and simi-
lar connections were valued for providing opportunities to gain insider
information.
Ball (2003) and Ball and Vincent (1998) discuss the role of informa-
tion in a marketised service such as education. Against a background of
different networks and contacts, information is a vital matter:

Information is a key dynamic in the workings of all markets and has

been a particular focus and a powerful mechanism in the reform
of education systems. That is the generation of judgemental and
comparative performance information which is intended to allow
consumers to make better choices between providers.
(Ball 2003 p. 100)

Ball and Vincent (1998) distinguish between the formal information

(‘cold knowledge’) that is produced by or about providers (and which
is freely available to all), and informal information that people share
and which circulates in social networks, namely ‘hot knowledge’. Ball’s
later study suggests that hot knowledge was privileged by parents choos-
ing schools, and that various ‘weak ties’ in social networks are used
heavily in decision-making. Like Ball’s study, ours shows high levels of
anxiety and uncertainty amongst the choosers, and the extensive use
of ‘hot knowledge’. But importantly, this goes well beyond the peri-
ods in which the main choices about transition were made. We suggest
that ‘hot knowledge’ continues to be important to many white middle-
class parents once the young people are established in the school, and
it contributes to high levels of continued intervention with elements
of ‘mangerialism’. Most parents of school-aged children are likely to
have some level of engagement and intervention, but many of those
we have studied went much further than this. The term ‘managerialism’
usually refers to beliefs and practices in workplaces and organisations.
It is ‘. . . underpinned by an ideology which assumes that all aspects
of organisational life can and should be controlled. In other words,
that ambiguity can and should be radically reduced or eliminated’
(Wallace and Hoyle 2005 p. 9). Like its workplace counterpart, parental
managerialism rests on the idea that all the important variables are con-
trollable and within reach. It is a reflexive project of the self of the
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 77

child which necessitates a certain confidence in relation to organisa-

tions like schools, and then a great deal of intervention. There were
many examples in our data. Tricia Simpson (London) described at length
how the deliberate and concerted efforts of a few middle-class parents,
including Tricia herself, had made a local primary school ‘the most
improved school in England’ and that this had a lot to do with ‘increas-
ing the percentage of kids from high achieving backgrounds’. Linda
Stubbs (Norton) described how she and another parent had decided to
do something about a weakness in the area of performing arts at The
Park School:

Well actually myself and another parent we’re on a bit of a mis-

sion to try and improve performing arts at the minute. I don’t know
what will come of it, but we um, my kids are very musical and my
daughter’s really, really interested in dance as well. We found out
that (a dance organisation) had offered The Park free dance work-
shops as part of their education outreach, and they refused them,
which slightly took our breath away. And they’ve had a lot of prob-
lems with performing arts and with staffing, and they took drama
off the curriculum last year . . . although they offer it as a GCSE, you
don’t get it in years 7, 8, 9. The performing arts is abysmal, it’s com-
pletely and utterly abysmal, to the point where if my kids wanted to
do GCSE in music I would tell them not to do it there because it’s so
awful . . . which I think is immoral. So we met with the head, we wrote
a couple of times and got the standard letter back saying it’s all fine,
we wrote back and said no it’s not fine and then we got a meeting
with the head, that was about three weeks ago, and this afternoon
she’s actually meeting with the head of performing arts, whose view
is that apparently everything’s fine.
(Linda Stubbs, Norton)

Linda and her fellow parent refused to accept the first responses pro-
vided by the school, and also a second set of responses which offered
the explanation that there had been ‘behaviour management problems’.
(Her view of this was that the school had not appointed the right staff
and needed to take this area of the curriculum more seriously.) Similarly,
in London one of our young interviewees told us about the nature and
level of her mother’s engagement with the school:

My mum is like a big complainer if anything doesn’t go right at

school she is like first there talking to the head teacher. She’s good
78 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

friends with him now. In Year 7 she managed to get an English

teacher sort of sacked, she is a bit like that, she is a bit of a tyrant.
She’ll like, if I come back and they haven’t marked my book for a
while, then she will be ‘ok I am going to go and tell the school’
because she wants me to have the best education I can and whereas
I would rather just think oh let’s wait for someone else to do it she is
the one to do it. She is really involved with the school she is standing
for governor. Yeah she really like feels strongly about trying to get
me to do the best . . . and also she really wants to try and get more
middle class people to go to Capeland School. And she has drawn up
like made a little committee and this year when people were being
shown around the school as a middle class parent she tried to like get
other middle class parents to send their kids to Capeland.
(Ella Harding, London)

There are parallels in all this with the social class tendencies in chil-
drearing noted by Walkerdine and Lucey (1989); Crozier’s (2000) study
of parents and secondary school relationships; Reay’s work on parental
engagements with school and how the success or productivity of these
encounters differed for mothers with different resources of cultural cap-
ital (e.g. Reay 1998b); Lareau’s (2003) study of processes of ‘concerted
cultivation’ amongst middle-class parents in the United States; and
strong resonances too with a UK study of parental voice which showed
that whilst there were similarities across all parents, one group who
were highly involved with schools had a particular habitus in relation
to education which included a ‘. . . responsibility to monitor children’s
achievement and the school provision’ (Vincent and Martin 2002 p. 125.
Emphasis added).
The significance of insider hot knowledge is further illustrated in the
following extract from our interview with Jocelyn and Bob Humphries
(Riverton). Both were teachers. We asked them if they thought there
were any particular risks being taken in sending their children to a
poorly performing (by conventional measures) local comprehensive:

Jocelyn: No.
Bob: No.
Jocelyn: Not for our own children
Bob: Particularly not at the time. I suppose there might have been
a slightly different question had the school gone into special mea-
sures at around about the time that Johnny was going and if we
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 79

didn’t, at that time, have the knowledge that we subsequently had.

So that might have been a question.
Jocelyn: I don’t agree because – and this comes from being in educa-
tion – the best time to send anybody to a school is when they’re
in special measures, because they’ve got tons of money, lots of extra
teachers and you’re quids in. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the time
to send your child to the school.
Bob: Well we did send them there, although if you like, there was
a perception in the neighbourhood, that it wasn’t a good school.
We weren’t concerned about it, we felt it was a good school, not
necessarily a popular school, but it was a good school. By the time
Zoe went there . . . I think when Zoe went there it was in special
measures.
Jocelyn: Yes, I think so too, because Mr Mears (Head teacher) was still
there.
Bob: Yes he was . . . we weren’t concerned because actually we felt that
the school wasn’t, I felt anyway, the school wasn’t as bad as the
special measures label on it.

It would be difficult to imagine a conception of quality any further

removed from the mainstream preference-ordering on which choice
policy depends.

Conclusion

In the broadest sense, school choice has been re-shaped by neoliberal

thinking that has changed the meaning and significance of ideas like
equity, inclusion and social welfare, and which has positioned the indi-
vidual as more responsible for the outcomes of whatever choices they
make. Some of the research suggests that policies that drive families and
schools in this direction have contributed to increased social inequal-
ity. Looking at such issues through the lens of data about ‘against the
grain’ choosers shows that much more is going on than a market model
can possibly admit. Our analysis suggests that the economistic con-
cept of choice conceals more than it reveals. Firstly, even at the level
of individual decisions, it conceals an important distinction between
preferences and commitments. It does this via the insistence that the
quality of schooling can be summed in one way that everyone agrees
on. Secondly, it conceals the significance of social positioning (such
as choosing to live in a ‘nice’ area that does not contain the ‘worst’
of state schools, even many years ahead of the birth of a child or
80 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

ahead of a primary/secondary transition). Thirdly, it conceals the con-

tinuing operation of social practices such as the parental monitoring
and intervention, and the associated ongoing and provisional nature
of choices that we have outlined in this chapter. Our study shows
that the actual choice of secondary school at a particular time is only
one small part of the overall story of ‘against the grain’ middle-class
practices.
The commitments of our sample of parents were actually more diverse
and much less ‘political’ than we had expected at the outset. The dis-
tinction between ‘principles’ and ‘doing what’s right for your child’
is a reminder of Zizek’s assertion that politics has not only become ‘a
dirty word’, and increasingly so in the contemporary context, but also
that the language of political intervention no longer appears to make
sense of, and in, the contemporary climate (Zizek 2006). Even this left-
leaning, pro-welfare segment of the white middle-classes rarely couched
their choices in political terms. Their rejection of dominant assump-
tions and (to some extent) practices is a rejection of a contemporary
political re-shaping of public services, but it is not one that is anchored
in a shared alternative political vision: One could say that against-the-
grain school choices seem to reveal more of what people do not believe
in than what they do believe in.
Although superficially these families might appear to be ‘acting
against self interest’, they are in fact doing nothing of the sort. Most
were seeking, or claimed to have acquired, specific social, cultural and
ideological returns from the school as a microcosm of a politically,
socially and ethnically diverse society. Hence, we would argue that
the neoliberal approach to education provides opportunities for these
‘mutating’ and evolving middle-class families, already predisposed to
social and ethical flexibility, to adapt to the system and construct new
forms of advantage as their existing capital interacts with the resources
of ‘ordinary’ urban schools.
Over 50 years ago at the inception of the comprehensive schooling
system in the UK Anthony Crosland, then Minister of Education, wrote:

The system will increasingly, if the Labour Party does its job, be built
around the comprehensive school . . . All schools will more and more
be socially mixed; all will provide routes to the Universities and to
every type of occupation, from the highest to the lowest . . . Then, very
slowly, Britain may cease to be the most class-ridden country in the
world.
(Crosland 1956 p. 207)
 Against-the-Grain School Choice in Neoliberal Times 81

Comprehensive schools have of course been constrained in realising

Crosland’s vision, either by the continuing existence of selection along-
side them in some areas or by the proliferation of other types of school,
and also by the immense rate of change at the level of policy. But our
research suggests that far from providing even a slow or partial remedy
for the ‘most class-ridden country in the world’, comprehensive schools
are themselves caught up in processes that reproduce social class rela-
tions. We would argue that though it appeals in common-sense terms,
it is sociologically naïve to expect social mix to produce social mix-
ing, rather as exposure to steel bands and samosas do not add up to
anti-racist action. Nancy Fraser writes of a conflation of a politics of
recognition and a politics of redistribution, identifying a ‘problem of
displacement’ (Fraser 2000 p. 108), where redistributive struggles look
as if they are served by cultural processes of recognition whilst actually
being displaced by them. We have described elsewhere the mutuality of
interest between league-table-conscious schools and white middle-class
parents (e.g. James and Beedell 2009): Elsewhere in this book we address
the extent to which this might produce gains to white middle-class
families whilst being potentially disadvantageous to others.
5
A Darker Shade of Pale: Whiteness
as Integral to Middle-Class Identity

Introduction

Drawing on the growing literature on whiteness in the United States

and more recently in the United Kingdom, this chapter interrogates
whiteness as integral to white middle-class identity. The first part of
the chapter describes the high value attributed to multicultural school-
ing by the parents, mapping out positive aspects of their self-interested
altruism. It then discusses more problematic aspects in which the dif-
ferential values attributed to classed and raced others is often strongly
related to the extent these others share the same or similar values.
While for many parents and children, there are very positive gains from
attending socially diverse schooling, and ethnic diversity is often valued
for its educative potential, there remain many difficult and uncom-
fortable issues around whiteness in multi-ethnic contexts. Even those
parents who actively choose ethnically diverse schooling appear to
remain entrapped in white privilege despite their political and moral
sentiments.
The chapter focuses on the complicated question of value; of hav-
ing value, finding value in, getting value from and adding value. While
knowledge and understanding of different cultures was emphasised
by both parents and children, encapsulating an openness to differ-
ence and multiculturalism, even these white middle-classes committed
to multi-ethnic schooling face the perils of middle-class acquisitive-
ness, extracting value from, as they find value in, their multi-ethnic
‘other’. The chapter examines these processes of generating use and
exchange value in which the ‘multi-ethnic other’ becomes a source of
multicultural capital.

82
 A Darker Shade of Pale 83

The importance of habitus as a sense of place again permeates the

data. Although all the families expressed sentiments of tolerance and
openness to difference, for the most part, the Norton parents were
not dealing with the lived experience of multiculturalism and all their
children attended schools where minority ethnic groups constituted a
small minority. Both Norton and Riverton were among the 13 local
areas that a recent Institute of Community Cohesion Report (Mansell
and Curtis 2009 p. 13) described as ‘increasingly segregated, deserted
by white parents if they find their children becoming outnumbered by
pupils from ethnic minorities’. The percentage of ethnic minorities in
the schools the Norton families were sending their children to ranged
from 18 to 3 per cent. In Riverton the range was 54–4 per cent with less
than a quarter of families sending their children to schools where more
than half the pupils were from ethnic minorities. Rather, it is primar-
ily the London parents who are living ‘the multicultural dream’, with
95 per cent of the schools attended by their children having at least half
the pupils from ethnic minorities (Reay et al. 2007).
However, regardless of the level of immediate proximity to ethnic
others all the parents were investing symbolically in processes which
position the ethnic minorities as a symbolic buffer between themselves
and a pathologised white working-class. In particular, a majority of both
the white working-classes and the black working-classes, those who are
perceived not to share white middle-class values, come to be residualised
and positioned as excessive in white middle-class imaginaries across
all three locations. The chapter concludes that the white middle-class
interest in difference and otherness can thus be understood not only
as recognition and valuing of ‘the ethnic other’ but also as a project
of cultural capital acquisition. This was particularly the case for the
London and Riverton families who sought to display their liberal cre-
dentials and secure their class position by equipping their children with
the capacities to cope or thrive in a multicultural society.

Adding multicultural value

There is a growing body of literature across the global north that

reveals the advantages and unacknowledged normativity of whiteness
(Frankenberg 1997; Nakayama and Martin 1997; Hage 1998; Lipsitz
1998; Giroux 1999; Back 2002; Hill 2004; Byrne 2006). bell hooks (1992)
argues that privilege habitually passes itself off as embodied in the
normative as opposed to the superior. Privilege works in a peculiarly
seductive way in relation to whiteness, which is seen to be rooted in
84 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

a whole range of things other than ethnic difference and skin colour.
However, theorisations of whiteness as a privileged identity have been
complicated by notions of whiteness as generating intense ambivalences
and anxieties, as well as denial and defensiveness (Brodken 2001;
Perry 2002). It is this multi-faceted understanding of whiteness that
we are attempting to elicit through a focus on white middle-class
identities.
Value lies at the heart of white middle-class identity (Skeggs 2004).
In a class-ridden, racist society, to embody both whiteness and
middle-classness is to be a person of value. It is also to be a person who
makes value judgements that carry symbolic power; a valuer of others.
And despite the rhetorical flourishes around difference and diversity,
it is sameness that routinely gets valued. A majority of white middle-
class parents in the United Kingdom seek out schools where there are
children like their own (Reay 1998a; Ball 2003).
Culture has become a central site for the exchange of value. As Skeggs
(2005 p. 47) asserts, culture can be converted into a highly mobile
commodity and is regularly used in transnational advertising to gener-
ate multicultural appeal. However, cultural differences have rarely been
analysed in terms of their appeal to members of the majority white
culture within educational fields. Yet, many of the families did feel pas-
sionate about the need to produce well-rounded, tolerant individuals
and they saw multi-ethnic comprehensive schooling as an important
component in this process. They spoke of children who were ‘socially
fluent and adaptable’; children who became ‘more resilient’ and this
resilience is sometimes counterpoised to the ‘softness’ of children who
attend selective and private schools. In particular, multiculturalism is
seen as an important value reflecting inclusivity in a diverse, global
world. This positive value in comprehensive schooling emerges strongly
in what Avril Smart, one of the London parents and a journalist, said:

This is a speculation but I think there is definitely something about

not being arrogant or not appearing arrogant. There is some kind of
modesty that some people might see as them not being confident.
You are not being educated to be a woman of the world, to be in
charge; you are being educated to take your part, a place alongside
everyone else.
(Avril Smart, London)

We glimpse, throughout what Avril Smart says, a sense of attending

comprehensive schools as almost a humbling experience for the white,
 A Darker Shade of Pale 85

middle-class child; one that makes children both better people and
better equipped to understand and respond to ethnic diversity. Avril’s
sentiments were widely held. They are reflected in the words of Karen
Charles, a Norton mother. Speaking of her two teenage children she
asserted:

They just have a great experience of people. I mean they share classes
with completely different types of people with different backgrounds,
with various different problems, and I think that’s hugely beneficial.
I think they’ve learnt tolerance, they’ve just learnt so much about
other people’s lives, how fortunate they are, I think it’s been a really
positive experience.

In both the women’s words, and those of the vast majority of the other
parents we interviewed, we are presented with a progressive inclusive
image of twenty-first-century citizenry in which comprehensive school-
ing is seen to play a key role in promoting cultural openness and
understanding. Edith Jennings, another London parent argued that this
was a case of putting rhetoric into practice, of living as well as espousing
democratic, civic values. Our parents were emphasising a social and cul-
tural fluency in which an active engagement with difference is signalled
as a highly valued attribute:

I think we would automatically spout all the stuff about the impor-
tance of cultural and social differences but I don’t think it would
mean much to our children if we sent them to either private or selec-
tive state schooling. Sending Jack to the local comprehensive means
that we mean it.
(Edith Jennings, London)

It became clear that many of the parents saw ethnic diversity itself as an
important and highly positive educative feature, equipping their chil-
dren for a globalised, multicultural future. Examples across all three
localities revealed the strong emotional engagement of many parents
as they described the ‘marvellous advantage’ of ethnic diversity. One
parent described her son’s

. . . incredibly ethnic range of friends and it is a marvellous advantage,

I mean it is not something that most people of my generation would
have I think. At his 15th birthday party last year 19 friends came and
they were from 9 different ethnic origins from all round the world
86 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

and I found it rather moving actually. They were just lovely, they were
just lovely, they were all over the house they were doing whatever
they were doing.
(Deirdre Johansson, London)

Another described how he valued a social mix:

I think it is really important for them to be exposed to a social mix,

which I think must be a big part of what I hope they get in going to
a state comprehensive school.
(David Gordon, Norton)

Whilst another celebrated ethnic mix together with exposure to chal-

lenging circumstances:

I think that aspect of Meadowood School was just an amazing edu-

cation for my kids and it was just there, it was just how school life
was. There were dealers outside the gates at lunchtime – well they
had to learn to cope with that, they’ve got streetwise and they’ve not
been protected from the seamier side of life. And the political refugee
children – they (my children) had so much education.
(Carinna Chandler, Riverton)

There is a strong expectation here that the social and ethnic diversity of
a school will produce a ‘better’, ‘nicer’ person – one who is capable not
only of recognising, knowing and respecting qualities of ‘the other’ but
also by doing so, having an enhanced capacity to negotiate their own
way through life:

Marcus has been so happy there, he doesn’t do any work but he’s
turning in to such a nice person, that’s partly [how] he is anyway and
I think we’re quite a loving family. But I think that Marcus will do
well academically wherever he is because he’s able and he’s socially
very happy there which I think at fourteen is more important than
anything. He feels very well looked after, he was telling me the other
day saying that it was quite challenging to start with when he was
confronted with all this sea of different coloured faces, he said he’d
never been in that sort of environment before and didn’t know how
to deal with it, but he’s just got used to it. He said he found it quite
 A Darker Shade of Pale 87

shocking to start with because it was so new. He’s just turning in to a

really nice person.
(Karen Sollazzi, Riverton)

While for Stuart Spedding, another Riverton parent, the working-class

and ethnic minority students that white middle-class children meet
when going to urban comprehensives

are actually quite an important part of education, and learning to

deal with people who are a bit difficult or have different views or
different backgrounds is actually what it is all about.

For many of the parents, social and ethnic diversity was a form of capital
to be weighed against the more conventional concern with the GCSE
results that their children might achieve.
Andrew Sayer (2005) argues that while it is analytically possible to
separate in abstract the moral from the instrumental and the con-
scious from the habitual, in practice the two are complexly interrelated.
Multiculturalism may be valued in itself, as may be an understanding
of other cultures so as to be able to better relate to other people. There
is however an important difference in principle between the moral and
conscious articulation of such ‘valuings’ and, on the other hand, hold-
ing them in the knowledge, (or even because) they gain an advantage
vis-à-vis others. So inner city multi-ethnic schooling is seen to be a
good in itself but also important for acquiring an understanding of,
and proficiency in, multiculturalist capacity. Amongst the high prin-
ciples, moral integrity and openness to cultural diversity is a powerful
strand of calculation regarding the gains to be made from multicultural
urban schooling. Our data reveal how both civic commitment and a
self-interested altruism can be woven together in a complex amalgam,
as in this example from a London-based barrister speaking about his
daughter:

Sophie will be, already is, totally different to us, all our friends are
white and middle class, hers are from all sorts of class and ethnic
backgrounds. And to be honest I’m quite uncomfortable with peo-
ple from different backgrounds. I never had the experience either at
school or university, and we didn’t want that for Sophie. We wanted
her to be a fully paid up citizen of the twenty first century and
88 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

I think she is and that is all down to the school. She has a real social
confidence and can get on with anybody.
(Richard Harding, London)

There are shades here of Van Zanten’s (2003) public sector urban pro-
fessionals with their cosmopolitan view of contemporary society and
an instrumentalised view of local multicultural state schools as ‘major
agents of preparation for this heterogeneous type of modernity, typical
of metropolitan areas’ (p. 119). Tolerance, understanding and proximity
are all valorised as positive, and clearly there is much to be commended
in white middle-class practices of sending your child to multi-ethnic
urban comprehensives, but such practices are also motivated by self-
interest as well as more selfless civic motives. As Gibbons (2002) argues,
the ethic of multiculturalism reflects the realities of professional life and
increasingly needs to be espoused in order to secure professional success.
The global economy requires individuals who can deal with people of
other races and nationalities openly and respectfully. So within the pro-
fessional social fields these parents inhabit as workers multiculturalism
is increasingly a source of cultural and social capital. In fact we would
argue that these white middle-class families are consciously – or at least
partially consciously – setting out to acquire valuable multicultural cap-
ital in order to better equip their children for an increasingly diverse
global world.
In common with many of the other families, Richard Harding’s reflec-
tions on his daughter are also redolent of ‘omnivorousness’. North
American research (Erickson 1996; Peterson and Kern 1996), and more
recently work in the United Kingdom (Warde et al. 2000; Bennett et al.
2009), maps out a particular kind of middle-class self-formation, the cul-
tural omnivore, who can access, know, take part in and feel confident
about using a wide variety of cultural mileux, from high to low. Sophie
is a classic middle-class omnivore. She is an accomplished pianist, loves
classical music and the theatre but also enjoys Black music and clubbing
and has friends from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds (although all
of them are middle-class). She had also been predicted four A grades
at A level and intended to study English at Oxford. Sophie like many
of the other white middle-class young people in the study is ‘a real
multi-cultural kid’ (Marcus Smedley, London) but also one who, through
her cultural activities, remains firmly embedded in white middle-class
social networks. This ability to fit readily and easily into very differ-
ent social milieux is characteristic of many of the young people in the
sample. London teacher Dan Adkins’ comments about his daughter also
 A Darker Shade of Pale 89

exemplify this omnivorousness, though it was also clearly evident across

all three locales:

Emily for example goes to a school where predominantly it’s a kind

of working class environment, a lot of children come from difficult
yes difficult, disadvantaged domestic situations. And it’s roughly 50%
non white. And so she’s got this kind of middle class background and
goes on middle class holidays with a middle class family, and has got
reasonably wealthy grandparents who have left an inheritance for
her kind of thing. And she goes and spends several hours a day with
people who come from very different backgrounds, so she’s exposed
to both and is totally comfortable with both.
(Dan Adkins, London)

Yet, despite the importance of social mixing with the classed and
racialised other expressed by parents across the sample, the vast majority
(over 90 per cent) of the white middle-class young people remain firmly
and primarily anchored in white middle-class networks (Reay 1998b).
Parents expressed varying degrees of concern about this, ranging from
Isabel Webb’s (Norton) surprised tone:

Andrew has stuck with exactly the same friends as he had at pri-
mary school. I think it’s extraordinary, I’ve tried to say invite people
back . . . but they’re all from families like us, they’re always from white
middle class families.

To Audrey Caisey’s (Norton) ironic humour:

I can’t remember the figures but it’s something like 20 percent of the
children [at the school] do not have English as a first language. There
is actually a huge ethnic mix but having said that my children never
seem to have found them.

The white middle-class interest in difference and otherness can thus

also be understood as describing a project of cultural capital acqui-
sition through which these white middle-class families seek to dis-
play their liberal credentials and secure their class position (Bourdieu
1984; May 1996). Ghassen Hage (1998) argues that in the context
of multiculturalism migrant cultures exist in the service of the dom-
inant white culture. He writes about ‘ethnic surplus value’ (p. 128)
in which the white middle-classes further enrich themselves through
90 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

the consumption of ethnic diversity. The ability to move in and out

of spaces marked as ‘other’, whilst part of these white middle-classes’
performance of tolerance and acceptance, is simultaneously a process
through which they come to know themselves as both privileged and
dominant (Razack 2002).

The classed and racialised ‘others’ of white middle-class

multicultural identity

Lying beneath omnivorousness and inclusive multicultural attitudes

and practices are more instrumentalised, and at times fearful, impulses
and attitudes. The instrumentalisation, the extracting of value from
others, is never far from the surface as a number of parents reflect on
the ‘value-added’ gained in terms of confidence and self-esteem that
comes through attending schools where many of the children are far
less privileged:

The funny thing is, something I didn’t realise is, I think it is very
good for their self esteem, I mean we are free loading in a way, partly
because they have got all these opportunities and a lot of them are
cheap and/or free, but also they are top of the tree academically at
a school like that and if they went to another school they would be
average . . . But I think they think they are great and so that is very
good for their self esteem.
(Sally Rouse, London)

And:

Bryony has come out very confident because she was top of the pile
as well in that school and she overcame all her fears and worries at
the beginning and has come out extremely well adjusted socially and
emotionally, very confident and knows where she wants to go.
(Julian Drew, London)

More buried are the fears and we discuss these in depth in Chapter 6.
We glimpse white middle-class fears of potential danger from the neg-
ative influence of white and black working-class peers on their own
children’s attitudes and behaviour. But more common are fears of a neg-
ative impact on children’s educational attainment as a result of being in
pupil peer group cultures where educational achievement is seen to be
insufficiently valued. This is most clearly articulated by Vickie, a London
 A Darker Shade of Pale 91

charity worker: ‘there’s fear, a fear that you’re sending your child into a
lesser environment, somewhere where they’re not going to be able to
do as well.’ Such fears are simultaneously rational and irrational, and
perfectly understandable, and result in the high levels of parental inter-
vention discussed in Chapter 4. Our parents constitute a segment of
the white middle-classes who are actually facing up to fears prevalent
among the white middle-classes more generally. However, both sets of
fears also reveal something more troubling, namely the ways in which
black and ethnic minority children are often used symbolically to put
even greater distance between the white middle-classes and their other
‘other’, the white working-classes. Jenny Etches, a Riverton mother,
expressed clearly the underlying white middle-class value hierarchy that
positions the ethnic minorities as a more acceptable working-class when
she comments:

Parents I’ve spoken to are more concerned about their children mix-
ing with the white rather than the black working classes. I can see a
fear here.

But many of the white middle-class parents make more explicit value
distinctions between ‘the valueless’ white working-classes and those eth-
nic minorities who are seen to hold more value. So in a significant
number of the transcripts a segment of the ethnic minority children
are separated out from the excess of blackness and come to represent
the acceptable face of working-classness, and of ethnic/‘racial’ differ-
ence: they are the children who ‘are exceptionally bright and very nice’,
‘are doing their best’, those who are a paler shade of dark, and come
from families ‘where the parents really care about education’ ‘have high
aspirations’ and ‘are really ambitious for their children’ – the ‘model
minority’ (Leonardo 2004 p. 129). This status is not however attributed
to all ethnic groups. As Paul Western differentiates:

Whereas you go to beyond where the secondary school is there’s a

council estate and its very much a white school but it is in terms
of class very working class and its very much not aspiring middle
classes, whereas the school that Hal went to which has lots of ethnic
minorities a lot of the parents aspire very strongly for their kids.
(Paul Western, London)

Within dominant symbolic systems the aspiring ethnic minorities are

ascribed with moral value despite – or we would argue, because – of
92 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

their ethnicity. This is perhaps unsurprising, especially as research has

consistently documented (Chen 2004; Tomlinson 2005a) that economic
migrants adopt middle-class values towards education often regardless
of class position. They also stand out from the working-class majority
(both Black and White) because of shared values. They are perceived to
be committed to the same values as these white middle-class parents.
They, too, have an aspirational habitus (Baker and Brown 2008) which,
despite their difference, makes them not too different, unlike the white,
working-class who are seen to be ‘beyond the pale’. So, for many of
our parents, the aspirational ethnic minorities come to be defined as
good and having worth in a middle-class process of drawing boundaries
and attributing value. And despite the deep-rooted institutional racism
within the labour market, such ambitions and aspirations are slowly
being realised, as a higher than expected number of upwardly mobile
young people are from ethnic minority backgrounds. A recent study
(Ridge 2005) found that 56 per cent of people from Indian working-class
families take up professional and managerial jobs in adulthood, while
more generally new generations of not just Indian, but also Chinese,
Caribbean and African families are moving ahead in the employment
market (Platt 2005).
However, more troubling, as some of the earlier quotes indicate, are
the ways in which the working-class is represented in the accounts of
a number of our white middle-classes. Whilst there is much valuing
and validation of the multi-ethnic other what is also interesting here
is what is being displaced and to whom it is being displaced. This is
made explicit in James Mount’s account of ‘the white trash factor’. The
interview had been covering the features of a good school:

Plus, the other factor that goes into making the school actually good
is, I don’t know if it’s particularly politically correct, but actually it
is very low on the white trash factor you see. What you’ve actually
got, is you’ve got people from all over the world basically and partic-
ularly you have got the Muslims, about half or a third of the intake or
whatever. It has got much more of a tradition of education and like
real fascist parents really (laughs) and so actually you don’t get the
same kind of disciplinary problems. You know they might be poor
and they might be refugees but they have still got a very, erm, pos-
itive [attitude] towards the benefit of education as opposed to like
the white trash families basically who are the third generation of
Thatcher’s dross or whatever. Actually if you get too many of those in
 A Darker Shade of Pale 93

the school then that is actually much worse than people of different
colour and races frankly.
(James Mount, London)

In this parent’s words we can see a privileging of the white

‘multicultural’ self through the pathologising of ‘the other’. As Bourdieu
argues in Acts of Resistance (1998), moral stigma is frequently attached to
those who are worst off in class terms while moral superiority is attached
to higher classes, in a process of what he terms ‘class racism’. And this
is what is at work here. In the process of gaining multicultural capital
the white working-classes are residualised. They come to simultaneously
represent excess and nothing, in the sense of having and being of no
value. Very similar processes are at play here to the ones Haylett (2001)
describes in which the white working-classes are marked as the abject
constitutive limit by which middle-class multiculturalism is known and
valorised. They are Warren and Twine’s (1997) ‘very white . . . naked,
pasty, underdone: white white’, embodying a whiteness that is some-
how excessive, excrescent and incommensurably ‘other’ (Haylett 2001
p. 360). But the association of excess with Blackness never entirely goes
away and there is still the fear/paranoia about ‘big Black boys’ or in Steve
Davies, A London parent’s words ‘racism pure and simple’. Both ‘White
working-class trash’ and ‘big Black boys’ are positioned here as ‘abject’,
the embodiment of that which is valueless (Skeggs 2004 p. 23).

Hierarchies of value and valuing

In all of this values are paramount, both in the sense of having the
right moral and educational values (the shared values discussed earlier)
and in being of value. In fact there appears to be a powerful causal rela-
tionship between the two in so far as the multi-ethnic other needs to
share in normative white middle-class values in order to be of value,
while those unruly white and black working-classes who refuse norma-
tive white middle-class values come to simultaneously represent excess
and abjection (Reay et al. 2007). They are of no value. Yet, this is not
quite as depressing a scenario as the one that emerges in Class, Self, Cul-
ture (Skeggs 2004). As we have illustrated in the earlier section on ‘adding
multicultural value’ nearly all white middle-class families in our sample
find value in as well as get value from multi-ethnic, inner city school-
ing. However, it is only a section of the working-classes whose affect and
dispositions are desired: those minority ethnic ‘working classes’ who are
94 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

working-class primarily in the traditional sense of having few economic

resources. They are Byrne’s (2006) excitingly different yet acceptably the
same ‘cultural other’. To a large extent they share the same aspirations,
hopes and desires for their children as the white middle-classes. Unlike
their white working-class counterparts, they offer acceptable aspects of
working-class culture ‘that can be put to use for the enhancement of the
middle-class’ (Skeggs 2004 p. 12).
Furthermore, the white middle-classes do not simply want their chil-
dren to gain from contact with their ethnic other, they want them to
be friends, although, as we have said, this happens less often than they
desire (see also Chapter 7). The multi-ethnic other then is not only a
source of multicultural capital, but it also becomes a symbolic buffer
between the pathologised white working-classes on the one side and
the traditional white middle-classes, criticised for their separatism and
racism, on the other. Yet, to view the minority ethnic students only as
a way for the white middle-classes to gain multicultural capital would
miss out on the gains that work in the other direction, however sec-
ondary they may be. We glimpse these gains in what Martha Sage says
about the learning benefits an Asian twin has acquired through being
placed in a class with a critical mass of white middle-class students:

It’s quite interesting because this friend who is Asian and lives on one
of the estates is part of Charlotte’s little group as it so happens she is a
twin and they are in separate classes. The one who’s in Sophie’s class
is doing a lot better than her twin sister. They’re not identical twins
and there could be all sorts of differences but even Charlotte points
to that and I think it is because they have very different friendship
groups.
(Martha Sage, London)

These gains were expressed more crudely by Ann Epsom, a Riverton

mother, who commented that in classes with all sorts of different
children ‘some children are dragged up by other children’. As both
mothers identify, learning gains come through social mixing. Sociol-
ogy of Education has been concerned about the benefits of social mix
for a long time (Coleman et al. 1966; Thrupp 1999) but traditionally
the benefits are all seen to flow in one direction from the middle to
the working-classes, from white to minority ethnic children. Further-
more, the gains from social mix are only seen to work if there is a
majority of white and/or middle-class students. What we have here chal-
lenges such orthodoxies. A critical mass of middle-class children may
 A Darker Shade of Pale 95

‘drag up’ some working-class children academically, but simultaneously

the white middle-classes are heavily reliant on their ethnic minorities
and working-class ‘others’ to provide the real-life experiences that these
parents value and feel that they are not able to offer themselves.
So for much of the time having value, finding value in, getting
value from and adding value to are inextricably entangled in the data.
As Lorraine Reeves (London) states, multi-ethnic schooling is ‘good for
white, middle-class children. It keeps them real’, and her sentiments are
echoed across the interviews with parents. Nearly all the parents referred
to their children’s improved skills in dealing with what was termed ‘the
real world’ or ‘dealing with real life’: ‘it’s important for being able to
deal with life’ (Jane Marsden, London); ‘She’s got a stronger sense of
reality, learning how to deal with all types of people’ (Jacqueline Fenton-
Lawley, London); ‘It gives them a taste of the real world . . . She has really
understood what life is really like so she is much more worldly wise’
(Liz Welland, London). As these quotes make clear, many of the par-
ents welcome the resilience and worldliness that comes with attending
inner city comprehensives. So threaded through the discourse of valuing
the diversity represented in urban comprehensives is a powerful theme
of the value gained from diversity that we have discussed earlier. This
opens up a tension across the data between two qualities – ‘of value’
and ‘of use’. As Baumann (2001 p. 164) points out, they are ‘notorious
for being confounded and confused: is not a thing valuable because it
is useful’? But as he goes on to argue that value is the quality of a thing
while usefulness is an attribute of the thing’s users:

It is the incompleteness of the user, the dearth which makes the user
suffer, the user’s urge to fill the gap, which makes a thing useful.
To ‘use’ means to improve the condition of the user, to repair a short-
coming; ‘using’ means to be concerned with the welfare of the user.
(Baumann 2001 p. 165)

A different way of approaching what is desired would be to value the

other for its otherness, to nurture that otherness and make it flourish
and grow. This for Baumann is akin to love and he asserts that ‘use
means a gain for the self; value augers its self-denial. To use is to take, to
value is to give’ (p. 166). We want to argue that there is a deep, irresolv-
able ambivalence among our white middle-class sample in relation to
‘use’ and ‘value’; between what we have earlier distinguished as ‘value
in’ and ‘value from’; a tension between the acquisitive individualised
self and commitments to civic responsibility and the common good.
96 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

As Thompson (2003 p. 7) argues, ‘progressive whites must interrogate

the very ways of being good for the moral framing that gives whites
credit for being anti-racist is parasitic on the racism that it is meant to
challenge.’

Challenging privilege? Doing whiteness differently

Sayer (2005) asserts that behaviour is often shaped by mixed motives

and influences. While individuals often decide on a course of action
because they hope it will have beneficial consequences for them, they
are also acting out of a moral sense of the right thing to do. In many
of the parents’ narratives the effort to do the right thing is difficult
to separate out from ‘getting the best for my child’. On one level this
is because ‘getting the best for my child’ is itself positioned as ethical
behaviour (and as we saw in the previous chapter, it can trump ‘polit-
ical’ perspectives). Problems arise when it is at the expense of others.
Yet despite the mixed motives of white middle-class parents, many of
the young white middle-class individuals who attended socially mixed
comprehensive schooling, at least from the perspective of their parents,
were seen to be developing key citizenship skills of tolerance and under-
standing difference that are increasingly vital in a society with growing
class and ethnic intolerance. As Sarah Davies, a deputy head teacher of
an inner city comprehensive, put it:

Going to an inner city comprehensive has made both boys socially

able to mix with anybody, having a real understanding and tolerance
of other people. Being the kind of people I think their sort of moral
attitudes are very, very strong. I think they are both very much full
of concern for others and they are not competitive in any way. They
don’t look at life that you know I have got to get to the top I have
got to be better than other people. They are both very understanding
and definitely don’t think they are better than other people.
(Sarah Davies, London)

Roediger argues that whiteness is all about absence. ‘It is the empty and
therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity on what one isn’t and
on whom one can hold back’ (Roediger 1994 p. 13). Such empty identi-
ties are ripe for filling in and one of the ways in which white dominance
in the context of urban multi-ethnic comprehensives is ‘rationalised,
legitimated and made ostensibly normal and natural’ (Frankenberg 1997
p. 3) is through processes of ‘shading in’, adding ‘colour’ to the white
 A Darker Shade of Pale 97

middle-class self. There is a blurring and shading in of whiteness that

serves to mask its privilege. These omnivorous practices produce alterna-
tive white middle-class identities – streetwise, globally knowledgeable,
tolerant, inclusive young white middle-class individuals, who, in a num-
ber of parents’ words, are better prepared for a global economy (James
et al. 2010). Sometimes, however, this can become problematic partic-
ularly when acculturation goes too far and white, middle-class children
are deemed to be over-enthusiastically playing with other identities.
As Lesley Mitchell comments:

I mean Andy can do a wonderful imitation of a South London Black

kid and that dismays me sometimes I say ‘why do you want to talk
like that’. But you know I don’t think he’s going to do it forever
because the whole environment is very important and he doesn’t
come from a home where he is not expected to do well.
(Lesley Mitchell, London)

Implicit in Lesley’s words is the white middle-class propensity to move

in and out of different more ‘colourful’ identities. White middle-class
omnivores can both dip in and out of black culture unlike their black
working-class counterparts.

Caught within multicultural capitalism

It is important for critical social science, on the one hand, to identify

hidden instrumental strategies and power relations behind apparently
innocent and disinterested action and, on the other hand, to uncover
genuinely unintended advantages deriving from ethical behaviour
(Sayer 2005). Initially our project was a naïve one in that we expected
to find, in the white middle-classes sending their children to urban
comprehensives, a fraction of the middle-classes characterised by altru-
ism and a sense of civic responsibility. We did indeed find those qualities
in our sample, and we can see clearly in what parents say about their
children some of the intended and unintended gains from ethical
behaviour. However, this altruism and sense of civic responsibility was
tempered by a degree of instrumentalism we had not anticipated. Writ-
ing of her American white middle-class neighbours, bell hooks (2000
p. 3) argues that:

They may believe in recognising multiculturalism and celebrating

diversity . . . but when it comes to money and class they want to
98 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

protect what they have, to perpetuate and reproduce it – they want

more. The fact that they have so much while others have so little
does not cause moral anguish, for they see their good fortune as a
sign they are chosen, special, deserving.

Only a minority of the white middle-class parents in our study made

explicit claims about their children’s ‘extraness’, their specialness. How-
ever, at the same time the vast majority did not question their privilege,
even though it was particularly apparent in the multi-ethnic, working-
class schools they chose to send their children to. In fact most of
the parents, while distancing themselves from the more exclusivist
white middle-class majority, continued to deploy their greater eco-
nomic, social and cultural capital to get more educationally for their
own children. While sometimes such practices were accompanied by
a commitment and even practices to improve educational resources
for other less-privileged children, on the whole actively seeking to
enhance the common good was not normative for this group of white
middle-class parents either. Like Butler with Robson’s (2003) London
middle-classes these parents constitute ‘a class in and for itself’. Theirs
was a multicultural, but only rarely a socialist, egalitarianism. While
they were anxious not to refuse or misrecognise cultural others, they
do not see themselves as implicated in the injuries of class (Sennett and
Cobb 1973), especially the injustices suffered by those termed ‘Chavs’
or ‘white trash’.
So is there an innocent white middle-class? One that is not either
putting cultural and material distance between itself and its ethnic
and classed others by rushing into elite geographical and education-
ally separate enclaves, or else ‘making use’ of a conveniently accessible
and acceptably valuable ethnic other in order to gain valued global
multicultural capital? Certainly, our research indicates that the future-
projected, strategising, capital-accruing self that epitomises middle-class
subjectivity can never be completely held in abeyance. Attending multi-
ethnic urban comprehensives becomes yet another, if slightly risky, way
of resourcing the middle-class self. There are glimpses of future-projected
strategising in most of the interviews but it is most clearly articulated by
Martha Sage:

We looked at our own educational experience and we had both done

reasonably well at school and got into prestigious universities and
we felt, you know, we were successes of the education system from
that point of view. We thought, what in life has ever stood in our
 A Darker Shade of Pale 99

way and has it been to do with exam grades and we thought no,
actually it’s been things that we would rather be better at; it’s other
stuff, not passing exams. It’s to do with social fluency, social skills,
time management, self-confidence, knowledge of other cultures and
the real world, whatever it might be. We thought that those things
if anything are more likely to come from going to a school like
Capeland.

Martha Sage and her partner, Jeremy, have already mapped out the skills
that their children will need for professional success in a multicultural
global economy and have calculated that attending an urban compre-
hensive is a better context for acquiring them than a more traditional
grammar or selective school. This is where we come back to the discom-
fort of our own positioning as researchers in relation to the research
and whether there is a way to rescue the white middle-classes from their
relentless acquisitiveness. Those of us, now precariously perched on the
moral high ground, who critique materialism and consumerism, frown
on elite choices and social snobberies perhaps neglect the gains we enjoy
on the back of our consumption of all the ‘right on’ capitals including
multiculturalism.

Conclusion

Despite their espousal of a cosmopolitan identity, there was little sense

amongst our white middle-class families of cosmopolitanism as ‘an
imagination of a globally shared collective future’ (Beck 1992 p. 27).
While the practices of Savage et al.’s (2005 p. 206) Mancunians work
to efface ‘the other’, the London families, together with many of those
in Norton and Riverton, seemed to be directed towards ‘consuming the
desired other’ in an act of appropriation. Cultural validation is entwined
with acquisitive valuing. And this is mostly a partial and narcissistic
valuing; one that is primarily about recognising a more colourful self
in the ethnic other in a process that residualises both a hyper-whitened
white working-class and an excessively black working-class who come
to share the same symbolic register in the white middle-class imagi-
nary (Sibley 1995; Haylett 2001). We can see the paradoxical way in
which the embracing of an acceptable ethnic ‘other’ is, in effect, an
excluding inclusivity. ‘The “unities” that identities proclaim are, in fact,
constructed within the play of power and exclusion’ (Hall 1996), and
this process of partial inclusion produces the too black working-classes
and the too white working-classes as unacceptable ‘others’.
100 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Yet it is important to remind ourselves that these parents are nego-

tiating an impossible situation that individually they can do little to
improve. They are left with the quandary of trying to behave ethically
in a situation which is structurally unethical (in terms of entrenched
inequalities), and radically pluralistic (in terms of different moralities
and value systems). The wider social context of structural injustices is
bound to throw up impossible moral dilemmas and lead to all sorts
of morally inconsistent behaviour. Marx argued that ethical behaviour
is only partially achievable in a society which is structurally unethical
in the way it distributes resources and opportunities and with them,
possibilities for equal recognition (see Avineri 1968). And contemporary
society has changed little in this respect. When the white middle-classes
make choices that are directed towards the common good, greater ben-
efits and value still accrue to them rather than their class and ethnic
others. This is a case of entrapment in privilege and constitutes pow-
erful evidence that we need effective policies that work towards the
dismantling of economic and social privilege.
We are left with two powerful challenges: first, to develop critiques
which, whilst recognising how people negotiate inequitable situations,
also constantly keep in play the structural injustices within which they
are situated. The problems of capitalist multicultural society do not
derive largely from the moral failures of individuals but from society at
large; second, to recognise the complexities of whiteness, and the need
for more empirical studies of how whiteness is lived and experienced by
different fractions of both working and middle-classes, and across dif-
ferent contexts. The research indicates that, whilst the white group in
society share the same skin colour, they are not ‘equally white’ (Bonnett
1998). Paradoxically, while the white working-classes are perceived to
be excessively pale, and are too white to possess dominant cultural cap-
ital, the white middle-classes in our study accrue valued (multi)cultural
capital by presenting themselves as ‘a darker shade of pale’.
6
The Psycho-Social: Ambivalences
and Anxieties of Privilege

Introduction

The main focus of this chapter is the frequently overlooked anxieties,

conflicts, desires, defences, ambivalences and tensions within middle-
class identities, what we have termed the psycho-social. Although they
are rarely made explicit, either by Bourdieu himself or the many scholars
drawing on his theory, there are strong links between the psycho-social
and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (also see Bourdieu 2007; Steinmetz
2006). As Bourdieu himself asserts, habitus as the interiorisation of social
history is fundamentally about the degree of integration across the dis-
parate experiences that make up a biography (Bourdieu 1990). However,
although he writes powerfully about his own ambivalence at being in an
unfamiliar field (Bourdieu 2007) and the defences of the working-classes
whose ‘habitus of necessity operates as a defence mechanism against
necessity’ (Bourdieu 2000 pp. 232–233), he does not engage with the
psycho-social manifestations of middle-class habitus. It is these we are
attempting to uncover in this chapter.
As we mentioned in Chapter 4, the dominance of neoliberalism and
the increased emphasis on educational credentialism has intensified
parental anxieties about the consequences of not making educational
choices for their children which might be seen as indicative of being
a ‘bad parent’ (Butler and Hamnett 2010). White middle-class families
making counter-intuitive choices have to deal with the psychic costs
and tensions of having different notions of ‘the best’ for their child
to those normative within white middle-class culture. As one London
mother succinctly pointed out, ‘Not everyone can have what is best
because the best is an exclusive thing.’ Yet, as we have seen, our sam-
ple was far from homogeneous. The 125 families were differentiated

101
102 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

by different positions on a number of cross-cutting spectrums. They

ranged from the established upper middle-class where even grandpar-
ents attended elite universities to tenuously positioned new arrivals
in the middle-classes; the UK equivalent of Bourdieu’s (1986) ‘inheri-
tors’ and ‘newcomers’. There were also varying degrees of commitment
and ambivalence to socially diverse urban schooling, which we will
be exploring further in the next chapter, as well as the range of lev-
els of detachment and embeddedness in localities that we explored in
Chapter 3.
However, the focus in this chapter is the psycho-social-affective spec-
trum with on the one extreme a tiny number of confident, relaxed
parents who know their child will do well wherever they go to school;
and on the other, the highly anxious parents, often mothers, who feel
compelled to micro-manage their child’s school experience. The chapter
presents data to illustrate that while this psycho-social spectrum does
not map readily on to social class fractions, it does nevertheless have a
strong connection with the levels of risk involved for parents in making
non-normative white middle-class educational choices. In turn levels
of risk are connected both to degrees of security and establishment
as middle-class and to the level of educational attainment and mar-
ket positioning of the school attended. While higher degrees of anxiety
are apparent in the narratives of the ‘first generation’, the more recent
arrivals and less secure members of the white middle-classes, there were
also regular glimpses of anxiety and fear in our interviews with the
securely established middle-classes.
Narratives of white middle-class choice reveal both powerful defences
and the power of the affective, and these are explored through
a number of in-depth case studies that highlight complex moral
and ethical dimensions of white middle-class identity and, in par-
ticular, the psycho-social basis of ‘principled choices’. Central to
the analysis are white middle-class relationships to a classed and
ethnic ‘other’. We are attempting to understand the psycho-social
impact of relationships and representations in the formation of white
middle-class identities in predominantly working-class, multicultural
contexts.
Before focusing on the case studies it is helpful to rehearse aspects
of the wider political and economic context that both feed into and
intensify white middle-class ambivalences and anxieties. The past 40
years have witnessed a growing and alarming disparity between rich
and poor (Lansley 2009). While state surveillance and regulation have
grown apace, over the same period the welfare state has shrunk in a
number of senses. Governments have reneged on the earlier ambitious
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 103

and optimistic remit of universal provision, and there has been a largely
hidden yet remorseless process of privatisation. The egalitarian, social
justice underpinnings of the welfare state have been consistently under-
mined by dominant ideologies of free markets and choice. In place of
wider structural state provision we now have the expectation that we
can all become self-entrepreneurial individuals capable of optimising
from the wide range of choices that markets provide. At the same time,
as Lynne Layton points out:

Government has increasingly retreated from providing any functions

that might contain anxiety and trauma; on the contrary, govern-
ment, in concert with the media and corporate policies, has done its
best to keep people frightened. Fear has led to splitting and projective
identification, and large segments of the population, traumatized in
different ways depending on social location, have taken up polarized
positions of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.
(Layton 2008 p. 69)

However, as Layton goes on to argue, instead of challenging these devel-

opments and the policies that sustain them, most people have sought
refuge in the narcissism of minor differences and/or an intensified indi-
vidualism. Rather, when government and public institutions abandon
their responsibilities to their citizens, as Layton asserts (p. 3), ‘there is a
pressure to create ever more individualistic identities that repudiate the
vulnerable and needy parts of the self.’ Against this backdrop we attempt
to explore the psychic tensions the white middle-class families in our
sample were grappling with. On the one hand, the many expressions
of anxiety and ambivalence indicate a white middle-class still in touch
with its own vulnerabilities, yet on the other hand, there remained a
defence of distinction which entailed a repudiation of moral account-
ability. We see this most clearly in the powerful discourses around
‘brightness’ exemplified in the case study of Clarissa, discussed later in
the chapter.

Personalising social class

Class is still an objective formation about ‘who gets what and who
ends up on what pathway’, but it is also ‘. . . about subjectivity – how
one understands and positions self and other, rationally and emotion-
ally, and one’s sense of potency and possibility’ (McLeod and Yates
2008 p. 359). Lois McNay argues that constructionist approaches, in
general, lack attention to ‘the more troubling and destabilizing effects
104 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

that irrational and unconscious motivations may have upon an indi-

vidual’s behaviour’ (2000 p. 122). The preoccupation of constructionist
approaches with the meanings people give to their behaviour and the
discourses which interpolate them tend to mean a corresponding lack
of attention to what Paul Hoggett (2000) terms the power of what is
unthought, unspoken, unthinkable and unspeakable. We would argue
that shifts in conceptions of the citizen and wider social processes of
individualisation and consumerism, together with the ways in which
these influence processes of educational choice for families, coalesce to
generate a set of dynamics that are both social and psychic. Conse-
quently, it is important to focus on the inner conflicts as well as the
outer rationalisations. Wendy Hollway (2004 p. 7) contends ‘we are
psychosocial because the real events in the external, social world are
desirously and defensively, as well as discursively appropriated’, and it is
this combination of ‘the desirous and the defensive’ that we are trying
to elicit. Ironically, although both clients and professionals in ‘the psy
industries’ are predominantly middle-class (Rose 1989), when there has
been a focus on the psycho-social within academic writing the empha-
sis has largely been on the working-classes – their defences, projections
and paranoia – usually in relation to their ethnic other. However, social
inequalities take shape psychically for all individuals through binaries
such as middle- and working-class, rich and poor, white and ethnic
minority, straight and gay. And as Layton (2004 p. 46) argues:

They do so by defining what affects, behaviours, thoughts, and

modes of attachment and agency are ‘proper’ to each falsely split
half of the pair. Within each pair in the hierarchy, a negative cul-
tural valence is assigned to the attributes of the degraded identity, a
positive valence to the dominant one. Thus these identities are often
lived as painful, conflictual, binary (either/or) structures.

The process then of internalising such invidious social norms, even for
those positively positioned by them, is complicated, conflictual and
often painful. Habitus is striated with ambivalences. The unfamiliar
educational fields the white middle-classes find themselves in generate
conflicts and tensions, as well as the difficult and uncomfortable feelings
that accompany them.
As we have already stressed nearly all the families were dealing with
the psychic costs and tensions of having different notions of ‘the best’
for their child to those normative within white middle-class culture.
However, as we have discussed in Chapter 4, rationales for choice of
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 105

urban comprehensives were couched as much in pragmatic terms as

moral and political ones. While across the sample parents expressed a
sense of regret at social inequality and many felt that by supporting
their local school they were making a commitment to the local com-
munity, parents who spoke passionately about the ethical reasons for
choice were in a minority. Rather, for a majority of the parents it was the
psycho-social consequences of choice that dominated their narratives.

The ambivalence at the heart of white middle-class

counter-intuitive choice

As we have seen in the previous chapter, parents expressed a complex

mixture of pity, sympathy, disgust and fear, towards the working-class
‘other’ but had more positive responses to their ethnic other. There
were strong spatial aspects to parents’ perspectives (Reay et al. 2008).
In London the ‘other’ was frequently a minority ethnic other, who was
recognised and represented as having similar attitudes and aspirations
to the white middle-classes and thus seen to be of value. There was a
degree of mutuality, respect and the identification of common inter-
ests. In Norton, with a far lower percentage of minority ethnic pupils
in the secondary schools, and to a lesser extent in Riverton, there was
primarily a focus on the working-class other who was, for the most
part, denigrated by parents and labelled as ‘locals’, ‘Chavs’ or ‘Charvers’.
In particular, for our Norton middle-class parents living in a city where
the middle-classes constituted only 8 per cent of the city population
the figure of the Chav was represented in disproportionate and emotive
ways that revealed underlying anxieties and fears.
Although the majority of parents expressed an anxiety about the
white working-class, many minority ethnic children were seen in terms
of the ‘model minority’ (Leonardo 2004) with similar values to them-
selves. A number of the minority ethnic children were middle-class,
particularly in the Norton context, but a substantial number of those
who were not were represented as coming from middle-class back-
grounds in their countries of origin (see for example Yvonne’s quote
later in this chapter). This conscription of the other as a source of
learning was undoubtedly a genuine empathy for some, but could also
become superficial and detached as many maintained their distance.
Sympathy was tempered by high vigilance against damage to their chil-
dren’s prospects. A surprising finding was how often parents viewed
the others’ disadvantaged circumstances, particularly those of the white
working-classes, as a cultural rather than a structural issue. Dominant
106 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

discourses of individualisation, meritocracy and self-responsibilisation

seem to have had a powerful influence even on this left leaning,
pro-welfare fraction of the middle-classes.
These then are families who have chosen against the middle-class
grain, sometimes out of strong moral and ethical inclinations. How-
ever, ambivalence lies at the very heart of inclination (Adkins 2003) and
what the data show are the psychic costs of ethical choice and often a
more than fleeting ambivalence in relation to their children’s schools
and particularly the other children that attend them. They were man-
aging deeply felt and unresolved tensions in relation to their children’s
schooling.
There were strong signs of Bourdieu’s ‘divided habitus’ (Bourdieu 1999
p. 511). The white middle-class subject produced through ‘acting against
the normative middle-class grain’ is split, divided between the acquisi-
tive self-interested self and a more altruistic, public spirited self and has
to live with the tensions generated through the contradictory interplay
of cooperation and competition, consumerism and welfarism (Miller
1993).
These are the white middle-classes who do not have the fortress men-
tality of the majority white middle-classes. While exclusion remains
a crucial strategy for ‘fearful’ middle-classes (Vincent and Ball 2006)
in ensuring the social and educational reproduction of their children,
the middle-classes in our study are not putting up the barricades but
boldly, or in few cases rather hesitantly, going where most white middle-
classes fear to tread. Anxiety and fear about a potentially contaminating
other affected all fractions of the white middle-classes. For example,
Catherine, a London mother, whose parents and grandparents attended
university, talked about ‘the danger’ of sending children to schools
where ‘there are too many working classes’. She perceived such schools
as characterised by indiscipline but more crucially as places where
children like her own would no longer be seen as ‘the norm’.
Yet, despite fears like these, it could be argued that the white middle-
classes have colonised normativity across society. Middle-classness in
the contemporary is about what is normal, good, appropriate and proper
(Skeggs 2004), while whiteness is also about a normalcy that historically
has meant a displacement of race onto racialised others (Byrne 2006).
And while the growing literature on whiteness is endeavouring to make
whiteness visible as a racialised identity (Frankenberg 1997; Perry 2002;
Ware and Back 2002), we still seem to be a considerable way from seeing
a discursive shift that opens up whiteness as a range of racialised sub-
ject positions. For many, the white middle-classes continue symbolically
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 107

to represent the ideal towards which others should aspire; paradoxi-

cally the social grouping with all the culture but none of the ethnicity.
Both middle-classness and whiteness then are positioned as the univer-
sal and, as Lucey et al. (2003) argue, ‘the universal marks the particular
as the particular in order to attain its hegemony and with that evades
the universal’s own particularity.’

Beyond rationality: Passion and politics in white

middle-class choice

Middle-classness traditionally has also been about containment and

restraint; in fact these qualities are part of the reason the middle-classes
have come to represent the social ideal. As we have alluded to earlier,
it is the working-classes who have always been portrayed as repositories
for excess (Stallybrass and White 1986; Carey 1992). However, we would
argue that emotions and affect seep beyond the edifice of ‘the rational
subject’, and this seepage was powerfully articulated in Yvonne Scott’s
narrative. Yvonne, a London parent, was a coal miner’s daughter before
becoming a dancer and marrying a middle-class man. When her old-
est daughter went to Copethorpe comprehensive it was bottom of the
LEA league table with 17 per cent A∗ – C at GCSE. At the time of Yvonne’s
interview the local newspaper had an article on Copethorpe entitled
‘Worst in London: Secondary school exam results hit rock bottom’ on
the front page. The newspaper was lying on Yvonne’s kitchen table
while she was being interviewed. Throughout her interview Yvonne
reiterated her deep commitment to comprehensive schooling, but this
strong commitment was in constant tension with Yvonne’s fear of the
consequences of acting on her belief:

I was totally freaked out by the whole prospect of secondary school

and all Tanya’s friends went to Drayton Park and I thought I was
like minded with these mothers, but it wasn’t until the secondary
school thing I thought no, they are not and I was panicking about
it and Tanya wanted to go to Drayton Park, she said her friends were
picking their school and why couldn’t she pick hers. I said Tanya they
are not picking their school, their mum is picking their school and
if you go to Drayton Park, their mum will have picked your school.
I said I don’t believe in segregation of any kind, whether it is single
sex, faith schools, fee paying, whatever people do to divide us, and
I wholeheartedly mean that and so you have to go to a mixed school
108 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

with no special faith where there is a mixture of kids and this is our
local mixed school.
(Yvonne Scott, London)

The calm reasoned explanation Yvonne provides to Tanya belied her

anxious feelings about school choice. In many ways Yvonne is one of
the least ambivalent of the parents (but see Laura Franklin, a Riverton
parent, in Chapter 4). She is passionately committed to comprehensive
schooling and told us that ‘there is no way I’d move my kids. I think it is
the responsibility of parents like us to make sure these schools improve.’
Yet despite her resolve Yvonne found the transition process, in her own
word ‘excruciating’:

When her primary class went to visit Tanya was terrified because it
was chaos. Not just that, the kids were pretty crazy, they weren’t in
the classrooms, the ones in the classrooms weren’t getting on with
their work and the teachers didn’t seem to have much control, it was
just chaos. I rang up the head and said I came today and do you
know, we want to send our daughter to this school, we really want to
support this school because everything we believe about putting into
your community and not taking from it, this encompasses everything
we believe, we want to come, and we will help. And I said look today
was a complete disaster and my daughter already asked not to go to
the school and had to listen to her friends saying oh why are your
parents sending you to that crap school, my mum would never let
me go. And we are getting flak from them and then we are getting
her here and it was a disaster. So it was just excruciating.

For Yvonne her investment in doing what was best for society rather
than just her own children was producing considerable anxiety not only
in relation to her daughter’s fraught experience of their local compre-
hensive but also in terms of her own self-perception as a mother who
in sending her child to what is perceived to be ‘a bad school’ may her-
self be seen to be ‘a bad mother’. We can see very clearly the conflict
and tension between being a good citizen and a good parent (Oria et al.
2007):

She went on the first day and literally I was not sleeping at night
and everything I was really worried. And I am not a worrier, I am
really not, but the first day she went, I took her there and me and
John both took her and she went up the stairs to the door to the
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 109

assembly hall and she didn’t know anybody and she walked off and
her face, I will never forget her face and she went bye mum and then
I went and worried all day, all day I was looking at my watch and
worrying.

Such conflicted feelings are further aggravated by a nagging sense of

anxiety that such choices may result in children ‘under-achieving’ edu-
cationally. While such powerful affective responses were most common
in the London context there were similar concerns in both Norton and
Riverton, as the following quotes from Isabel Webb show:

Um, we had a very unfortunate first term . . . he was horrendously bul-

lied. Um and that was all just, just about everything that I feared was
all coming true . . . it was just terrible, it was horrible, it was horrible
hearing what he’d gone through and bless him he’d kept it all bottled
up and it was awful. The first we’d heard about it, it was sitting, was
at a parents’ evening and it was this time of the year, it was about,
it was around about his birthday. We went over there and sat down
with the form teacher and, um, and the teacher said, she handed me
this piece of paper which was Luke’s assessment of how he was get-
ting on in different lessons, you know and he went through it and
bless him he’d sat there and filled it in so honestly and it was things
like I’d like, I like geography but in geography I get a lot of um, a
lot of teasing, do this and do that. German, I’d like to learn some
German but it’s, you can’t learn any German because of all the dis-
ruptive behaviour in it. PE, I get, you know, I get bullied in, they take
my clothes away from me in the changing rooms and make them wet
under the taps so that my clothes are wet. You know, and just things
like that and I just sat there and I’d never, I said this is just shameful,
absolutely shameful.

Isabel added

. . . we were so upset, we were so upset, John was just so upset about

it, that whether they would have that response had we not been that
upset, had we not been that articulate, which we can be if we have
to be, you know, standing up for your child. Um we made it quite
clear to them that we weren’t accepting it and, you know, we were
expecting this, the boys were not used to that, we’re not used to that
kind of . . . And you know, they went to a really good primary school,
that school’s fantastic, and I don’t think, you know, by the time they
110 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

left Birchwood I don’t think I could have paid and got better educa-
tion to that. Um, so then going to that over there, it was, it was just
awful.
(Isabel Webb, Norton)

Across our data we noticed how these white middle-class parents

retained a strong sense of entitlement in relation to the education
of their children. But that entitlement was often infused with and
under-cut by high levels of anxiety. In the quote below Karen Sollazzi,
a Riverton mother, describes the widespread hyper-anxiety among
Riverton parents in relation to a new secondary school located in a
multi-ethnic working-class locality:

It’s fear of not achieving and fear of the unknown, it’s like almost, it’s
stereotyping at ethnic minority kids, it’s sort of almost . . . buying in
to this notion that just because these kids are from different races or
different ethnic or different economic backgrounds they are automat-
ically going to be difficult children or they’re going to be disruptive
children, which is a load of rubbish as we all know. But it’s almost
feeling that your child is going to be sucked in to this place and is
never going to achieve their potential. It’s just a faceless fear.

Class out of place: The discomforts of ‘lesser places’

Stephen Ball argues (2003 p. 162) that for the middle-classes, concerns
and anxieties about getting it right and doing the right thing are engen-
dered and reinforced with social networks. If white middle-class parents,
in part, become moral subjects by learning and acquiring behaviours
and attitudes from others in their class setting, then when those oth-
ers opt for the private and selective state sector parents like those in
our sample are often left with a sense of abandonment and righteous
indignation, but also anxiety and guilt. There is no reassurance of com-
munity. Instead we have a language of panic in which the psychic
costs of principled choices becomes evident. Unsurprising then that
anxiety, guilt and contradictory responses permeated our interviewees’
responses including some of those who were well established within the
middle-classes. Cathy Beattie, a London mother, went to private school
as did her husband. She sent her two oldest children to private school
before deciding to send Ben her youngest to the local comprehensive.
In the quote below, we can see the powerful conscious and unconscious
conflicts permeating Cathy’s narrative, and gain a strong sense of the
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 111

middle-class fear of contagion through contact with the working-classes

(Layton 2008):

They are very seductive the private schools, they sort of, you know,
into thinking they’re the best and I think it’s, yeah you could say it’s
racism it’s classism at the start, but it’s fear, it’s fear that you’re send-
ing your child into a lesser environment, somewhere where they’re
not going to be able to do as well.
(Cathy Beattie, London).

Here Cathy articulates a prevalent middle-class fear that state

comprehensives are in some way inferior. Her emphasis on state schools
as ‘lesser’ places is telling. Skeggs (1997 p. 90) argues that class is
internalised for the working-classes as ‘an intimate form of subjectivity
experienced as knowledge of always not being “right” ’. Concomitantly,
the internal fears and defences of white middle-class parents like Cathy
are supported in the wider social world through discourses which
themselves contain enduring phantasies about the inferior intellectual
capacities of the working-classes (Carey 1992). Although she is clearly
struggling against these perceptions, Cathy’s ‘lesser places’ reveal ‘the
middle-class use of class as a defence, to create the illusion of superi-
ority and false confidence, warding off fears of failure and inadequacy’
(Ryan 2006 p. 60). Here habitus is operating as a defence mechanism
against privilege. We can see clearly a defence of distinction and the
ways in which the white middle-classes, most apparently unproblemat-
ically but in the case of these parents more conflictually, defensively use
their own investments in class to distinguish themselves as superior to
others. What is also evident in the quote below, and the later example of
Ross, is that the white middle-classes do not view the majority working-
class white and ethnic minority students in their schools as people they
easily fit in with.

You know also he was the only . . . he was alone, he didn’t have a
single mate, he didn’t know anybody, he was by himself, whereas
virtually everybody else came up with a peer group, so he was sitting
by himself and you know he is very white and he’s very middle-class.
So looking round, all the groups are mixed, there isn’t a sort of ‘white
middle-class group’ he could go and slot himself into . . . So I think he
found it really difficult. I know he did, it was horrible, we used to
walk to school and it was a nightmare. The first term I just felt sick,
the whole time. I would like it to be the norm for people to go to
their local school and not to be scared in the way that I was scared.
112 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

I would like people like me to send their children to Broomwood and

not be scared. I think a lot of my fear was irrational. I’m sure it was.
I didn’t even go and look at the school, so how rational can this be?
(Cathy Beattie, London)

Like many of the parents, Cathy is ambiguously positioned and

expresses a great deal of ambivalence. At different points in the inter-
view she spoke about ‘the terrible, terrible reputation of local state
schools’ and her sense of panic when considering them as possibilities
for her own son. On the one hand, she projects her discomforts onto
lesser people in lesser places, those through whom she can maintain her
privileged status (Hughes 2007). But on the other hand, she adopts a
strong moral stance in relation to ‘the good society’ and asserts that if
she wants society to be more equitable then she needs to act in certain
ways despite her fears. This tension between doing the best for one’s
own child and doing the best for wider society was there, to a greater or
lesser extent, for all the parents. Yet again we glimpse ‘a habitus divided
against itself, in constant negotiation with itself and its ambivalences’
(Bourdieu 1999 p. 511). These parents were managing the psycho-social
strains of trying to behave ethically in a situation which is structurally
unethical, in terms of entrenched inequalities, and radically pluralistic,
in terms of different moralities and value systems (Sayer 2005).

Objectifying the classed other

Within private and selective schools the middle-classes are one of a

social group or collective of individuals that offers ‘the two-fold bless-
ing of being someone and not having to be alone in doing it’ (Berking
1996 p. 199). For these families, and particularly those choosing the
lowest performing schools, that is not the case. We can see this very
clearly in Cathy’s description of her son Cameron’s isolation. It is also
apparent in Ross’ account. Ross, who achieved four Grade A passes at
GCSE Advanced level and a place at Cambridge, was at a school at the
bottom of the Local Authority league table. While we cannot deter-
mine from Cathy’s words whether Cameron’s isolation is chosen or
imposed, isolation for Ross has a distinctly ambivalent character; it is
both imposed and deliberately chosen. In the quote below, he articu-
lates clearly a boundary drawing process that separates him off from his
ethnic minority working-class peer group:

I did my own thing but with lots of support and like yeah, I was never
held back and I was always really pushed by my teachers. In class
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 113

things I always felt a bit uncomfortable because I would always be

kind of straining myself from sounding like a twat (laughs). But in
general I was, allowed to write like a twat in my books and I just got
on with it. I am not saying I found things easy it was just that I com-
pelled myself to do more than anyone else did. Like I just worked
longer, it’s kind of like a neurosis.
(Ross, London)

He hints at some of the costs in this process but his father, himself
from a working-class background, makes them more evident when he
explains why Ross dropped out of a Gifted and Talented leadership
programme:

Anyway they wanted three kids for this gifted and talented leader-
ship scheme, and he was chosen for one of them. And I remember
him coming home and saying ‘oh great’. And the next day he was
just crying for no reason at all and so they took him to the office
and it happened again. And so they took him to the doctor and
they arranged a visit, it was amazing, within a week, with the edu-
cational psychologist. And then we got 6 sessions with him and me
almost straightaway and it turns out that I had been putting too
much pressure on him and that was the last straw.
(Steve Davies, London)

The family may have a powerful commitment to socialist egalitari-

anism but as we can see from both son’s and father’s quotes, these
principles must be managed in tension with the pursuit of academic
excellence, a conflicting desire to be ‘the best’. This constitutes a difficult
painful enterprise in working-class educational contexts that requires
constant vigilance and pressure in and over the child. These processes
of stretching the child and ensuring that his talents and abilities are
fully realised against the institutional odds are both exhausting and
isolating. As Ross says he ‘compelled himself to do more than any-
one else’. But this is not simply a self-inflicted disciplinary practice, his
father admits that he too ‘had been putting too much pressure’ on Ross.
This joint pursuit of academic excellence results at one point in psychic
collapse.
Ross’ relationship with his classed other illustrates the ways in which
despite valuing the other there is still enormous ambivalence about
children connecting or becoming allied with the working-class major-
ity in the comprehensive schools they attend (Reay et al. 2007). One
114 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

consequence is the semi-detachedness evident in what he had to

say about working-class students at the predominantly working-class
comprehensive he attended:

At Sixth Form College they had got no idea about how most people
live. They’d had no experience, unlike me. I’d seen it at first hand.
I knew what life was like for kids who lived on the estates. Not that
I agreed with how they behaved a lot of the time. Mostly, I kept my
distance.
(Ross, London)

Here knowing is not the same as empathising. Rather, Ross is demon-

strating the dispositions of the white middle-class cosmopolitans that
Bev Skeggs writes about. She argues (2004 p. 158) that ‘to be cosmopoli-
tan one has to be able to appropriate, distinguish and claim to know the
other in order to generate authority and disposition from this knowing.’
And Ross has this appropriating knowledge that becomes a resource for
the self rather than an empathetic connection with the other. But at the
same time this is no easy knowing rather it is undercut by the discomfort
of being in culturally different and difficult spaces. This was especially
the case for those families whose children like Ross attend schools with
a sizeable majority of working-class children (some 60 per cent of the
schools attended by the London children had over 25 per cent of their
pupils eligible for free school meals). Tricia Simpson, a London mother
whose daughter attended a comprehensive with 52 per cent minority
ethnic and 40 per cent free school meal pupils, had a reflexive class anal-
ysis. Yet, while she expressed sympathy with the white working-classes,
she still positioned them as a problem to be faced up to. Talking about
the white working community adjacent to her daughter’s secondary
school, she commented:

They are really an indigenous community and have long histories of

being servants to the military and now that military has gone, every-
thing has crumbled around them. They don’t have so many jobs. The
army has just kind of left them and that’s actually an erosion of hun-
dreds of years of history. You may not like the attitudes, you may not
like the lack, you know, the quite aggressive culture, the racism in
that culture, you may not like it, but to pretend that it never existed
and that it is unimportant is only to create problems for yourself. And
the problems that you deal with: schools are the only places, I think,
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 115

the only places, where you actually confront those issues, because
particularly state schools are pulling in everybody.
(Tricia Simpson, London)

Bourdieu’s theory of identity formation focuses on habitus as the

internalisation of hierarchical social relations, an internalisation that
produces dispositions that reflect the individual’s position in the social
hierarchy. And Tricia’s microscopic analysis, her privileged view from
above, displays the classic middle-class habitus. We can also see in
Tricia’s words Layton’s (2008) ‘failure of empathy’. Tricia epitomises
the attitudes and affective responses of many of the parents and chil-
dren to the working-classes, and particularly the white working-class
other. On one level they are to be pitied, and, in common with Ross,
she stresses the importance of knowing and understanding their sit-
uation intellectually. But there is also the emotional impossibility of
putting yourself in the position of those who are defined in the middle-
class imaginary through ‘their lack’, ‘their aggression’ and above all
‘their racism’ (Haylett 2001). Rather than developing any empathetic
understanding the challenge is to learn about and understand the
working-classes as a problem to be dealt with. Sheila Moss, a Norton
parent, expressed a similar condescension laced with distaste, disdain
and a slight sense of mockery:

I go into school frequently as a governor and I see horrendous chil-

dren, children that you think what is going to happen to them?
Where are they going to go? And my poor children who are really
nice have to be in amongst them.

The key distinction here is between ‘nice’ middle-class children and

‘horrendous’ working-class ones. Despite over a hundred years of uni-
versal state education the working-classes continue to be discursively
constituted within the educational field as an unknowing, unreflexive,
tasteless mass against which the middle-classes draw their distinction
(Tawney 1931; Carey 1992). Despite their left-leaning, communitarian
impulses these families have complex and difficult feelings towards their
classed other, ranging from Joan’s ironic distaste to Ross’ ambivalent
but still defended response. Dealing with the discomforts of privilege in
disadvantaged contexts all too often results in varying degrees of repres-
sion, sublimation and dis-identification (Skeggs 1997). These parents
116 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

and their children are attempting to do class distinction work under

conditions of anxious proximity (Raisborough and Adams 2008).

Claiming the intellectual high ground: Brightness as the

white middle-class defence of distinction

Of all the young people we interviewed, Camilla, a Londoner, was the

most transparent about the difficult feelings that class differences can
arouse. In her mid-twenties by the time of the interview, she reflected
on how when she was at secondary school ‘there was an element of
being embarrassed about being middle-class’. She explained that this
was especially so as secondary school was the first time in her life that
she was confronted with people she describes as ‘having a lot less than
anyone I had ever met’. Her recollections of her secondary school expe-
riences illuminate difficult tensions between empathy and desires to
distance herself. Once again the divided habitus that results from the
ambivalences and tensions that characterise many of these middle-class
individuals is evident. On the one hand, she was:

. . . quite upset to see it though and I remember feeling really sorry

for them because although I knew it happened and I knew it was
an issue, you know, until you actually see if for yourself you don’t
actually think about it. And then knowing that we had so much more
and knowing that when I came back after my first day my mum was
going to ask me how it went. And there were so many kids there
whose parents obviously probably didn’t have hardly anything and
you know weren’t going to ask or didn’t care sort of thing and that
was quite sad.
(Camilla, London)

However, on the other hand, permeating Camilla’s sense of empathy

and embarrassment at her own privilege was a countervailing sense of
superiority in relation to her working-class peers at school. Her words
also poignantly reveal her need to defend against a sense of inferiority
in relation to her parents who are both senior academics:

I think the other kids at school looked up to me to a certain extent

and I didn’t sort of consciously think it but I subconsciously felt
slightly superior to them in that I had everything that they didn’t
have. You know everything that my mum and dad had given me and
I was more intelligent than they were and there was more going for
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 117

me than there was for them. And I think also because my mum and
dad had achieved so much I think I probably felt quite second rate to
them and being friends with these people made me feel like the one
you know who was achieving you know and was superior to them.

We have drawn on Camilla’s uncomfortably honest account of her com-

prehensive school experiences because, in many ways, she seemed the
least defended of the white middle-class individuals we interviewed, and
her openness allowed us a better understanding of what was at play in
the claiming of intellectual superiority by the vast majority of our par-
ticipants. We would argue that the norm among the sample was to take
refuge in what Freud terms ‘splitting’. Freud (1940) argued that when
faced with a traumatic situation that calls into question one’s integrity,
the ego often deals with what appears to be an irreconcilable dilemma
through processes of disavowal that leads to a splitting of the ego. What
is seen to be shameful, in this case any responsibility for very visible
inequalities, is split off and projected onto subordinate groups. But as
Layton (2009 p. 116) asserts, ‘the split polarities that result from the
shaming instantiation of oppressive social structures such as sexism or
racism [and we would add, classism] proliferate in the dark.’
Skeggs (2004) provides a very powerful account of how excess, vulgar-
ity and stasis are projected on to the working-classes, in order that the
middle-classes can preserve their hold on respectability, reflexivity and
responsibility. Through such processes of ‘making classed selves’ (Skeggs
2004 p. 119), the working-classes come to be seen as lacking in value as
value is attributed to ‘distinctive’ middle-class ways of being and doing.
In our research it was primarily through discourses of middle-class
‘brightness’ that middle-class distinction was asserted and defended.
Across 251 interview transcripts there were a staggering 256 references
to brightness, made by the parents, and to a lesser extent their chil-
dren, without prompting by the interviewers. We would argue that such
discourses, which position middle-class brightness as both normative
and a justification for middle-class privilege, are one of the main means
through which the middle-classes defensively use their own investments
in class hierarchies to distinguish themselves as superior to others. Split-
ting, and the othering of the working-classes it generates, enables the
middle-classes to hold on to brightness and intelligence as key aspects
of their identities whilst generally denying these characteristics to the
working-class other (Holt and Griffin 2005). Brightness then becomes a
rationalisation for holding on to more: educationally, socially and eco-
nomically. Furthermore, investment in brightness defends against the
118 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

fear of failure. For the white middle-classes educational failure is often

intolerable and needs to be projected elsewhere.

The desirous white middle-classes: Positive identifications

with classed and racialised ‘others’

At the beginning of the chapter we described both the defended and the
desirous white middle-classes. However, the majority of the data reveal
a defended white middle-class subject with varying degrees of ambiva-
lence and anxiety. We gain a whiff of white middle-class fear of softness;
a fleeting anxiety, but one present in many of the interviews, that priv-
ilege puts children at risk of becoming flaccid, in some ways weak and
unable to deal with the real world. This is expressed in particularly vivid
terms by Caroline, a journalist based in London:

I also feel very strongly that private schooling doesn’t prepare you
in any way at all for real life once you leave. I mean our best friends
down in this road, their daughters are exactly the same age as ours
and they go through the private system. And I just look at their
daughters and I think at some point you’re going to have leave
school and you’re going to have to be out there with some rough
dysfunctional people and you won’t know what’s hit you. Whereas
my daughter is in classrooms with some very, very difficult behaviour
of children, and she’s having to learn to concentrate and get on with
what she’s doing. And I think that is tough for her but she is learn-
ing that in order to do well at school she’s got to be an independent
learner.
(Caroline Friar, London)

Evident in Caroline’s words is the conviction that attending inner city

comprehensive schooling is the best preparation for dealing with the
real world. This is comprehensive schooling as a provider of ‘character’
or ‘backbone’, ironically in one sense, and in this sense only, a twenty-
first-century successor to a prime function of the old public schools.
Most of the white middle-class desire for the other was complicated by
differing degrees of dis-identification with what was seen to be conven-
tional middle-classness and in two or three cases whiteness, although
this latter small group of mothers either had ethnic minority partners
or had mixed race children. Brenda, a London mother, who has a black
partner and a white daughter from an earlier relationship, makes a
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 119

strong statement about the desire not to be privileged in terms of either

class or race:

Brenda: She had a group of black friends and so she was she was not
seen as like, posh like the white middle-class kids.

Interviewer: But she was

Brenda: She was but she wasn’t, she was and she wasn’t because you
know it depends on how you look at it doesn’t it. I mean yes she is
white but I don’t think she’s, I don’t think we are particularly posh
and certainly her experience growing up has been very, very diverse.
You know who our friends are and who we mix with is definitely not
mostly middle-class.
(Brenda Gresham-Worthing, London)

First it is important to recognise that Brenda’s daughter is not typical

of our sample. Most of them did mix mostly with other white middle-
classes. But also if we look at the psychic processes at play we can
see a strong dis-identification with white middle-classness as a defence
against the anxiety of being part of, and benefiting from, a prejudicial
class system (Reay 2005). She continues repeatedly to dis-identify her
daughter from white middle-classness and convince herself of the suc-
cess of this dis-identification with ‘I don’t think . . .’ ‘. . . certainly she is
not . . .’ ‘. . . she is definitely not . . .’, suggesting powerful processes of dis-
avowal. Like a majority of our sample Brenda has unresolved anxieties
around privilege (Ryan 2006), and we glimpse the ways in which habitus
can be susceptible ‘to a kind of duplication, to a double perception of
the self, to successive allegiances and multiple identities’ (Bourdieu 1999
p. 511).
But denial of privilege and powerful psychic investments in dis-
identifications from one’s subject position are not quite the same as
desiring the other, and certainly not, as was the case for Skeggs’(1997)
working-class young women, in part a desire to be ‘the other’. According
to Elliott (2004) one of the defining characteristics of contemporary cul-
ture has been a longing for cultural difference, for a sufficient sense of
otherness, particularly a desire for multicultural communities. So where
were the desiring white middle-classes in the sample; those embracing
otherness? Christopher Bollas (1995 p. 22) writes about ‘the ultimately
self-enhancing projective identifications by which we invest the world
of external objects with aspects of ourselves’. And we do glimpse self-
enhancing projective identifications, and even at times more socially
120 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

desirable empathetic understanding. Below Avril, a London mother,

who might be best described as upper middle-class as one of her parents
was a member of the aristocracy, talks of both openness and understand-
ing. While clearly recognising that other white middle-classes might
misread such openness negatively as lack of confidence, she is very def-
inite that such qualities are positive, that to learn with other cultures
rather than of them is an asset:

One of the most important things is an openness . . . and also I think it

is an understanding of others you can only have if you are sort of with
them all the time. It is something to learn of other cultures, but to
actually learn with other cultures, of other cultures, it is a completely
different thing.
(Avril Smart, London)

In Avril’s words we can see the desire for inclusion and openness;
an attempt to reconcile unity with difference (Hoggett 2000). Simi-
larly, Maria Lowenthal, a London mother, who comes from a soli-
darist working-class background, talks of an openness and desire to
understand rather than to know of one’s ‘ethnic other’:

I know some people didn’t send their children to Capeland because

they’d heard about it focusing too much on black kids and racism
in the school. And I just thought I wouldn’t want my kids to go to
a school where they didn’t do that. I thought it was very positive,
that’s what a good school should be doing and Max had a number of
black friends and very positive for them and for Max to see it and to
hear about it was good for him. They were able to talk about these
things and when he did his sociology research project he looked at
the differences between black young people and white young people
at Capeland and he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t have been
in a school where it was actually seen to be important to do and
where they didn’t see it as threatening.
(Maria Lowenthal, London)

A significant minority of our white middle-class parents expressed sim-

ilar sentiments. A particularly vivid example is Yvonne, who, despite
the enormous anxieties we have seen in her earlier quotes, articulates a
powerful recognition of the self in the ethnic other:

I said to my kids ‘who do you think refugees are’? If they were bomb-
ing this country what do you think we would do? Do you think if
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 121

I thought there was a chance you might have your leg blown off
every time you went to school I would get you out of here. Of course
I would, we would go, there are some other people who are maybe
not quite as intelligent as us, who would stay here to have less idea
about how to motivate themselves to get out, that is who these peo-
ple are, they are the people like us, from these other countries. When
they get here they are like, there is an opportunity for you. And you
grab it by both hands.
(Yvonne Scott, London)

But even here, the identification with, and valorisation of, the eth-
nic other is accompanied by the denigration and residualisation of
the white working-classes, those others who are not ‘intelligent’ or
‘motivated’ enough to move either geographically or educationally.

Conclusion

Paul Hoggett (2000) argues that in relation to citizenship and the wel-
fare state the key issue is that of difference, the idea of the individual
or group who won’t fit in. In particular, school choice policies and the
construction of quasi-markets reveal powerful kinds of defensive forma-
tions. The provocation of anxiety at both individual and collective levels
can result in a splitting between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ at
the levels of schools, students and communities. The defended habitus
that Bourdieu writes about in relation to the working-classes (Bourdieu
2000) is just as prevalent among the middle-classes. All the families
are struggling with the wider psycho-social context, the macro level, in
which collective imaginaries are increasingly about divisions and what
divides rather than unity and openness to difference. However, at the
micro-level, the ‘otherness’ white middle-class families confront in these
urban comprehensives undermines the traditional middle-class confi-
dence about being able to control the educational process and its values,
further reinforcing defensiveness and generating anxiety for a majority
of the parents. But more hopefully for a significant minority, like Avril
and Maria, anomalies and questions of otherness are construed ‘against
the grain’, ‘as novelty, enrichment, and as a focus for the extension of
the self’s possibilities, as the source of “wonderment” ’ (Young 1997).
We glimpse a yearning after and for difference.
Judith Butler (1997 p. 86) points out:

. . . the psyche, which includes the unconscious, is very different from

the subject: the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning
122 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to

become a coherent subject.

Normatively speaking, the middle-classes do not ‘do’ excess and inco-

herence: both are supposed to be the province of the upper and lower
classes. But those of us who are middle-class know that excess and
incoherence can be part of middle-class identity. Rather, we would like
to suggest that normatively, excess and incoherence are not owned
and integrated. They are the unacceptable parts of middle-class iden-
tity, defended against and projected elsewhere, usually on to those
white and black working-classes who are normally kept at a com-
fortable distance. However, the white middle-class families we have
studied have chosen what is at times an uncomfortable proximity
to their class and ethnic other. This generates both defensive anxi-
eties and fears, but also sometimes, and more hopefully, a desirous
openness.
A crucial social issue then is how to cultivate and grow disposi-
tions of desirous openness because even amongst this group of left
leaning cosmopolitans they are uncommon and increasingly under
threat (Page 2007). Within the public arenas of the social, and more
specifically the educational, world, there is a growing emphasis on
competition, instrumentalism, and ‘being the best’ (Rodger 2003),
while the demonisation of the working-classes and, in particular, the
white working-classes within official, media and public discourses has
increased over the last 50 years (Skeggs 1997, 2004; Lawler 2005;
Reay 2006). All these developments have impacted powerfully on the
inner dynamics of the boundary constructions necessary to collec-
tive identity. Stallybrass and White (1986 p. 202) describe the middle-
classes as:

a class which, whilst indeed progressive in its best political aspira-

tions, had encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings,
in its body, bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism which was con-
stitutive of its historical being. Whatever the radical nature of its
‘universal’ democratic demand, it had engraved in its subjective iden-
tity all the marks by which it felt itself to be a different, distinctive
and superior class.

The white middle-classes sending their children to urban comprehen-

sives are struggling, with varying degrees of success, to resolve the
tensions between desirous openness and sublimated elitism. We would
 Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege 123

argue that this is not just a challenge that they alone should face,
especially when a majority of the middle-classes continue instru-
mentally, and from a distance, to use their Others ‘in order to
play out the disorders of its own identity’ (Stallybrass and White
1986 p. 200). Rather, the challenge for the white middle-classes,
and for social justice more widely, is how to resolve the tensions
between desirous openness and sublimated elitism to the benefit of
all classes. In the next chapter, we move on to look at the expe-
riences of the children and how their white, middle-class identities
are reproduced or reconfigured in the context of multicultural state
schooling.
7
Young People and the Urban
Comprehensive: Remaking
Cosmopolitan Citizens or
Reproducing Hegemonic White
Middle-Class Values?

Introduction

Middle-class parents, ambitious for their children, tend to have a sense

of ‘futurity’ (Prout 2000) or what Butler with Robson (2003) term ‘hori-
zon’, that is middle-class parents are confident in how they envisage
their children’s future trajectories and how to ensure these (p. 141).
Underpinning these objectives lies a strong, implicit desire to socially
reproduce the family. However, our middle-class parents have not been
as strategic in such intent (through their choice of school) as for exam-
ple those studied by Ball (2003) or Butler with Robson (2003). They do
not engage to the same degree in the competition for reproducing their
class advantage. As we have seen, one of their intentions in choosing
the urban comprehensive school was to provide a more expansive and
diverse experience for their children which would provide them with
opportunities to prepare them as global twenty-first-century and even
cosmopolitan citizens (Beck 2006). The question for us is whether they
have merely found new strategies to ensure their social and cultural
reproduction or whether their actions reflect an attempt to re-orientate
or reconstruct their and their children’s middle-class identities based on
a more equitable cosmopolitanism. Through the preceding chapters we
have seen the tensions and struggles that surround these endeavours
and have also shown that the parents are beset with contradictions and
moral ambiguity (Sayer 2005; Crozier et al. 2008), although in Chapter 4
we demonstrated the assurance with which parents made potentially

124
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 125

‘risky’ decisions. In this chapter we turn to the views of the young people
themselves and explore from their perspectives and through their voices
the impact of the urban comprehensive experience on their identities.
We look at the young people’s experience of the urban school in terms
of their achievements and their attitudes to their peers; their own sense
of fitting in, their identifications or dis-identifications and their coping
strategies. And we discuss how their views and attitudes echo or diverge
from those of their parents, examining the complex dynamic between
reproducing parents’ views and asserting independence and difference.
This issue is also important in relation to the extent to which the par-
ents impose and reproduce their own attitudes and values on or in their
children. Given the desire for their children to develop cosmopolitan
experiences and identities through their diverse schools we discuss the
extent to which this took place and consider the difference between
social mix and social mixing.
As we have explained earlier, the schools the children attended were
regarded as average or below average according to league-table position.
The most ethnically mixed schools were in London (of the 40 schools
in London only four had less that 50 per cent ethnic minority intake,
and 14 schools had more than 70 per cent). In Norton1 the school that
most of our respondents attended had a significant minority of mainly
South Asian pupils which apparently had one of the largest percentages
of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) pupils in the city. In Riverton three
schools had between 27 per cent and 54 per cent of BME children; two
schools had 19 per cent and 15 per cent, six schools had 10 per cent or
less and two had no BME children at all. The average number of BME
children in Riverton comprehensive schools was, in 2005, 8.2 per cent.
There were 270 children/young people in our 125 participating fami-
lies, of whom five children were mixed ‘race’. We interviewed 68 white
children (that is, 25.2 per cent of the 270). These ranged in age from
12 to 22, plus one 27-year old. There were 39 girls/young women and
29 boys/young men.

Young people and choice

Whatever the intentions of the parents, the children were not entirely
passive or pliable beings but exercised agency to a greater or lesser
extent. At the point of choice there were clear examples of the children
exerting their own preferences but there was also a whole spectrum of
coercion and subtle orchestration exerted by the parents, behaviour in
keeping with others’ findings that middle-class parents tend to assert
126 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

their own views in the school choice process (Ball et al. 1995; Reay and
Ball 1998; Butler and Hamnett 2007). Generally speaking, the levels of
stress and anxiety engendered by these processes were lower for the chil-
dren than for parents, although at the point of transition, predictably,
many children were a little intimidated by the size and differences pre-
sented by the secondary school and some also were disappointed or
upset not to be accompanying their friends.
A few of these choices, mostly in London, were against the wishes
of children who wanted to remain with a group of primary school
friends for the transition to secondary school. However, on the whole,
the children interviewed were happy to be at the school their parents
had chosen for them and despite occasional episodes of social and/or
academic difficulties, most young people ended up making positive
assessments of their experiences of school. Not one child in Norton
expressed a desire to be at a different school. In London, only two
children, both boys, had an overall negative experience and two girls
wished, in hindsight, they had gone elsewhere, and in Riverton only
two children expressed some unhappiness.
In general, children echoed their parents’ well-rehearsed arguments
about the choice of secondary school and about the issues surrounding
it, such as the pros and cons of private education and the quality of edu-
cation in the chosen school. There are also examples of children across
the three locations reiterating, often quite passionately, the moral and
political arguments against private education and for a more egalitarian
school system:

Well it’s hard to think what I thought then cos I’ve obviously got
a view now, but um I think I thought that it was maybe fairer, er,
having state schools and yeah, I’m not sure whether I had a very sort
of socialist view of it or anything, but I think I maybe understood
that I was going to a state school because, not because we couldn’t
afford to go to a private school, but because it was sort of better in a
way.
(Natasha Hann, 17 years, Norton)
I think that you shouldn’t have to pay to go to a school because at
the end of the day you shouldn’t have to pay to get an education. It’s
like everyone is entitled to one and it shouldn’t be you can’t get that
education because you can’t afford to pay for it, or ‘oh no, you can’t
get that education because you are not clever enough’ [ . . . ] if you go
to a private school, I don’t know, it just feels like it is unfair . . .
(Angela Baker, 12 years, London)
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 127

Children also echoed their parents’ desire that they should have and
learn from ‘real life experiences’; as Zach (14 years, London) some-
what pointedly said, ‘I ain’t going to meet a range of people, if I go to
[a private school].’ These shared narratives of distinction between types
of school and school experience or values different schools can provide,
indicate that schooling is a shared project in the home: the family has a
relationship to the school rather than just the child or the parent. Here
we saw something of the passing-on (reproduction) of values and ideas
with the child learning to think like the parent.
As we have seen, the choice of school was often influenced by a range
of principles and pragmatic factors. For instance a number of families
(particularly in London) made different secondary school choices for
their different children and this was especially noticeable where one or
more children had Special Educational Needs. Not surprisingly then the
young people themselves expressed the view that the choice of school
depended on the individual child and on the sort of person you were:

There are people that wouldn’t fit into an in inner city comprehen-
sive school environment and people that wouldn’t fit into a private
school environment. There is nothing worse or better about them,
(they are) just different experiences. That has been my outlook on
life. That is another thing my Dad has given me. There is no better
or worse, just different. [ . . . ] I would want the experience that suited
them [his children, if he had any]. I can’t say what would suit them
because I don’t have any. I would pick the school that suited them
the best.
(Ed Jennings 16 years, London)

At times, however, this viewpoint is expressed in less egalitarian terms.

Like their parents the young people constructed a binary between them-
selves and the Other, and in this way set themselves apart. Fourteen-
year-old Noah, for instance, feels going to the socially mixed school is
of benefit because you get to learn about the real world and have con-
tact with, and knowledge about, ‘the not nice people out there’ which
in turn prepares you to deal with them:

I feel that non private schools are always better because you learn
more and it’s more diverse and it kind of toughens you up. Not
exactly, but you are not exposed to much if you go to a private school,
like, there aren’t that many fights and you don’t really know how to
deal with stuff. It is not really the real world because there are a lot
of not nice people out there and for people who can afford to go to a
128 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

private school they don’t see much of that. And so I definitely think
public school or non private school is better, but it is still not good.
(Noah Malone, 14 years, London)

Maintaining advantage and dispelling urban myths?

Academic achievement is crucial in terms of social reproduction.

According to Bourdieu and Boltanski (2000) ‘. . . the reproduction of class
structure operates through translation of the distribution of academic
qualifications held by each class . . .’ (pp. 220–221). As we have discussed
earlier, parents’ choice of school gave rise to anxiety and dilemmas
about their children’s well-being and fundamentally about their aca-
demic fulfilment. With regard to the latter such concerns seemed in
most cases unwarranted. Across all three locales the young people were
generally doing well at school. Most were performing well compared
to their age equivalent peers, with some performing significantly above
average. The choice of school their parents made did not seem to have
had any negative impact on academic development and in fact the chil-
dren seemed to have benefited from being in inner city comprehensives.
In terms of measurable academic success, of the 117 young people who
had reached at least 16, all except three boys and one girl did well in
GCSEs; two of whom because of personal family circumstances and the
third was found a highly paid job eventually by his father in the film
industry. Of the 71 who were over 18, eight went on to Oxbridge after
A levels (six from London) and the others went to a range of pre- and
post-1992 universities, with only one girl leaving education at 18 years
and two boys going to specialised further education (one sports and one
arts foundation). As we have argued, in the context of a performative
target-driven school culture, teachers/the schools appear to value highly
(white) middle-class children who they see as helping them meet their
targets. Whilst they might be irritated by middle-class parental inter-
ference (see for example Crozier 2000) this is a small price to pay for
children who display consonance with the values of the school and
have the requisite capitals to ensure success. In a minority of cases par-
ents did acknowledge the pressure that the school’s expectations placed
on the children particularly where middle-class children were in a small
minority:

I believe they have high expectations for some children, for the chil-
dren they can see who are putting in the effort, for the children they
can see who are going to succeed, whether that be A-level, university,
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 129

whatever, then yes I do think [they] have very, very high expecta-
tions. An example of that is my niece, one of my nieces, um very
bright child, stayed on to sixth form and originally said she was going
to go to university, then she changed her mind. Still does her A-levels
but she’s going to get a job. The teachers hounded her, absolutely
hounded her because she said she wasn’t going to university. And you
know, I was saying to her look it’s your choice, if that’s what you want
to do that’s your choice, at least if you’ve got the A-levels you can pick
it up later in life if that’s your choice. But she was really, really sick
of the teachers hounding her and obviously because to them it was a
waste of talent, might have something to do with their achievements,
you know, their reports and it’s one less picture on the wall in the
sixth form block, you know, um a child in a cap and gown. Cos I’ve
noticed in the sixth form block that every child that’s gone to univer-
sity, once they’ve graduated that’s it, there’s a photograph up there.
(Sharon Cole, Norton)

Sharon Cole insightfully identifies the importance of the middle-class

child to urban averagely performing schools. Although in this instance
the pressure is unwelcome, its presence indicates how the school can
share the parental view we explore below, that the middle-class child is
‘special’, ‘extra’.
High educational achievement is synonymous with being middle-
class. As we have seen the parents themselves are educationally very well
endowed and correspondingly they want the same for their children.
Moreover, as Brantlinger (2003) has argued, middle-class parents’ self-
definitions are strongly related to their children’s own successes: ‘high
tracks, good grades . . . marked children and mothers as smart’ (p. 48).
Although the parents did not leave academic success to chance (Crozier
et al. 2007) they are confident their children are ‘intelligent’, ‘bright’
and able to achieve; there is no doubt in their minds. This is apparent
very early on in their children’s schooling:

She had some problems initially with reading they told me she was
struggling with reading which I wasn’t particularly bothered about to
be honest. They gave her some extra help with her reading but I just
knew that she’d learn to read because you can’t not really if you are
in a literate household with parents who like reading and you know
where books are around all the time. I just knew she would get there
in her own time and of course she did.
(Brenda Gresham-Worthing, London)
130 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

This confidence extends to a universal assumption that their children

will go onto university or some form of higher education; the pursuit of
a ‘normal biography’ (Du Bois-Raymond 1998):

The thing is it was always ever, since she was little, assumed that
she would go to university and I don’t know if we laid that on her
really but its just she came from a family where her parents had
two degrees each you know and the house has always been full of
books.
(Beth Cannon, London)

This is such a natural assumption for their middle-class identity that it

leaves one Riverton mother slightly bemused (and amused) when her
son, along with some other top set pupils at his poorly performing com-
prehensive, was given a university mentor to encourage him to think
about going to university:

Now, I’m not quite sure why they chose him. There’s a few of them
that have been chosen, but they obviously think that he’s, y’know,
suitable. The thing is, my expectation is that he’s going to go on
anyway, to university [smiles, laughs].
(Gill Harrison, Riverton)

In almost all cases, the young people were in top sets (ability set-
ting, in the core subjects at least, was prevalent in all of the schools
attended by the young people) and most were selected to benefit from
the Gifted and Talented scheme. This had the effect of creating a two-
tier system in the schools and as one Norton mother said her children’s
school was like two schools in one. This separation added to a sense
of ‘specialness’. In London, for example, where the child was often
the only white middle-class child in their class or year group, this
sense of educational superiority seemed to be exacerbated, sometimes
supporting a perception that their children were uniquely ‘gifted’ or
‘special’:

Mary and I went to see the head about it who was very defensive and
thought we were complaining and we weren’t we were just saying he
needs help. I mean he was very bright and he wasn’t getting enough
stimulation and he was feeling ‘extra’ all the time if you know what
I mean because he always knew the answers and the other kids didn’t
and so you know he felt excluded. And the school was fantastic he
got extra lessons they celebrated his ‘extraness’ if you like within the
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 131

class and got the other kids to celebrate it as well and so you know
they cheered him on rather feeling he was different from them.
(David Goldblum, London)

She has got on really well academically she got lower fives in the SATs
[Key Stage 2] and she has just continued to progress. She got very
good results in the Key Stage 3 SATs. When I went to see her teachers
before the school broke up, they are looking for her to get quite a lot
of As and A∗ at GCSE, and the science teacher was so thrilled that she
was crying because [Susannah] is the only person who has ever got
20 out of 20 in the tests [laughs]. I think that they don’t usually get
the chance to teach bright kids and so when they do they are really
excited and go for it really. Instead of just trying to manage them,
they’ll actually try to recognise it.
(Diane Prichard, London)

We see again here the affinity in Diane Pritchard’s identification of the

link between middle-class parents’ desires for their children and the
school’s desire for middle-class children in the context of league tables.
Added to this many of these young people had been selected for the
schools’ ‘Gifted and Talented’ schemes. The Gifted and Talented Scheme
educationally privileges the white middle-class children, placing them
at the pinnacle of the comprehensive school. Whilst many parents were
ambivalent towards the scheme and didn’t see it as offering their chil-
dren anything they didn’t already get, either at home or in the out
of school activities they themselves provided, there is a contradictory
sense that parents liked the fact that their children had been identified
as ‘Gifted and Talented’ as it affirmed their educational superiority:

She’s a bright girl, you gather she’s got on the gifted and talented
but, we weren’t looking for that, but she was approached. And I’m
sure she is at that level of ability and em, I’ll be interested to see how
that translates into GCSEs in terms of the blessed As and A∗ s and
goodness knows what, but it feels ok.
(David Gordon, Norton)

I am very pleased that she is doing that [i.e. participating in the Gifted
and Talented scheme] and I have parental pride that she is doing that.
I wouldn’t deny that.
(Patricia Forrester, London)

This would explain why despite some parents’ apparent ambivalence,

they questioned the school if their children were not included in Gifted
132 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

and Talented activities and even went so far as to lobby for their child’s
inclusion.
Even when the children did falter slightly within the comprehensive
system, there was a strong belief from parents that it was the system that
was at fault and had let their children down. There was no doubting of
their children’s ability and in fact their sense of intellectual superiority
was often reinforced by the fact that their children overcame the pitfalls
of the comprehensive system and did manage to achieve, though not as
highly as they might have done within a more academically conducive
environment:

Yes, I mean, if I look at [Peter’s] GCSE result, he got eight As and he

got three Bs and the rest were Cs and most of that was because he
didn’t do his course work and I just know that at any of those other
schools there was no way that they could have got away without
doing course work. I mean, it’s very difficult. I mean, how involved
do you get? When they get to 16 or so they have to do it without you
encouraging. I could see he was more interested in other things but
we kind of encouraged him along and chivvied him along a bit but
I doubt those other schools, even if the teachers write it for them, it’s
there and it’s done. [With Peter’s] . . . design technology, the teacher
said to us at parent’s night, ‘well, do you know he’s hardly done a
thing and it’s 60 per cent course work and 40 per cent on the exam,
he’s going to have to get 95 per cent in the exam to get a pass’.
And what did he get, he got a C so he went into that exam and got
95 per cent!
(Liz Allum, London)

Although the choice of comprehensive education did not come with-

out anxiety, parents were able to draw on their vast reserves of social
and cultural capital and to ensure educational success. The importance
of maintaining family status gives rise to parents’ school interventions
and pressure or influence on their children. The parents were intent
on the children securing the best possible resources and outcomes from
their schooling. Whilst their choice of school may have been influenced
by egalitarian principles subsequent actions and their relationship to
the school do indicate more individualistic intentions, such as the par-
ents’ endorsement of the institutionalised stratification through setting
and as already mentioned, through the Gifted and Talented scheme
in the school. There was some disquiet felt by the children, about the
fairness of such singling out for academic privilege within a notionally
egalitarian, comprehensive system:
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 133

I think it is good if you are in a higher set like you know you are
in Set One because you are at the top of the pile and I guess like
the classes were a little bit more [well] behaved. But I don’t think it
is good, like people who were in Set Five just thought what is the
point . . . I know all the Set Five people were unbehaved and sort of
loud and everything they just thought we are all in Set Five and we
are not going to get up to Set One and so there is not really much
point. And I think it really like dampened your spirits if you got put
in a lower set and you think you can’t move up.
(Davina Wansell, 18 years, London)

The language of ‘top of the pile’, or as another student described it ‘the

smart class’, is interesting and clearly indicates the sense of superior-
ity such structures simultaneously build upon and maintain. However,
the benefits of separation were welcomed by others. A key motivator for
being in the top set was to ensure academic success, but this was also
linked for both the parents and young people to the desire to be sep-
arated off from the putative ‘disruptive elements in the school’ – the
undesirable Other. So whilst one argument for going to the urban com-
prehensive was to experience a diverse social and ethnic mix, the reality
was often quite different (see also Lipsitz 1998).
As James Gordon (12 years, Norton) explained when talking about his
views on his school:

I thought it was good. Yeah, it was just getting used to the fact that
there were some Charvs as we call them, and they’re quite annoying,
and that was just quite tough in the first year, but then now I’m in
the second year it’s fine, cos I’ve moved up into the higher sets and
they’ve moved down, so I’m sort of away from them, I don’t have to
deal with them as much as last year, so it’s not . . . whereas last year
it tended to be in most lessons, they’d be disrupted by that, but we
weren’t set in the first year.

In relation to the structures of schooling and academic progress, many

children and young people echoed their parents’ views of streaming/
setting and the Gifted and Talented programme, recognising the benefits
for the individual but also a desire to be kept apart from those not per-
ceived as ‘good enough’. Overall there was limited recognition amongst
the young people of their own relative advantage or the impact of an
inequitable system on the life chances for the majority. Rather, many of
them seemed to espouse a meritocratic view of society and educational
success – that it is ‘all down to the individual’ to make their own success
134 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

in life and also take the responsibility if they failed. Talking about her
working-class peers Louise says:

A few of them towards the end of their secondary school really

thought ‘I’m going to get through this, I’m not going to be one of
these people that fail . . . because they wanted to break the vicious cir-
cle almost really because you know it can be a hard cycle. I mean a
lot of them were very young mothers who got pregnant when they
were teenagers and a lot of them sort of said you know, I’m going
to learn from this, I’m not going to sort of go through that because
when you’re in those circumstances it really is hard you get trapped
in a cycle and its just constantly repeating itself, so I was really sort
of proud of a lot of them for you know just really wanting to break
through so and I’d say in terms of statistics and like Austin Friars not
having like a high pass rate or whatever, its because of that social
cycle rather than it being a bad school or the teaching being bad.
And I think at the end of the day its really down to the individual to
just decide whether they’re going to break through that or whether
they’re going to succumb to it and so I know a lot of my friends you
know, did really well and went onto go to college I suppose. That’s
quite pleasing for me.
(Louise Cannon, 18 years, London)

In his work on the middle-classes and class advantage, Ball (2003) dis-
cusses the need for the middle-classes to achieve social closure (Parkin
1979) and the need of the middle-classes not just to maintain their
class advantage but as Moore put it (2004) ‘to advance their own par-
ticular “virtue” and its associated status, culture and the situation of its
members’ (p. 82). In a world where there is an expansion of education
and for all of its flaws, an orientation towards increasing educational
achievement for all, the middle-classes cannot remain complacent:

. . . Once higher levels of education become recognised as an objective

mark of elite status, and a moderate level of education as a mark of
respectable middle-level status, increases in the supply of educated
persons at given levels result in yet higher levels becoming recognised
as superior, and previously superior levels become only average.
(Collins 1977 p. 131 cited in Moore 2004)

As we have seen here, school choices that might have been construed
as a handicap for the middle-class families in this endeavour have not
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 135

been. However, social and cultural reproduction is not merely about

mastering school knowledge but perhaps more specifically the role that
school plays in the development of habitus and the cultivation and
accumulation of cultural capital (Moore 2004 p. 82). An indication of
the ‘right’ conditions for the cultivation of white middle-class habitus
is arguably evidence of the expressive order in terms of discipline,
behaviour, attitudes, demeanour and so on (Bernstein 1996). Given that,
according to parents’ accounts, the urban schools portrayed the antithe-
sis of the type of behaviour that they wanted their children to adopt, this
goes some way to explain their endorsement of the system of setting
which in effect created a separate existence in school for their children
from the unacceptable Other.

Classed and gendered: White middle-class boys and girls

fitting in to the urban comprehensive

The extent to which the white middle-class children felt ‘out of place’
in the context of their school was contingent on the different social
class and ethnic composition of the schools and the ethos of the school,
but also the agency of the child, with several families having differences
between siblings. Interestingly there appeared to be a gendered dimen-
sion to this with more parental anxiety about their child ‘fitting in’ in
the case of boys (see also Williams et al. 2008).
Although bullying was not a dominant theme in the data, there was
a strongly held view among the parents that the transition to secondary
school was not a smooth one for some of the boys in particular. More
boys seemed to experience difficulties ‘fitting in’ than girls. The concep-
tion of ourselves is shaped by the social worlds we move in and ‘the
way in which individual identity relates to social, cultural and spatial
contexts’ (Sibley, 1995 p. 4) and secondary schooling is for many of the
young people the first time that they experience being in a minority
(in numerical rather than status terms). The sense that white middle-
class boys struggle socially when they are in the minority is articulated
by Stephen who did not mix well at school;

I always didn’t feel I fitted in very well . . . I always felt a bit differ-
ent to be honest. And it just got worse when I went to secondary
school. [This was]largely because I didn’t play sport very well and
I was (pause) quite a bit, I don’t know if you would say brighter . . . but
I was kind of a bright kid and found it difficult to kind of stay at a
level that we were being taught at, at primary school.
136 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

He added:

I was a very scared kid and secondary school and like Pittsville feels
like a rough place to be when you are 11 and a little bit soft! The kids
at Pittsville are anything but soft!
(Stephen Goldblum, 22 years London)

It could be argued that there are no classed and gendered patterns in

relation to who gets bullied at school and who does the bullying, as
it is down to power relations which can be based on strength, ‘street
cred’, personalities and characteristics (see for example Duncan 1999).
As Stephen pointed out: he was ‘shy,’ and ‘nervous; and this made him
‘weak’ and vulnerable to bullying in an inner city comprehensive, or in
any situation in fact. However, we argue that this masks the structural
nature of his position within the school. His sense of isolation and being
‘out of place’ at Pittsville is both classed and gendered, as his father was
well aware: Stephen did not fit in because he was privileged. Privilege
operates to create a sense of division between Stephen and ‘the kids at
Pittsville’. The alternative masculinity he brings to the school provides
him with a marginal space at school, one that is valued by staff and
adults which may aid his social reproduction but keeps him at a distance
from his peers.
Parents encouraged their sons into particular kinds of (especially
creative) activities and many boys struggled to maintain the balance
between the alternative masculinities fostered at home with the nor-
mative masculinity they encountered at school. But this balancing act
can come under strain as Sarah Davies makes clear; for her son Ross the
stress of managing both becomes too much to bear especially as his plu-
ral masculinities cause resentment amongst his peers and he eventually
has to reject football in favour of pursuing English and poetry:

I suppose Ross had some conflicts when he got to round about Year 9
because he was very much an all rounder he was very good at football
as well as being good at music as well as being very, very good at
English and everything else. And some of the people in the football
team resented him being there because their attitude was well you
are academic and so why aren’t you doing that why are you here.
And so he had to make that choice was he going to go along and
think it was important to do football and put up with a bit of hassle
from them or was he just going to cut his losses and think I have
got enough to do I will keep with the music, I will keep with the
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 137

English and the poetry and the writing and all that. And he made that
decision he decided he would opt out of the football. He had enough
to do.
(Sarah Davies, London)

This creates a difficult balancing act for a number of the young men
who find the range of masculinities that they can perform in school
limited by teacher and peer expectations and that this, coupled with
their parents’ expectations, often leads them not to ‘fit in’.
In general, whether they had sons or daughters or both, parents
believed that it was harder for boys than girls at the comprehensive
school.

. . . from my own professional experience [as a clinical psychologist]

um, it’s mainly um, a number of boys that get referred to us who are
very unhappy, anxious about schools and it tends to be the brighter
boys who aren’t into the sports and other things like that and who
want to get on with their work.
(Beverley Hann, Norton)

Boys were often constructed (by their parents) as delicate and fragile
in contrast to the characterisation of their sisters as ‘easy going’ but
‘robust’. The notion that boys need to be protected but that girls are
more able to ‘take things in their stride’ was a widespread view amongst
the parents.
In addition parents saw the presence of girls as mediating the over-
whelming threat of classed and raced masculinity:

Because more often than not parents who don’t or won’t send their
own children there are talking about badly behaved black boys and
it takes a critical mass of little blonde girls to begin to change their
minds.
(Avril Smart, London)

The sense that girls neutralise problematic masculinities is strongly

embedded in these parents’ discourses as is the construction of girls as
socially able copers:

When Olivia was in Year 6 she got on really well – and always has
done – with the awkward boys, particularly the awkward Caribbean
boys she really likes them and they really like her. I remember her
138 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

saying that she was working with one in the English class and he
turned round to her and said, ‘You’re well posh, aren’t you, Olivia?’
But she feels comfortable around these people.
(Pat Levy, London)

Pat’s use of the term ‘these people’ emphasises the distance between her
family and the forms of masculinity that the ‘awkward boys’ represent.
It seems that their awkwardness is their inability to fit in with white
middle-class masculinity or indeed their distance from her daughter’s
restorative femininity. Parents are more tolerant about ‘awkward people’
at schools their daughters attend:

You know I am aware that there are, sort of, there are people who
find either the behaviour or the slight wildness about some of the
kids there, erm, difficult but Charlie doesn’t seem . . . she seems to take
it all in her stride and . . . Bob and I try to take it in our stride too
(laughs).
(Diana Pilkington, London)

Positioning girls as copers, and indeed the focus on boys (in a fam-
ily) can silence the problems that girls face (Mahony 1998; Francis
and Skelton 2005) and serves to make invisible the problems that are
reported by them (Hey et al. 1998). In contrast to parental perspec-
tives on their daughters as ‘robust’ and ‘easy going’, many of the girls
themselves talked about difficulties in managing friendships and about
problems such as sexual harassment which they didn’t discuss with
parents:

I remember when I was in year 7 actually, it was really horrid I’m just
walking along and this boy likes gropes me in the back and it was
horrid and I hated it and I have never admitted it to anyone, I mean
I have to my friends but I was really shocked and I was in year 7 and
it was horrid – and he was in year 11 and it was horrid, I hated it.
(Olivia Levy, London)

Social mix or social mixing? Young people’s friendships and

social groups

While there is a social mix in the urban schools these white middle-class
parents send their children to, there is little social mixing particularly
between social classes. This seemingly stands in contradiction to the
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 139

often declared desire for mixing by parents, a number of whom as

we have seen lament their children’s lack of minority ethnic friends.
However, embedded within the desire for ‘mixture’ is also a fear of
‘over-exposure’ to difference. Even where there is a degree of social mix-
ing with the classed and racialised Other, the data reveal that nearly
all the white middle-class young people remain firmly and primarily
anchored in white middle-class networks. This is underscored by the
primary schools these children attended and the after-school, extra-
curricular activities the children and young people engaged in such as
dance, drama, instrumental classes and woodcraft folk which are pre-
dominantly accessed by other white middle-class young people. Over
half of our middle-class parents sent their children to primary schools
that came in the top third of the primary school league tables for their
local education authorities. As a consequence most of the children in
our sample arrived at multi-ethnic, class diverse secondary schooling
from predominantly white middle-class primary schools. It was a minor-
ity of families in the sample – and largely those from first generation
middle-class backgrounds or those recently returned from living over-
seas (mainly in London and Riverton) – whose children had been to
primary schools as diverse as their secondary schools. Also the majority,
from the data on young people over 16, seemed to be moving on to sixth
form provision that was similarly predominantly white and middle-
class. This was especially so in London where there was a trend towards
children/young people moving into ‘whiter’, more middle-class spaces
for FE and HE. This meant many did not retain beyond secondary school
any mixed friendships they may have had. Frankie Cadogan (aged 18)
admits to having a completely new set of friends now he is at a highly
performing sixth form college in a gentrified London borough, and
Fiona Richards (London), reflecting back on her educational trajectory
which took her to Oxford, remembers sixth form as ‘much whiter’.
Attending inner city comprehensives was on the whole seen to be
a positive experience for the children/young people. As we saw in
Chapter 5, a key element underpinning parents’ anxieties stemming
from having placed their children in an urban comprehensive is the
anxiety of the undesirable, troublesome black and white working-class
Other. The parents are intent upon distinguishing their children from
these others and indeed their children are constructed in contrast to
what they are not. The white working-class is often denigrated, and
there tends to be a reluctance on the part of both parents and children to
see anything of importance or of intrinsic value in white working-class
culture. There is a strong sense of fear of contamination and also of what
140 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Stephen Ball (2003 p. 114) calls a sense of ‘other’ families as not ‘nor-
mal’, as unintelligible in terms of ‘our values, attitudes and behaviour’.
As well as the structural division in the organisation of the school
which is strongly linked to class and ‘racial’/ethnic stratification, par-
ents and children pointed to overt differences marked out by cultural
differences. In Norton and Riverton several parents described how their
children’s school was divided internally, between ‘Chavs’ or ‘Charvs’
and the groups that their own children belonged to. For example, white
middle-class children at The Park School got called the ‘Poshies’ or
the ‘Hippies’, with clear social class connotations (the term ‘poshies’
clearly denoting middle- or upper-classness, and ‘hippies’ having their
roots in middle-class radicalism (Parkin 1968) or at least alternativism.
Gemma Foster (age 13) explained how in her school in Riverton ‘gen-
erally you stick to your own groups’. In a process of boundary making
(Southerton 2002) children in Norton and Riverton were very keen to
define themselves in opposition to the Charvers or Chavs, as one mother
(Anne Downie, Norton) explained about her daughter, ‘she’s part of an
interesting little [laughs] friendship group, who define themselves as
non-Charvers.’ As Holt and Griffin (2005) argue,

Othering enables the middle classes to focus on aspects of their

identities which they wish to hold up as defining their groups’ char-
acteristics (for example Middle class taste, intelligence, refinement),
while denying these characteristics to the working class Other.
(p. 248)

The othering of the ‘Charvers’ defined by their violence, bad behaviour,

crass taste in clothing and lack of interest and ability in education served
to set the white middle-class children apart as well behaved, with the
‘right taste’ and ‘natural’ educational ability.
Social class distinctions are important in most of the children’s
accounts of school experience and friendships, and were usually exp-
ressed, as Nayak (2006) has shown, via visible markers like style, accent,
attitude and appearance.

[ . . . ] while social class may rarely be discussed directly by young peo-

ple it continues to be threaded through the daily fabric of their lives:
it is stitched into codes of respect, accent, dress, music, bodily adorn-
ment and comportment. In short, the affective politics of class is a
felt practice, tacitly understood and deeply internalised.
(Nayak 2006 p. 828)
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 141

Terms like ‘Chav’, ‘Charver’ and ‘Hippy’ were common. However, many
of the young people did wish to convey they knew that these sorts of
generalisations were partial and inadequate for summing up the char-
acteristics of others and in talking about this also displayed a certain
discomfort:

Interviewer: So are Charvers working class would you say?

Not all of them, that’s the thing. It’s . . . just as superficial as any other
sort of classification like a hippy or a, you know like you can be,
it doesn’t matter what like class you’re from, like anybody can be,
I would say like the majority of people, the majority of Charvs prob-
ably are like sort of working class, but I wouldn’t, I don’t really like
to say that cos it sounds stupid.
(Oliver Todd, 19 years, Norton)

Children in Riverton talked about Goths, and Chavs or Townies but

most often they situated themselves outside any of these groupings.
William Smart (aged 15 Riverton) elaborated how there are Chavs, but
there were also:

. . . Jitters, Skaters, people who dress like Skaters but can’t actually
skate. And there was Indies and a few Emo’s and a few Goths, but,
yeah, it’s changed a lot, there are a lot more Emo’s. And a lot of the
boys are Emo’s.

There was some awareness of themselves as marginalised in all three

locales but for these children whilst this may have been discomfiting it
had no significant impact on their school experience. To deal with this
they most often when necessary developed different personas for in and
out of school, including the use of different accents in different settings:

Um well I still say I sound posh in comparison to some people, but

we’re not labelled as that any more, cos we’ve kind of blended with
other groups from our form.
(Lucy Gordon, 14 years, Norton)

Or else they created their own distinctive groups:

Well me and my friends would often refer to other people as Chavs

in their groups and they would call us something like Jitters I guess
although we didn’t particularly think of ourselves as that, we didn’t
142 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

really know where we fitted in so I guess my group of people were the

people that we weren’t, we didn’t fit in, in any of the other groups so
we were kind of like the odd ones and most of us were from the same
backgrounds, we were just quite different I guess. So we didn’t fit in
and we made our own group I guess.
(Laila Bailey, 15 years, Riverton)

In some cases they sought to transcend such classifications and asserted

their individual or even unique identities compared to the majority.
Todd Western (aged 19, London), at a coeducational school which had
90 per cent Asian pupils, told us:

Well I got into heavy metal and stuff but no one else at the school
listened to it, that I knew of, and so I always felt a bit out of place
there. I mean it wasn’t like they all excluded me or anything to be
honest; I wasn’t like forced out of any groups or anything, everyone
still talked to me. I was quite happy to go off on my own really.
In terms of having friends there- most of my friends that I ended up
with were outside the school.
(Emphasis added)

When asked more explicitly about class and ethnicity, he replied:

Well ethnicity doesn’t bother me at all but most of my people who

are into what I’m into are white.

Another boy, Frankie Cadogan (aged 18) who had moved school to a
sixth Form college across the other side of London, also talked about
his own difference from the other(s). He talked about the school being
predominantly working-class, with a large Bengali population and he
reflected:

I think everyone was just sort of different [to me] everyone was from
[the immediate local area] and was just sort of into different stuff and
I was going up to Camden and there were some people who hadn’t
really left [the immediate local area] in their life.

The percentage of BME children in schools which differed dramatically

within and across the three cities appears to have a strong effect on
children’s sense of themselves in the world. In schools with a small pro-
portion of BME children it is as if ethnicity is invisible. We find little
 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive 143

of Fortier’s (2007) ‘intimacy of multiculturalism’ and young people giv-

ing up aspects of originary habitus in order to identify with classed and
raced Others. More often distance is maintained:

It is really difficult because I think in some ways it is quite idealistic

to say that every like school should have a perfect mixture of differ-
ent classes and different races. I think it does cause problems. I don’t
think by sticking lots of different people together in one place it
doesn’t get rid of the difference it just intensifies the conflict. I think
it just makes, I think people from like unfortunate backgrounds,
I don’t think they appreciate having other people that have come
from more privileged backgrounds. I don’t think they think ‘oh that’s
really good of them to come and mix with us’ I think it is almost as
if it is rubbed in their faces.
(Jemma Johnson, 20 years, London)

Jemma Johnson’s experience and viewpoint represents a direct challenge

to the strong parental expectations placed upon social mix in the sec-
ondary school, illustrated by so much of our data and discussed earlier
in the book. Rather than the benign positive influence of social mix we
glimpse here an antagonism engendered by close proximity.

Conclusion

The white middle-class parents are strong advocates for their children
which in turn transmits a strong sense of entitlement, ‘specialness’ and
with that a sense of superiority. At the same time there is evidence of the
young people developing or trying to develop egalitarian perspectives
and socially just frameworks for praxis. However, within the limits of
the research, it is not possible to weigh up the degree of success that
they had in this regard.
A dominant theme in our data is around disparagement of the
working-class Other and the strong desire and strategic intent to sep-
arate themselves off from this group. The structure and organisation of
the school in a number of cases (if not most) facilitates this to some
extent and as the children get older that separation is increased. How-
ever, there is some evidence of children trying at least in terms of accent
and or dialect to ‘blend in’ but this does not seem to be a major concern.
The issue around boys’ masculinity may be a concern for the boys but
it would seem to be a greater concern for the parents. If they (the boys)
(think they) have something to hide such as an interest in dance, then
144 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

they hide it, but overall the white middle-class children set themselves
apart and so it becomes less of an issue. The young people tend to have a
very strong sense of themselves and part of that is a sense of superiority –
superiority in terms of: academic achievement; family support; cultural
attributes and tastes; and in terms of material wealth. Whilst they do get
called names because they have the affective and cultural resources to
counter the effect, these are not apparently significant events for them.
Whilst there were similarities in terms of classed experiences of school
across the three locales, this was less the case with respect to their dif-
ferent ethnicised experiences. Here critical mass seemed to influence the
young people’s ‘racial’ awareness and reflectivity with more awareness
being displayed in the London context. Positioning as a minority white
middle-class child in a majority black or Asian school played out in
particular ways in the school context; a number of young people var-
iously described their experience as ‘shocking though not necessarily in
a bad way’ to ‘exciting’ and ‘revealing’ as indicated in the experiences
recounted earlier. However, it was rare for the young people to describe
these relationships as friendships.
In terms of the overarching question of social reproduction the young
people are clearly working through the kinds of developmental experi-
ences that young people need to do and given the dissonant contexts
within which they have to engage in that process they have an added
challenge to cope with. Nevertheless there is evidence to suggest that in
many cases the young people have interpellated (in the Althusserian
sense) their parents’ values and views on the urban comprehensive
and their raced and classed peers. Perhaps this is an explanation for
the seemingly limited evidence of teenage rebelliousness and ensured
focused academic success which was intended for them.
8
Reinvigorating Democracy:
Middle-Class Moralities in
NeoLiberal Times

Introduction

This chapter examines the democratic possibilities that emanate from

middle-class identities which are grounded in sociality and openness to
difference. In what ways might these identities work against, and dis-
rupt, normative views of what it means to be ‘middle-class’ at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century? In the US context Kahlenberg (2001
p. 62) argues that middle-class parents constitute powerful resources
within state schools, intensely involved in their children’s school-
ing, driving up standards and drawing in additional resources. For
Kahlenberg middle-class parental involvement not only has a positive
influence on their own children’s educational experiences and achieve-
ments, it enhances the experience of all children in the school (p. 63).
We interrogate Kahlenberg’s assertion in the light of our own UK-based
data. There is also an examination of the role of social mix in parents’
understandings of, and levels of commitment to, notions of ‘a common
good’, and the extent to which the idea of the school being an exten-
sion of the local community is valued but more importantly put into
practice in their actions. While the focus is on processes of ‘thinking
and acting otherwise’ in order to uncover some of the commitments
and investments that might make for a renewed and reinvigorated
democratic citizenry, what also emerges strongly are the difficulties of
turning these commitments and investments into more equitable ways
of interacting with class and ethnic others. The chapter explores some
of the possible reasons why the translation of sentiments into prac-
tices is a real challenge for this left leaning, pro-welfare segment of the
middle-classes, concurring with Cucchiara and Horvat (2009) that the
benefits of middle-class parental involvement in disadvantaged inner

145
146 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

city schooling are more limited than its proponents have argued. The
wider political culture and discourses of neoliberalism that valorise
competition, individualism and the market are seen to make it increas-
ingly difficult to convert inclinations into actions, even for these white
middle-classes who express a strong commitment to community and
social mixing.

Civic engagement and moral ambivalence

White middle-class parents make up the vast majority of parent repre-

sentatives on school governing bodies, and the parents we interviewed
were heavily involved in school governance. In 58 per cent of the
London families (36 out of 62 families) at least one parent was currently
serving or had served as a school governor. There were 11 chairs of gov-
ernors (these were all secondary apart from a mother who was chair at
a primary school). Of the 20 primary school governors 75 per cent were
mothers. Of the 23 secondary governors 61 per cent (14) were mothers.
The figures in Norton and Riverton were lower, as was the proportion of
mothers, though still unexpectedly high. In Norton 22 per cent of fam-
ilies had a parent who was a school governor, and of these nine parents,
four were mothers and five were fathers. In Riverton 43 per cent (13 out
of 30 families) had a parent who was a school governor, of whom seven
were mothers and six fathers. For a majority of these families becoming
a school governor was rooted in a desire to make a civic contribution,
and it demonstrated a commitment to the wider community. However,
it also very clearly constituted an additional way of managing the risks
in sending children to inner city state schooling. Other than being a
governor there was little civic engagement across the sample, despite
nearly all the parents describing themselves as politically left of centre.
London had the most politically active parents (22 per cent), including
three Labour party activists, a chair of the local neighbourhood society
and a couple who were campaigning against a local Academy. But for the
most part civic engagement and activism lay in the parents’ past histo-
ries, and many talked about their disillusionment with politics, and in
particular, New Labour, although almost all talked about their commit-
ment to the welfare state. We would argue that this pervasive sense of
activism as ‘a thing of the past’ is an indication of the ways in which
neoliberalism has worked to ‘incorporate, co-opt, constrain and deplete
activism’ (Bondi and Laurie 2005 p. 2).
Across all three locales the parents held broadly ‘Centre-Left’ and
‘Green’ positions. In the face of the primacy ascribed to the market
 Reinvigorating Democracy 147

by New Labour, the fervour with which communitarian ideals were

once pursued by the parents had mostly given way to pragmatism and
pessimism about the possibilities of political action. There was little evi-
dence of the high levels of social responsibility that Etzioni (1993) argues
are essential for communitarianism to thrive. However, this is not to
posit some kind of loss of moral bearings. Most of the parents worked
as public sector professionals, and they sometimes cited beliefs about
their work in a general support for public sector institutions. But rather
than expressing recognisably political positions in relation to public sec-
tor provision, support for state education tended to be voiced in terms
of individual morality and what was ethically desirable, and in terms
of what sorts of people their children would become (see Crozier et al.
2008 p. 265). We saw a good example of this was the quote from Audrey
(Norton) in Chapter 2.
While there was a wide spectrum of civic engagement across the
sample there was a significant minority of white middle-class families,
predominantly in London, who demonstrated a strong ‘vocabulary of
association’ (Jordan et al. 1994 p. 43). Jordan and colleagues describe
those who, despite the ascendancy of individualism and imperatives to
make something of oneself, still give a high priority to the public life
of participation, membership, community and democracy. These fam-
ilies had a commitment to a local community that was broader than
‘people like them’ and they expressed strong views that it should be the
focus of civic responsibility with local schooling as a key community
project. For this group comprehensive schooling was strongly valued as
an opportunity to put democratic, civic values into practice as well as
for the related identity-work it can perform. They saw schools as central
to community-building, viewing them, as Etzioni advocates, as places
where children should learn responsibilities to the common good. Avril
Smart, a journalist in the London sample, put it like this:

There is definitely something about producing a different kind of

middle-class child. Comprehensives are all about producing a differ-
ent kind of middle-class child . . . We didn’t want our girls to think
they were superior to other children who didn’t have their advan-
tages . . . There was no way we would have sent them anywhere
else.

However, for the majority of the parents there was more provisionality
than this, and the happiness of their children was deemed paramount.
Their commitment to local comprehensive schooling was conditional
148 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

on the individual educational success and emotional well-being of their

children: As Isabel Webb in Norton said:

We’ve wrung our hands and still do about whether we should send
them private . . . We’d have buried all our, all our socialist principles
[laughs]. If you, you know, if um you ask John that’s the one thing
that he would ban, private schools.

Similarly for Elaine Booth in Riverton:

Everyone has a right to be a hypocrite for their children, ‘cos what-

ever your politics you just . . . when it comes to your children, you just
have to do what’s right for them, and that’s what I did.

The ambivalence and provisionality expressed by Isabel and Elaine was

much more common than the unconditional commitment of Avril.
In the rest of the chapter we look at the sample in terms of this division
between the ‘brave few’ who express few qualms about their commit-
ment to comprehensive schooling and the ‘more fearful majority’ who
are still on some levels ‘hedging their bets’. But first we explore the wider
political landscape in general, and the neoliberal discourses in particu-
lar, that have led to the withering away of democracy and politics, and
a diminishing of the public sector.

Neoliberal subjects?

We can find some of the reasons for the fearful retreat of the white
middle-classes from the public sector in the wider social and economic
context. The contemporary cultures of individualisation and privatisa-
tion have eroded commitments and investments in the public sphere.
The last three decades have seen the evaporation of a strong pub-
lic sector ethos under sustained political attack, first by Thatcherism
and, more recently, under New Labour (Hutton 2010). Furthermore,
the reduction of graduate jobs at the same time as the rapid expansion
of higher education has resulted in middle-class anxiety and a loss of
certainty. In addition, the growing gap between the rich and the poor
has exacerbated class divisions and increased mistrust and fear of the
classed and racialised ‘other’. Local democracy and civic engagement,
particularly in our inner cities, is becoming increasingly elusive as state
centralisation continues apace and local power becomes vested more
and more in the hands of a small privileged minority. Teresa Caldeira
 Reinvigorating Democracy 149

(2005 p. 335) argues that ‘among the conditions for democracy is that
people acknowledge those from different social groups as co-citizens,
that is, as people with similar rights’. But that recognition is probably
less characteristic of the white middle-class majority in the 2010s than
it was 50, even 100 years ago (Szreter 2006), and appears to have dimin-
ished over the last 40 years as egalitarian and more inclusive perspectives
on social differences, and especially class differences, have faded in the
onslaught of neoliberalism (Bourdieu 1998).
In Chapter 4 we explored the impact of neoliberalism on notions of
choice. It is also important to trace the consequences of neoliberalism
for public sector education. As Nick Stevenson (2008) emphasises,
neoliberalism is a profoundly educative project that seeks to produce
flexible, consuming, enterprising individuals. It is concerned not simply
with structural features of society but with the making and remak-
ing of cultural practices and understandings in ways which centre
the individual and sideline society. A growing culture of marketised
self-improvement has marginalised wider concerns with the needs of
others or more civic responsibilities. The neoliberal culture of hyper-
individualism has resulted in a prioritising of the self at the expense of
care for others (Elliott and Lemert 2006). But more important for the
families in our study it is increasingly the dominant lens through which
their actions are viewed; one in which the responsible committed sol-
idarity of parents like Avril is viewed either as reactionary passivity or
the wilful selfish prioritising of individual principles over children’s best
interests. In contrast, the more calculated provisional preferences of par-
ents like Isabel are valorised as part of active entrepreneurship in which
‘individuals are encouraged to strive to optimise their own quality of life
and that of their families’ (Miller and Rose 2008 p. 79).
Although the families in our sample are amongst those middle-classes
most resistant to dominant discourses of neoliberalism, even the bravest
amongst them never entirely escape the reach of these discourses.
As noted above, neoliberalism is a profoundly educative project con-
cerned as much with the transformation of individuals’ sense of self
and civic identities as with the economy. At the same time, in relation
to the economy, those aspects of government that welfare construed as
political responsibilities are transformed into commodified forms and
regulated by market principles (Miller and Rose 2008). Neoliberalism
positions all subjects as active individuals eager to better themselves
in the market. Active entrepreneurship, in which individuals are urged
to optimise their own quality of life and that of their families, is jux-
taposed to what is perceived to be the inertia and dependency of
150 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

responsible solidarity. Obligations to others outside the immediate fam-

ily become peripheral within neoliberal agendas. Rather, there has been
the steady growth in ‘amoral familism’ (Rodger 2003), the tendency to
feel accountable only for yourself and those in your immediate circle.
When we focus specifically on the impact of neoliberalism within the
field of education, we are faced with the centrality of targets, marketi-
sation and the ‘choice and voice’ of enterprising individuals (Justesen
2002; Miliband 2006). Neoliberal policy creates a ‘market’ in which
there is competition between schools, and the most significant indicator
of market position is the percentage of higher-level examination passes
at the end of compulsory schooling. Some ‘consumers’ take this at face-
value, reading off impressions of educational quality or even using the
information to make some estimate of the chances of their own chil-
dren achieving certain academic credentials. Others view the picture as
too simplistic, instead reading into the situation a much more complex
engagement. In the case of the counter-intuitive choosers in our study,
there is relative confidence that their own children are likely to do well,
coupled with the widespread rejection of league tables as indicating any-
thing useful about the quality of a school. This situation is inherently
more complex than neoliberal accounts allow.
It has been argued that it is the middle-classes who provide the ideal
individual for neoliberal times, the person for whom life can be a con-
scious reflexive project of the self and to whom it may seem plausible
that, barring accidents, the individual is primarily the author of what
befalls them. As Levitas put it, capitalism continually undermines equal-
ity, and those with relative advantage, with more capital (of any kind)
are always in the best position to gain (Levitas 2005). Work by Robertson
and Lauder (2001), Gewirtz (2001) and Ball (2003) illustrate, in differ-
ent but overlapping ways, how the process of selecting and applying to
schools ‘favors middle-class families’ (Hursh 2005 p. 8).
As we admitted in the introduction, we started out wondering (per-
haps a little naively) if counter-intuitive school choices might be
explained at the level of families as a political project, as a form of oppo-
sition to the well-embedded neoliberal assumptions underpinning an
individualised subject as consumer of education. We wondered if there
were community orientations that put the interests of the collective on
a par with those of the individual. Similarly, we wondered if there were
attempts at a personal level to try to reverse the shift noted by Hursh
(2005) away from shared interests in respect of schooling in the United
States and England.
 Reinvigorating Democracy 151

Such questions meant it was important to find out about the fam-
ilies’ ability to ‘think otherwise’ in civic terms, in particular, how
the 125 families positioned themselves in relation to discourses of
communitarianism. There were indeed some who drew on a strongly
communitarian discourse characterised by a commitment to social jus-
tice and opposition to the marketisation of education. These parents
would not contemplate selective or private schooling in any circum-
stances, expressed a total aversion to ‘playing the market’, and were
strongly community orientated to relation to schooling and locality. For
Etzioni (1993) a central underpinning of communitarianism is the bal-
ancing of self-advancement with investment in one’s community and
such a balance was prioritised by these families. However, a major-
ity of the parents drew on weaker discourses of communitarianism,
which, whilst supportive of comprehensive schooling, did not intrude
on the securing and maintaining of advantage. For these parents com-
mitment to comprehensives is conditional on ensuring their children’s
educational success. They may not be classic neoliberal subjects but
like their more exclusivity-oriented middle-class counterparts choosing
high-performing selective state or private schools, they are active agents
seeking to maximise their own advantage with little consideration of
the costs to less-advantaged others. In a contemporary culture in which
education is subject to processes of commodification and economising,
schools are increasingly seen in terms of risky investments, even by
the left leaning parents in our sample. They become the educational
equivalent of stocks and shares. And like the stock market they require
vigilance and careful monitoring in order to maintain their value and
ensure a profit. There is always the risk that their value may plum-
met, necessitating middle-class parents to pull out and find a safer
educational investment that will still generate profits in terms of exam
results.

The impossibility of cross-class community

We have discussed social mix more generally in Chapter 7. Here we

explore social mix in relation to parents’ desires for their children
to be educated with children from different cultures, as part of a
communitarian impulse. As we have seen in Chapter 3, it was common
for parents in all three locales to draw on discourses of ‘community’ and
multiculturalism when asked about their motivations for choosing the
local comprehensive school. Many of the parents felt passionate about
152 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

the need to produce well-rounded, tolerant individuals and they saw

urban comprehensive schooling as making an important contribution
to this process. They stressed a social and cultural fluency in which
an active engagement with difference is signalled as a highly valued
attribute:

Part of why we chose the school was for social reasons. I think Guy’s
going to get a far better education going to the local comprehensive
where he is going to be meeting and dealing with a complete range
of children.
(Gill Harrison, Riverton)

This positive value in comprehensive schooling emerges strongly in

what Gavin and Deirdre say below. We also glimpse in their words more
communitarian impulses, both a view of schools as central to commu-
nity building (Etzioni 1993) and the desire to contribute something
positive to the local school:

If sending our kids to the local school can help that school continue
its improvement and development and attract more middle class
people to send their kids, then their kids can get a more rounded
experience of where other kids come from and what their experiences
are like and just a greater social mix.
(Gavin Featherstone, Riverton)

The school gives them this wonderful bond of popular culture that
unites them you know for getting on with all types of people in all
ways in the future. I don’t think I could have given him a better
education.
(Deirdre Johansson, London)

This valuing of comprehensive education, particularly in the London

context, is closely tied to a valorisation of multiculturalism. The parents
are seeking schools with a wide social mix because they see value in their
children being educated with children from different cultures. Attend-
ing comprehensives has a compensatory value, providing multicultural
experiences that home life cannot. As Fred Drummond, a Norton parent
explains:

Because our local community isn’t multiethnic, it’s not part of our
normal existence to be achieving the kind of intercultural mingling
 Reinvigorating Democracy 153

that we should be doing. That, you know, would make the world a
better place, whereas at The Park [the local comprehensive] it is.

Again we see in Fred’s words a strong communitarian urge ‘to make the
world a better place’. But for many of the parents such communitarian
impulses are in constant tension with neoliberal appropriating tenden-
cies to better and enhance the self and generate a profit through contact
with the other. As we have argued in Chapter 5, diversity, and ethnic
diversity in particular, is viewed as a valuable asset. Relatedly, socially
diverse comprehensives are seen as contributing an education that is
much broader than the National Curriculum, one that gives children
experiences of, and the ability to deal with, ‘the wider world’.
For a majority of the parents, commitment to comprehensives
is complicated. It is more than the straightforward enactment of
communitarian principles because they also anticipate gains in terms
of their children’s cultural knowledge and social skills. The imperatives
for self-advancement too often override ‘a responsibility for the material
and moral well-being of others’ (Etzioni 1993 p. 264). As Burbules (2000
p. 256) argues:

The framework within which multiculturalism often takes shape, a

broad (and sometimes patronizing) ‘tolerance’ for difference, leaves
dominant beliefs and values largely unquestioned – indeed even insu-
lated from challenge and change – because they are shielded within
the comforting self-conception of openness and inclusivity.

The children, attending socially mixed comprehensive schooling, are

seen by their parents to be developing key citizenship skills of toler-
ance and understanding difference that are perceived to be increasingly
vital in a global society. At the same time, a powerful theme, of the
gains to be made from urban comprehensive schooling, also emerged
from the interviews. This is hinted at in Deirdre’s assertion of ‘the mar-
vellous advantage’ accruing to her son from attending schools that, in
Lorraine’s words, make ‘our kids more real’. In contrast to the ‘solidary
individualism’ among the liberal middle-classes described by Berking
(1996 p. 195), these parents seem to be pursuing ‘an individualistic soli-
darity’. Neoliberalism may be configured slightly differently in their and
their children’s identity formation but it still seeps into the soul. While
there is a strong commitment to (and valorisation of) multiculturalism
across the families, this was underpinned by a strong sense of the ben-
efits for their own children; of the gains to be made in encountering
154 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

rich cultural diversity. And these benefits were primarily seen to come
through contact with ethnic rather than classed others. Despite valuing
a particular ‘other’ there is still enormous ambivalence about children
connecting with or become allied with the working-class majority in
the comprehensive schools they attend (Reay et al. 2007). As Ravaeud
and van Zanten (2007 p. 117) found, while it appears unacceptable
to attribute negative educational effects to the presence of minority
ethnic children there are no such strictures on criticism directed at
the working-classes. The paradox that Binnie et al. (2006) articulate
between simultaneously embracing certain forms of difference whilst
devalorising others is evident in the distinction many of the parents
made between the desired ethnic and the feared working-class other
(Reay et al. 2007). One consequence is a semi-detachedness from the
working-classes despite sending their children to school with them. This
was evident in what we saw Ross describing in Chapter 6 about the con-
trast between his comprehensive and the far more middle-class sixth
form he moved on to.
In fact when these white middle-classes talked about the working-
classes, rather than expressing empathy, they often conveyed an instru-
mentalising impulse; that to know about their classed ‘other’ was a
useful resource for later life. Neoliberal appropriation is still power-
fully in evidence. As we saw in Chapter 2, Audrey comments that her
son’s friends were exclusively white and middle-class, and goes on to
assert in relation to the working-class children in his comprehensive
school:

He doesn’t bring these children home but he knows they are there
and he meets them in school and I know when he grows up and he’s
going to be a lawyer or a teacher or whatever at least he’ll know where
these people have come from.
(Audrey Caisey, Norton)

Audrey echoes the semi-detachedness expressed by Ross. The ‘at least’

that Audrey qualifies her comment with is telling. The aim appears not
to befriend and mix as equals with working-class others but rather to
know them in appropriating ways that resource the self.
Despite an enthusiasm for comprehensive schooling among the fam-
ilies there was often ambivalence and anxiety about too close contact
with working-class others:

I have to say for me as great a fear was that my son would get in with
the scrap metal dealer’s son who was given everything from this age
 Reinvigorating Democracy 155

and that he would think he should have that lifestyle as well when
we wanted it to be balanced and even.
(Sheila Moss, Norton)

Although most parents did not display such overt feelings of fear of
contamination, almost half referred to attending comprehensives as ‘a
toughening experience’, the opportunity for their children to develop
resilience and become ‘worldly-wise’. These parents rationalise their
choice of urban comprehensive as, in part, a matter of ensuring their
children become used to operating in an unequal society. Clearly, this is
a somewhat different concern to that of actually opposing inequalities.
Rather, the ambition is more that children are to become inured to, and
learn to cope with a socially unjust world.
So for the parents comprehensives are one of the best ways of prepar-
ing children for the ‘real world’, and here the contrast with private and
selective schooling is apposite. In Chapter 2 we discussed the impor-
tance of private and selective schooling in family history, and how this
could continue to function as a point of departure in current school
choices. But for many of the parents, we also see strong contemporary
aspirations for their children to acquire the type of appropriating knowl-
edge that enables a process of capitalising on contact with the other,
rather than prioritising empathetic connections. This is a clear case of
neoliberal impulses trumping those of communitarianism. Their chil-
dren are learning to know of and about the working-classes rather than
to know them in a companionable, reciprocal way.

Invigorating democracy? A minority within a minority

Yet, as we have touched on at the beginning of this chapter there was

also a countervailing discourse of public engagement. If we look firstly at
contact with school governance, parental involvement was both com-
plex and contradictory, and the parents’ rationales reveal some of the
ambiguities and ambivalences embedded in these families’ relationships
to their locality, and in particular, local schooling (Ball and Vincent
2007). For a majority becoming a school governor was as much an issue
of developing insider knowledge as a desire to make a civic contribu-
tion. They thought they could intervene more effectively by becoming
involved in their children’s schooling:

I just thought a way to be attached to a school and know what is

going on is to become a governor.
(Sandra Hayes, London)
156 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Secondary schools tend to keep the parents at a distance, which again

is why I’ve become a governor so I could actually find out a bit more
what was going on.
(Jane Taylor, Riverton)

So I got to know the school very well and obviously got insider
knowledge.
(Victoria Williamson, London)

For a majority of the parents then school governance became an addi-

tional way of managing the risks in sending children to inner city state
schooling (Vincent 2000), a way of subjecting the school to surveil-
lance as well as a means of supporting it. As Savage et al. (2005 p. 65)
point out, such narratives of support have ‘an edge of instrumentalism’.
This ‘edge of instrumentalism’ is particularly powerful in Linda Quercy’s
account of being a school governor:

Well I thought if they’re going to go there I need to find out what its
like, I need to make a really informed decision so I became a governor,
and I’m still a governor now I’m in my second term, erm and I was
chair of governors and now vice chair . . . so I decided that I would
get involved and become involved in their education. And I am now
the ultimate busy body. I know almost every teacher in the school,
I know exactly what’s going on, erm I’m always in e-mail contact
with the teachers like today for example I’ve e-mailed the head of
Spanish. Hazel erm got a grade B in her mock and was predicted a
grade B but she’s only two marks away from an A so I’m saying can
you please explain to me why you didn’t predict her an A. Not saying
‘how dare you’ but I just want to know why. You know because she’s
now thinking about applying for De Veres school in Westborough,
you have to have 6 As and so that A’s gonna make a difference to her.
(Linda Quercy, London)

Here Linda makes explicit the individualised gains to be made from

formal participation in governance of schooling.
However, as we pointed out earlier in the chapter, 16 of the white
middle-class families possessed a strong ‘vocabulary of association’
(Jordan et al. 1994 p. 43). These families had a commitment to a local
community that was broader than ‘people like them’ and expressed
strong views that it should be the focus of civic responsibility with local
schooling as a key community project:
 Reinvigorating Democracy 157

We have each got the responsibility to get the best for our own chil-
dren but not at the expense of abdicating the responsibility for the
local community that we are a part of or whatever.
(David Johnson, London)

Going to the local comprehensive makes us part of the community

and that is a slightly yucky thing but in a way I feel we are contribut-
ing to the community rather than withdrawing our children. I mean
it’s part of our general philosophy I’d definitely try to move them
away from thinking they want jobs that have good money to jobs
that have a benefit to society. Both Bill and I think it’s important to
put something back . . . or at least not harming people, I suppose.
(Sally Rouse, London)

We should all have equal access to good education and good health.
I believe in that and I think that’s what any government should be
trying to do and not be trying to create areas or sort of separate,
either wittingly or unwittingly, people in society, so that some peo-
ple have better opportunities than others, or that you end up with
situations where schools do end up on sort of tiers and you do end
up with stupid league tables reflecting that, because some schools
aren’t getting a cross section of the community. Because people are
being encouraged to think that they should choose something better,
because what’s there in the community isn’t better, and it’s a mind-
set. And I just feel that principles are important and that we should
support things for the benefit of everyone as a whole. And I suppose
they’re the basic Socialist principles or whatever and I sometimes
think perhaps we’re terribly naïve and other times I think, no
we’re not, I think we’re just really trying to hang on to a really
good idea that has been beaten to death by successive policies over
the years.
(Alice Featherstone, Riverton)

It gave me an opportunity to explain to her about life, about putting

into the community that you are living in, not just getting the best
for yourself and bugger everyone else. But actually giving and not
just taking from society. That there is some value in trying to be
a good person and part of that is giving back to the community
you are part of and that includes your school and where you live
and on both counts my kids are very privileged compared to other
kids so it’s even more important for them. Everything we believe in
158 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

is about putting into your community and not taking from it, this
encompasses everything we believe.
(Yvonne Scott, London)

If we explore how community is being envisaged in these four extracts,

we can see ideas that emphasise notions of group solidarity, collective
action and responsibility, all concepts that Burke and MacFarlane (2001
p. 71) argue lie at the ‘root of socialism’. Such socialist values of com-
munity, solidarity and collective responsibility are further reinforced in
Sally and Yvonne’s priorities around ‘giving back’. We are presented with
a discourse that concentrates on citizenship obligation and the pub-
lic good and we would argue notions of social justice that attempt to
connect it to a coherent vision of the good society. The social practices
these families endorse are those that contribute to community and ben-
efit society. All the parents in these 16 families made strong statements
about the imperative to invest in local state schooling. All expressed
the view that education is fundamental to the sort of adults that chil-
dren turn into. While only Patricia stated explicitly that ‘if you pull the
middle-classes out of state schooling society as a whole loses out’, it
was clear that there was a vital link between individual investment in
inner city state schooling and collective gains. As Ian asserted, ‘if your
local school isn’t good you bloody well make sure it’s good’. In a simi-
lar vein the most upper-class parent in the sample (with parents firmly
located in the aristocracy) commented, ‘I just don’t think you can talk
about a real democracy if everybody is, almost secretly, is being edu-
cated according to their class background.’ Perhaps the greatest contrast
between these 16 families and the other 109 was that they held pow-
erful political commitments grounded in a conception of ‘the common
good’ (Etzioni 1993 p. 259) as an objective that still held value. We saw
in Chapter 4 how Laura Franklin (Riverton) argued that ‘comprehensive
education truly only works if you close down your private education
and everybody sends their child to the local catchment school.’ Louise
Naylor makes a similar point:

Everybody is only concerned with their own child, but if you could
see the bigger picture, it doesn’t work like that. If you’re concerned
about your own child, somebody else is disadvantaged.
(Louise Naylor, London)

The orientation here is one where a ‘principle’ is clearly articulated and

fastidiously applied.
 Reinvigorating Democracy 159

Threaded through the narratives of these families’ relationships with

their locality and local schooling is a powerful language of democracy
and civic engagement. The possessive individualism is muted and in
its place there is a rhetoric of community responsibility. We gain a
strong sense of public values and a collectivist repertoire (Jordan et al.
1994) in which these parents attempt to link their choice of com-
prehensive schooling with discourses of democratic participation and
active citizenship. Yet, even in these white middle-class narratives that
profess the strongest commitment to the ‘public’ and civic values, we
glimpse the same contradictions and confusion over how to translate
social democratic discourses of collectivism and community into effec-
tive action as citizens that Jordan et al. (1994) found. Within those
families with the strongest commitment to comprehensive education
and community, children still mixed in almost exclusively middle-class,
predominantly white social networks. Although all these parents were
resolutely opposed to choice and markets within education and often
asserted that real choice was a myth for most parents, they continued to
accept ‘the dominant principles of vision and division’ (Bourdieu 2000
p. 143) within society. In fact it all seems even more difficult 15 years
on from the period Jordan et al. were writing about. In a twenty-first-
century society increasingly devoid of languages for creating visions of
egalitarianism, civic and community responsibilities and ‘giving back’
(Reay 2002), even those white middle-class who combine the resources
with the will to invigorate democracy seem to have little if any delib-
erate involvement in actions that would benefit less-advantaged others,
despite sending their children to school with them. While most of the
parents in the study were trying to act ethically or in accordance with a
range of political beliefs normally associated with the Left (or for a few,
Socialism), as we saw in Chapter 4, they nevertheless often presented a
distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘what is right for your child’. In this
view ‘politics’ is positioned as superficial, while ‘what is right for your
child’ is positioned as a more authentic expression of interest or con-
cern. In this respect even this group of parents, despite their left-leaning,
welfarist orientations and their strongly stated commitments, speak the
neoliberal language of individualism and self-interest. As Andrew Sayer
pessimistically concludes:

Even actions which are not driven by struggle for advantage over
others, indeed, even those that have egalitarian motives, are likely to
be twisted by the field of class forces in ways which reproduce class
hierarchy.
(Sayer 2005 p. 169)
160 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

Yet, it is parents, such as the ones in our study, who offer a real
prospect for a fairer educational system. As Richard Webber, director of
a large statistical survey of school performance, argues, ‘the best edu-
cational achievement for the largest number of pupils will be achieved
by having a broad social mix of pupils in as many schools as possi-
ble’ (Taylor 2006 pp. 1–2). Although our data and analysis show it is
important not to confuse ‘social mix’ with ‘social mixing’, it remains
the case that there are important democratic and communitarian possi-
bilities of comprehensive schooling, where children of different class
and ethnic cultures may actually mix and become friends. In Avril
Smart’s words:

I think it is an understanding of others you can only have if you

are sort of with them all the time. It is something to learn of other
cultures, but to actually learn with other cultures, of other cultures,
it is a completely different thing . . . and that can only come through
comprehensive schooling.

Avril articulates strong democratic aspirations for her children and the
possibilities of achieving these through comprehensive schooling. How-
ever, practices of attending the same schools as class and ethnic others
whilst maintaining a safe distance from them amounts to a rather
weak form of openness to difference. Common practices of setting and
streaming as well as Gifted and Talented schemes enable the white
middle-classes to cultivate distinction and maintain social distance from
classed others even when they attend the same schools.

Conclusion

According to Kahlenberg, middle-class parents are particularly powerful

advocates for, and assets to, state schools:

Educated middle-class parents are more likely to be involved in their

children’s schools, to insist on high standards, to rid the school of
bad teachers, and to ensure adequate resources (both public and
private) -in effect to promote effective schools for their children.
(Kahlenberg, 2001 p. 62)

He goes to argue that ‘when parents volunteer in the classroom and par-
ticipate in school activities, they raise the average achievement of all
children in the school’ (2001 p. 63). In other words, the benefits of a
parent’s involvement reach beyond her own child to benefit the school
 Reinvigorating Democracy 161

and students as a whole. Of course we found a few parents whose involve-

ment fitted the model Kahlenberg describes. For example, Yvonne
Scott and her husband John, both accomplished in drama and dance,
worked every year with an entire year group to put on an end-of-year
school play. However, such parents were a rarity. More often parents
were engaged in practices of parental involvement similar to those
Brantlinger (2003) and McGrath and Kuriloff (1999) describe in the
US context. Both studies found white middle-class mothers tended to
exclude parents from lower classes and tried to ensure that their chil-
dren were involved in schemes that benefited them at the expense of
other children.
There is a key distinction between the domain of the ethic of care
(Fraser 1997) obtaining in relation to people who have a strong per-
sonal attachment or dependence and the domain of social justice. It is
perfectly natural and understandable to make a distinction between the
welfare of one’s own children and those of others. In Honneth’s terms
(1995) they involve different kinds of recognition. It is important to
acknowledge this care–justice distinction as legitimate and to distin-
guish it from the differential treatment of one’s own class from other
classes. However, this distinction (between the welfare of one’s own
children and that of others) is over-determined for most of the parents
by attitudes and behaviours that make additional distinctions on class
grounds.
Contemporary research examining middle-class relationships to the
public sector indicates that normative middle-class practices are increas-
ingly underpinned by elite separatism rather than public welfarism.
Under neoliberalism a selfish individualism has become hegemonic
among the white middle-classes, exacerbated by growing privatisation,
consumerism and the market culture (Ball 2003; Brantlinger 2003). Our
research focuses on those middle-classes who think and act otherwise in
order to uncover some of the commitments and investments that might
make for a renewed and reinvigorated democratic citizenry. The parents
in the study stand out against normative white middle-class practices
because, for the most part, they do not choose ‘the best’ schools for
their children. Rather, they choose schools they feel are ‘good enough’.
It is this acceptance of ‘good enough’ that marks out these families from
those who ‘play the market’. They are choosing not to use their privilege
as much as they might.
Yet, the data also reveal painful contradictions. The parents were
caught within impossible tensions between being ‘good neoliberal indi-
vidualists’ and their communitarian impulses. These two competing
pressures work against each other discursively within wider society but
162 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

also psychically within individuals as we have explored in Chapter 6.

And just as neoliberalism has triumphed over socialist and more
communitarian ways of living and relating in the United Kingdom and
globally so, its hold on the individual, even those who struggle against
its grip, remains powerful and dominant.
As a consequence, attempting to live and even foster egalitarian
lifestyles in a society, which valorises competitive individualism, is
both difficult, conflictual and tension laden (Sayer 2005). It is vital to
recognise the relations of distance, power and conflict that living with
difference is embedded in. As Anne-Marie Fortier (2007 p. 111) argues,
‘the illusion of tolerance with multicultural intimacy is that power rela-
tions and conflicts will be somehow suspended through intimacy, and
that the distance and hierarchy between those who tolerate and those
who are tolerated will dissolve.’ As our research demonstrates, living in
the same neighbourhoods and going to school with class and ethnic oth-
ers rarely dissolves distance and hierarchy. While a significant minority
of the parents feel passionately about local community and comprehen-
sive schooling with a strong sense (as one father asserted, those who are
more privileged should be engaged in ‘the giving back side of things’),
giving back and a concern with civic renewal were not on the agenda
of most of these white middle-class parents. While we have found a
great deal of commitment we also found more troubling aspects of white
middle-class investments in inner city comprehensives. There was more
self-interest than altruism, and more superficial endorsement of social
mix rather than commitment to social mixing. Like Stephen Ball (2003
p. 142) we found that ‘there are lines to be drawn within social diversity
and there are limits to community and social mixing’. Although this
is far removed from the elitist and narrow version of citizenship of the
socially isolationist, exclusive and excluding white middle-classes that
both Butler and Giddens have written about, it is also a great distance
from egalitarian notions of democratic citizenry.
Conclusion

What do we learn from these white middle-class parents? Clearly,

there are partially realised goals, undercurrents of provisionality and
surges of anxiety associated with against-the-grain choices of secondary
school. But looking at the often pragmatic, sometimes conflictual aspi-
rations of most of the parents in the sample, we also learn a great
deal about the narrowness of mainstream white middle-class aspirations
under neoliberalism, the failures, ignorance and short-falls of privilege.
Despite their left-leaning, ‘radical’ inclinations, they, like the majority
of middle-class parents, are motivated by the desire ‘to make the most
of the child’ (Ball 2003 p. 25), and view them in terms of investments in
and for the future. Theirs is a carefully monitored investment of human
capital in educational stock that many of their middle-class peers have
rejected as too risky. But the differences between mainstream middle-
class practices and those of most of our sample are fairly superficial, and
when we strip them away to focus on what lies beneath, the processes at
play are similar. These parents are also playing the educational market,
and capitalising on educational investments. While most would claim
that they want a good education for all children, their actual social prac-
tices in the educational arena are still primarily about competition and
trying to generate a greater profit than other parents. This paucity of
aspiration comes as something of a surprise. The irony here is that it has
traditionally been the white working-classes who have been judged for
a paucity of aspirations: perhaps it is just that the circumscribed range
of aspirations differs for different classes.
What the parents tell us appears particularly apposite in the aftermath
of a series of scandals of sleaze and greed (in the United Kingdom in
2010). It has become increasingly evident that our political and eco-
nomic elites are often ignorant of the lives and desires of ordinary

163
164 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

people, perhaps whom they see as too ordinary to be worth knowing

and understanding; their calculating and cynical self-interest is testi-
mony to the long hegemony of the neoliberal moral vision (Marquand
2009; Hutton 2010). In contrast the parents in our study have a social
reflexivity that their political ‘betters’ seem to lack. However, it remains
one infused with difficult contradictions, in particular between a self-
interested desire to know of their class and ethnic others that is in
tension with a communitarian impulse to reach out and understand
them. The political climate with an emphasis on individualism and
competitiveness promotes a fear of falling (see for example Ehrenreich
1990) and serves to deter any such intentions. There is evidence of
parents displaying a lack of knowledge of how to operationalise their
‘communitarian impulses’. Some parents clearly stated that they wanted
their children to mix with ‘diverse’ groups because they themselves had
never done so and did not know how to do so. At the same time there
is a constant concern of the impact of getting too close and embrac-
ing the Other. As we have argued this represents on the one hand an
appropriating desire for control and advantage, and on the other an
open receptivity that promises greater equality and valuing. The result
is a profound paradox that lies at the heart of liberal white middle-class
identity, in which, as Savage and his colleagues found (2005 p. 43), ‘The
celebration of diversity figures as a means of self-reinforcement, a form
of self-congratulation for avoiding the narrowness of fixed lifestyles.’
In order to understand why even these parents, those who profess
strong egalitarian commitments, still are not able to make equal and
sustaining connections with, in particular, their class others, we have
drawn on Lynn Layton’s (2009) psychosocial account of the failure of
accountability and empathy within American society. Layton argues
that across American society there is a pervasive and profound fail-
ure. Firstly, a failure to take responsibility for things that individuals
should be personally responsible for; secondly a failure in regard to soci-
etal responsibility. There are hints of this in the suggestions of some UK
commentators that the recent public outrage at Members of Parliament’s
greed and self-interest in claiming expenses they were not entitled to
might stem, in some measure, from a denial and dis-identification with
their own self-interested acquisitiveness.
While in some ways these families reveal the long reach of the
neoliberal tentacles, holding even these pro-welfare, left-leaning indi-
viduals largely in its sway, they also provide a glimmer of hope for a
more complex and nuanced moral economy. Their narratives hold in
tension difficult, contradictory strands, but we would argue that there is
 Conclusion 165

also evidence here of a burgeoning challenge to the neoliberal model of

the unhindered, rationally calculated, pursuit of individual self-interest
in free competitive markets. There is a strong recognition that many
people are seriously disadvantaged by this model, though as we have
already argued, there is little by way of articulation of what might be
done about it (although see Hutton 2010).

The janus middle-classes

Our middle-class sample then are those middle-classes looking both

ways; defensively inwards, to varying degrees deploying strategies for
protecting their investments of capital and their children’s futures,
but also looking outwards, towards otherness, tentatively recognising
a value in difference that is more than just tokenistic. It is the second
of these effects where hope for the future might lie. Consistently both
Conservative and Labour Governments have foregrounded the role of
parents in relation to schools in terms of implementing their respec-
tive market policies, by monitoring teachers as well as the children (see
for example Crozier 1998). Also as we have reported here schools liked
(and as could be argued, needed) middle-class parents. Such parents
tend to bring with them forms of social, cultural and economic capital
that help the children achieve within the status quo; thereby boosting
the schools’ league-table indicators. But despite (or perhaps because)
of this, as soon as the middle-classes are involved, in whatever capac-
ity, they do seem to dominate, and through their advantageous position
they acquire more advantage, in this case for their children. This is a
conundrum for policy aiming to address equality of opportunity, and
for critical sociologists like ourselves. But just as the involvement of
the middle-classes can have these negative effects on those less advan-
taged, their power and influence could be put to good use with a more
equitable purpose. There are examples in our findings of a minority of
parents organising and intervening to bring about school change for
the good of all. There are others whose main concern was to improve
a curriculum area such as music or art for their own children’s benefit,
but whose actions in effect benefitted a range of children. Such initia-
tives could be harnessed and more consciously exploited by schools and
those concerned with their character.
Although the focus of our research was not on the schools themselves,
it does appear to us that the schools have to take some responsibility in
trying to balance the equality scales between parents. This responsibility
could be realised through a number of positive action measures, which
166 White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

could include greater subtlety in decisions about which children bene-

fit from the extra resources and opportunities presented by the Gifted
and Talented Scheme. It could also include seeking school governors
from a diverse range of backgrounds and introducing support strategies
to increase familiarity with educational processes and to bolster confi-
dence amongst some parents. Schools could choose to depart from the
now ubiquitous but problematic subject setting that goes on in all sec-
ondary schools for at least the core subjects of Mathematics, English and
Science. Many schools could do more to utilise the skills, knowledge and
other capitals of middle-class parents, as well as the funds of knowledge
of all parents (Moll et al. 1992) in order to make that work for all of the
children. Moreover, teachers are in a position to notice something of the
lack of mixing in their schools, and it is possible that this knowledge
could be used in finding ways to address class antagonisms.
This brings us back to the issues relating to citizenship which we have
alluded to rather than developed throughout the book. We recognise
that whilst we have referred to most of the parents as cosmopoli-
tans in the sense presented by Beck (2000), we have not addressed
the complexity of ‘cosmopolitanism’. As many of the parents indi-
cated, they see themselves as global citizens who embrace difference
and diversity and more importantly desire these life enhancing, con-
temporary experiences for their children. Consequently these parents
travel internationally, taking holidays in exotic places and accumulat-
ing the experiences of the more tangible aspects of diverse cultures
(such as food, music, dress). This type of international cultural capital is
increasingly important – perhaps essential – for the credibility of the cos-
mopolitan. There are though different views on cosmopolitanism and
globalisation and different values attached to both. Processes of glob-
alisation have created a range of opportunities for some people, whilst
reducing opportunities for others, throughout the world. Yet whether
globalisation and cosmopolitanism are seen as a threat to national iden-
tity or an enhancement of self-identity, neither can yet be associated
with liberating oppressed and discriminated peoples. Likewise the cos-
mopolitan citizen tends to be a privileged citizen. Beck describes it as
an ‘idea’, but it is an idea which as we have seen people like to be
associated with and embody. In this sense it becomes part of white
middle-class identity. By contrast the white and black working-class par-
ents and children – those hidden others in our study who attend the
same schools as the white middle-class children – live in ‘global’ com-
munities and engage and interact with the effects of globalisation on
a daily basis. We do not think these experiences endow them with the
 Conclusion 167

same kind of symbolic capital that cosmopolitan citizenry probably does

for the middle-classes.
Finally, conducting this research, and the analysis and writing that
followed, has been a difficult, sometimes painful process. Many of
the research team could be described as white, urban-dwelling first-
generation middle-class. Researching the white middle-classes was often
like holding up a mirror to the self. We were confronted with our own
culpability, failings, conceits and self-deceptions. If, at times, the anal-
ysis appears too harsh a criticism of a social group who, to all intents
and purposes, are making an effort to reach out across social differences
when many are not, that is because we have had to engage simul-
taneously in a process of self-interrogation. In this project they (the
left-wing, pro-welfare white middle-classes) are not ‘the other’, they
are ourselves with all that brings in terms of desires, defendedness and
attempts at dis-identification. We have come to see that the challenge
for us as well as the middle-classes more generally is to create posi-
tive ‘complexity and mutual attachment in cities that tend to difference
rather than alterity, cities in which people withdraw behind the walls of
difference’ (Sennett 2005 p. 121). We too have turned inwards, spurning
activism (although we would justify this by saying we were too busy – as
do some of the sample of parents), and instead investing heavily in our
own families. Our social circles, although not primarily academic ones,
are still largely white and middle-class. Just as much as the participants
in the research, we are stumbling, rather than moving purposefully,
towards a different moral vision, a different way of being and relating.
Conducting this research has illustrated the power and subtlety of edu-
cation’s role in the generation of social inequality, even where actions
are motivated or justified by a desire to contest, oppose or mitigate such
effects. Recognising our own centrality within the research has helped
to reveal the overwhelming need for a different collective, moral vision,
one rooted in reciprocity, care, mutual accountability and empathy.
Appendix 1
Methods and Methodology

The book is based on an analysis of data arising from an interpretative qualitative

30-month study which took place during 2004–2007. The study, entitled Identi-
ties, Educational Choice and the White Urban Middle-Classes, was funded by the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (UK) (grant ref. RES-148-25-0023)
and was part of the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme directed by Pro-
fessor Margaret Wetherell at the Open University (www.identities.org.uk/). The
research took place in three cities in three different geographical areas. These were
London, Riverton in the South West and Norton in the North East of England.
‘Riverton’ and ‘Norton’ are pseudonyms. Strictly speaking, Norton data are not
confined to one city as we involved a few participants from beyond the city lim-
its. We interviewed at least one parent from 125 white middle-class households
who had chosen inner city comprehensive schooling: 181 parent interviews in
total. In most cases we also gathered outline information about the remaining
69 parents. There were: 63 families in London, 30 in Riverton and 32 in Norton.
We aimed to capture the diversity of middle-class identities and the consequences
of these differences for dilemmas of choice. Therefore, those middle-class parents
who ‘work the educational system’ by choosing and getting high-status compre-
hensive schools at the top of league tables (Ball 2003), a majority in both Ball’s
(2003) and Butler with Robson’s (2003) samples, are only a small minority in our
sample. Our main target group were middle-class parents who were seemingly
committed to comprehensive schooling as an educational principle; those who
deliberately eschewed a conventional ‘working the system to their advantage’.
Our main target group were middle-class parents who were seemingly committed
to comprehensive schooling as an educational principle; those who deliberately
eschewed a conventional ‘working the system to their advantage’. At the time
we carried out the fieldwork 80 per cent of the comprehensives the London fam-
ilies sent their children to were performing at or below the national average,
while comparable figures were 83 per cent in Riverton and 50 per cent in Norton.
However, these figures offer a conservative indication because they refer to the
period in which we conducted our interviews, and many of the young people
had left school by this time. Several of the schools had ‘improved’ over recent
years in terms of where they sat on the indices that are conventionally used to
compare them.
We interviewed 68 middle-class young people (39 young women and 29 young
men) from our 125 households – 28 in London, 20 in Norton and 20 in Riverton.
Forty-one of the young people were 18 or over at the time of the interview. They
were interviewed in order to explore their identities and identifications and the
extent to which these are constructed in accord with or against the orientations,
commitments and dispositions of their parents.

168
 Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology 169

We also collected rigorous demographic data. This was important because we

were interested in exploring the extent to which the main sample could be
mapped on to existing models of intra-middle-class differentiation (Savage et al.
1992; Power et al. 2003).
The data analysis drew on a number of conceptual approaches, including: con-
temporary adaptations of Bourdieu’s social theory (Skeggs 1997, 2004; Grenfell
and James 1998; Charlesworth 2000; Savage 2001; Ball 2003; Butler with Robson
2003; Reay et al. 2005); contemporary theorising on the experiential, moral and
ethical dimensions of social class, in particular Andrew Sayer’s (2005) work; and
psycho-social approaches (Hollway and Jefferson 2000) that allow for an analy-
sis of how anxieties are defended against by white middle-class parents investing
in a different notion of ‘the best’ for their child to that of majority middle-class
opinion. We also employed an approach to qualitative data analysis that was
informed by grounded theory (e.g. Strauss and Corbin 1990) and by critique of
grounded theory (e.g. Thomas and James 2006). An important aspect of the data
analysis was that it was for the most part a collective process allowing refinement
through constant comparison of examples. The issues, themes and patterns we
have illustrated in this book are all products of this joint process.
The aims of the study were:

1. To contribute to contemporary theorising on social class that is extending the

scope and analytical framework of social class through a close investigation
of interests and identities.
2. To examine the identity work of white middle-class parents dealing with
dilemmas of ethical choice, and the part played by gender and ethnicity in
such identity work.
3. To investigate the impact on children’s identities and identifications of par-
ents appearing to act against self-interest and how their perspectives relate
back to parents’ self-perceptions.
4. To investigate the extent to which such identity work is related to a wider
sense of identity and identification that transgresses contemporary notions
of the middle-class self through an exploration of the psycho-social basis of
principled choices.
5. To examine ethnographically tensions and affinities between familial and
wider social interests and ideas of community and the common good among
the middle-classes.

We used the Registrar General classification scheme (ONS/Rose and O’Reilly

2000) together with educational credentials (virtually all of our sample have
at least one higher education qualification as detailed in Chapter 2) to identify
households as middle-class. In addition, all members of our parental sample self-
identified as middle-class. In London, access to just over half of our sample came
through parents responding to a Guardian newspaper article about the research
project which specified that its focus was the white middle-classes. In Riverton,
six families contacted the team having seen the national press article. A further 12
responded to an approach via letters from schools, and the remaining 12 came
through snowballing and personal contacts. As in Riverton, six of the Norton
families contacted us after the national press article (plus a local press variant).
170 Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology

The remainder of the Norton sample came through one particular urban com-
prehensive school that sent out letters on our behalf (11), via personal contacts
(7) and through snowballing (8). The families contacted through snowballing
included a high proportion of medical professionals. It is worth mentioning that
our approaches to several head teachers of ‘low-performing’ schools in Riverton
and Norton, seeking their help in sending letters inviting participation, resulted
in them telling us that their schools did not have any middle-class pupils.
We strove to include a number of fathers as well as mothers in our sample
and we also ensured that there was a balance between families with daughters
and those with sons. We wanted to explore the impact of gender on principled
choices. While most interviews were conducted with one parent and this was
most often the mother (64), five were with fathers alone, and 56 were conducted
with both parents together. The children and young people were interviewed on
their own or with a sibling.
We utilised a semi-structured in-depth interview technique, and the majority
of interviews were conducted in the family home. The interviews covered the
following areas:

Parents’ interviews

– their own biography

– educational/career trajectory
– the choice-making process
– their children’s experience of both primary and secondary school
– aspirations for their children
– values and opinions on education, the welfare state and politics

Children’s interviews

– primary and secondary school experience

– the choice-making process
– friendships
– aspirations and values

Ethnographic interviewing practices (Brewer 2000) that allow for a mix of open-
ended questioning and careful prompting and probing enabled us to elicit rich
and reflexive data. Of particular importance were the educational biographies,
not only because of the insights that the past can shed on the present, but
also because they would help us to examine how far narratives of self and fam-
ily accorded with collectivist commitments. Dilemmas of choice and ethical
commitments are difficult, abstract areas to research that are also highly emo-
tive which our methodology was designed to take into account. We followed,
therefore, an adaptation of the biographical interpretative method outlined in
Hollway and Jefferson (2000 p. 53) in order to elicit significant personal meanings
and narratives of identity. The emphasis was thus on understanding participant
meanings (Spradley 1979) but unlike Hollway and Jefferson we did use the ‘why’
question, albeit in a subtle and non-confrontational manner.
Gaining trust and establishing rapport are key elements in the qualitative inter-
view process. The former is an obvious requirement with any type of research,
 Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology 171

but it is particularly important in personal experience research and when dealing

with a topic that is emotive and which involves questions about personal histo-
ries and the revelation of political perspectives and personal values. The efficacy
of this questioning placed great emphasis on us establishing rapport and empa-
thy. According to Fontana and Frey (2000), ‘the researcher must be able to take
the role of the respondents and attempt to see the situation from their viewpoint
rather than superimpose his or her world of academia and preconceptions upon
them’ (p. 655). At the same time it was important for us not to over identify with
them and get drawn in to imposing our own views on to the research and the
respondents.
As we had three research sites, much of the work was carried in three sub-
groupings of the research team. In London, Diane worked with two half-time
research assistants; David in Riverton and Gill in Norton both worked with a
half-time research assistant each. All but one of the team members was white;
all except one were women, though age and positions within universities varied.
Also five of the team were parents: three with grown-up children; one with a child
who was entering secondary school around the start of the project; and one with
primary aged children. Two of the team had mixed-race children. All members of
the research team can be described as middle-class, though with different types
and degrees of class inheritance. Presentation of self in the interview situation is
important and no doubt we each did this slightly differently depending on the
circumstances but also our individual dispositions. Basically however, through
adopting a feminist approach to interviewing and approaching the respondent as
a subject, an individual, rather than an object (Reinharz 1992), we aimed to create
an experience that was conducive to accessing the participants’ stories. As Oakley
(1981) has indicated, ‘There is no intimacy without reciprocity’ (p. 49). With
respect to the parents they mostly seemed to identify with us as middle-class peo-
ple – as people like them – who had empathy with their school choice decisions
and would understand their dilemmas and at times difficulties. We used, perhaps
at times unconsciously, the ‘same’ language and established shared meanings.
We also followed and responded to respondents’ ordering and phrasing (Hollway
and Jefferson 2000) all of which facilitated the development of a trusting and
comfortable relationship. Although accessing this section of middle-class parents
was challenging, once we had made contact with our participants they were very
helpful and accommodating with some people agreeing to be interviewed after a
long day at work. Also in almost all cases they were happy for the interview to be
recorded. It is worth noting that as with other aspects of the research process, we
shared early interview transcripts in team meetings and acted as critical friends
to weigh up the strengths and areas for further development in data collection.
We also devoted team meeting time to refining aspects of the analysis.
Interviewing the children was in some cases characterised by a slightly more
constrained relationship than that we were able to form with parents. However,
as the transcripts testify, the young people were generally very self-confident and
forthcoming. The majority of the interviews took place in the family home and
whilst the parents were not in the room, we made sure that at least one parent
was present nearby in the house. These interviews were also tape-recorded and
transcribed.
All names of people, places and institutions have been anonymised and
disguised where necessary and as much as possible. We use pseudonyms for
172 Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology

everything except for London boroughs and London itself, where this would be
less effective as a strategy.
Subsequently, some of us ‘bumped into’ a number of our participants at con-
ferences where we were presenting our findings from this project and others
contacted us on reading press reports of hearing mention of the research on
media programmes of which there were several. These encounters were not
always easy as some parents felt their intentions had been misrepresented, albeit
unintentionally. Where it was requested or desired we sent them the complete
research report so that they could get a better sense of our findings and contex-
tualise the often-fragmented sound bites represented in the media. For most of
us this kind of reaction from research participants was new, and it speaks of dif-
ferent power relations to those experienced in researching disadvantaged groups.
It gave us further indications of the nature and extent of the kinds of social and
cultural capital the families held and the confidence this inspired them with.
Undertaking personal experience research of this kind comes with significant
responsibilities to the participants, to the research community and also to the
funding body. It is of paramount importance that the data are handled with
respect, ethically and productively. In this project the parents had entrusted
their stories to us. It was our responsibility to achieve something useful from
the research and hopefully make a contribution to positive change in some way
(Crozier 2003). Whilst we utilise the parents’ and young people’s voices drawing
on representative quotations from their transcripts, we do not use a ‘tell it as it
is approach’ (Hollway and Jefferson 2000). Rather we have employed a robust
interpretative approach to our analysis informed by the theoretical frameworks
and the emerging themes grounded in the data set. We analysed the data within
and between our three research teams, both vertically and horizontally within
and across each family, each geographical location and across all three geograph-
ical areas. The purpose was to contextualise emerging issues and themes and to
triangulate the data and test out emerging hypotheses (Strauss and Corbin 1990).
As interpretativists we reject the notion of objectivity and absolute truths. But
through our systematic analyses we have arrived at as rigorous and reliable an
account as we believe possible at this point in time. That is to say we recognise
there could and no doubt will be other interpretations that could be made of our
data, and we recognise the influence of our own perspectives and experiences
upon the analysis. However, the strength of the analysis is evidenced by the pro-
cess of triangulation of data and also the fact that the seven different researchers
engaged critically in this challenging process. Each of us had to defend to each
other our analysis/interpretation of the data. In terms of replicability in the tra-
ditional sense, we would argue that this does not apply to our research given its
uniqueness in terms of the individual perspectives and experiences.
This brings us finally to the issue of generalisability, which is sometimes
raised as a criticism of interpretive research. Notwithstanding our epistemological
position outlined above, we also recognise and address in our analysis the situ-
atedness of the personal within the policy and wider structural context and the
impact of the structural on individual and collective actions. We also agree with
Giddens (1976) that social and subjective action contributes to the reproduction
of structures which in turn enable and constrain individual and collective action.
In our analysis we develop theoretical ideas around white middle-class actions
and behaviours and identity formations. Our participants are not representative
 Appendix 1: Methods and Methodology 173

of all white middle-class families, as we have demonstrated they are an unusual

fraction of the white middle-classes in terms of their school choice practices and
also demonstrate different class-related histories within that subset. Whilst our
data set is quite substantial and located in three very different geographical areas,
it is difficult to claim generalisability of this group of families as a type. Never-
theless, we believe there are concepts that have arisen from our findings that can
probably be attributed in general terms to white middle-class families. One exam-
ple would be our findings in relation to the white middle-class anxiety about the
white working-class Other and the investment in processes which position the
ethnic minorities as a symbolic buffer between themselves and the pathologised
white working-classes.
Appendix 2
Parental Occupations and Sector

The data are shown as far as possible in mother/father pairs. Sector shown as
‘Public’, ‘Private’ or ‘Third’.

Mother’s occupation Sector Father’s occupation Sector

LONDON
University Senior Lecturer Public University Principal Lecturer Public
University Senior Lecturer Public Businessman Private
Novelist Public Banker Private
University Senior Lecturer Private Barrister Private
Senior Civil Servant Public Barrister Private
University Lecturer Public University Lecturer Public
Data Analyst, Research Private Housing Officer Public
Company
Writer/Journalist Private Policy Analyst Private
Consultant Private Banker Private
Dancer/Choreographer Private Actor Private
Teacher Private Trade Union Official Public
Politician Public University Lecturer Public
Teacher Public CSV Organiser & Teacher Third
Primary Teacher Public Director of Special Needs Public
Education
Teacher Public Teacher Public
Under-Fives Worker Public Shop Manager Private
Educational Advisor Public Local Gov Worker Public
Local Gov Officer Public Senior Master Independent Private
School
Further Education Public Small business (translation Private
Lecturer & publishing)
Solicitor for Consumer Public Government Solicitor Public
Council
School Bursar Private Investment Banker Private
Freelance Special Needs Public Architect Private
Teacher
Journalist Public Journalist Private
University Academic/TV Private (not known)
producer

174
 175

School Librarian Public Photographer Private

Freelance Translator Public Retired Accountant Private
TV Producer Private Musician Private
Senior Civil Servant Public Middle Manager Private
Senior Civil Servant Public Charity Manager Third
Teacher Public Local Government Public
Manager
Special Needs Teacher Public (not known)
Journalist Private Media Business Director Public
Nursery School Teacher Public Primary Teacher Public
PA for Media Managing Private Media Private
Director
PhD Student & University Public Transport Planner Public
Researcher
Trade Union Organiser Public Trades Union Accountant Public
Psychotherapist Private Computer Systems Private
Consultant
University Lecturer Public Television Repair Private
Engineer
Further Education Public Solicitor Private
Lecturer
University Researcher Public Self-Employed Web Private
Designer
Book Trade Administrator Private Director of IT, Health Public
Service
University Research Public Deputy Head Teacher Public
Fellow
Housing Association Public Accountant Private
Employee
PA for a political party Public Head of Public Affairs, Public
Trades Union
Sure Start/Home Start Public University Lecturer Public
Co-ordinator
PA for an engineering Private Projects Manager Nat. Third
company charity
University Administrator Public Retired Theatre Manager Private
Librarian Public TV Journalist & Private
Correspondent
Psychotherapist Private Media Executive Public
Director, NGO Public Investment Manager Private
Librarian Public Bank Manager Private
Picture Editor Private Senior Arts Manager Public
Community Public (not known)
Development Worker
Social Worker Public Arts Journalist Private
Project Manager for Social Third Sports Journalist Private
Enterprise
Financial Consultant Private Teacher Public
176

(Continued)

Mother’s occupation Sector Father’s occupation Sector

International Banking Private Fundraising Business Private

Advisor
Charity Worker Third Financial Journalist Private
Clinical psychologist Private Journalist & Magazine Private
Editor
Accountant Local Public Management Consultant Private
Government
Head Teacher (retired) Public Actor Private
Primary
Director of NGO Public Photographer Private
NORTON
Primary Teacher Public General Practitioner Public
University Academic Public Welfare Rights Officer Public
Health Service Manager Public Manager, Electricity Private
Company
Mature Student General Practitioner Public
Manager Local Authority Public Owner of small business Private
Mkt Research Manager in a Public Teacher Public
University
General Practitioner Public Teacher Public
General Practitioner Public Arts Director Public
General Practitioner Public University Academic Public
Former Legal Secretary – Lawyer PRIV Private
not in paid employment
University Academic Public Generalist Advice Worker Public
Not in paid employment Dentist Public
Social Worker Public Manager Gov agency Public
Not in paid employment University Academic Public
Health Worker Public Quant Surveyor Private
Clinical Psychologist Public University Academic Public
Accountant Private Manager Gov agency Public
Nurse/Midwife/Volunteer Third Senior Health Researcher Public
General Practitioner Public Not known
Secondary Teacher Public Secondary Teacher Public
Civil Service Manager Public Manager Local Authority Public
Senior Clinician Public Senior Clinician Public
Speech Therapist Public Civil Engineer Private
Clinical Psychologist Public Clinical Psychologist Public
Secondary Teacher Public Freelance Cameraman Private
Manager Civil Service Public Not known
IT manager, University Public University Researcher Public
University Academic Public General Practitioner Public
General Practitioner Public Bank Worker Private
Arts Administrator Public Arts Director Public
 177

Senior Manager, health Public Nurse Tutor Public

Deputy Head, Primary Public IT Technician Local Public
Authority
RIVERTON
Nurse Public Computing Private
Physiotherapist Public Probation Officer Public
Health Worker Pub/Priv Buildings Officer Public
Teacher (early years) Public Non-professional in NHS Public
Health Worker Public Freelance media Pub/Priv
Teacher Public Teacher Public
Practice Manager GP Public Machine Operator Private
surgery
Care Worker Third Teacher Third
Bookkeeper Private Accountant Private
Middle Manager in gov Public CEO for charity Third
agency
Health Worker Public Teacher Public
Pharmacist Private Financial Consultant Private
IT Manager Private Teacher Public
Health Service Manager Public CEO, educational charity Third
Primary Head Public Landscape Architect Public
SEN specialist Public Not known
University Academic Public University Academic Public
Freelance Artist Private Training Consultant Third
Local Authority (housing) Public University Academic Public
(not known) Television Producer/ Public
Manager
Primary Teacher Public Nurse Public
FE College Schools Public Connexions Manager Public
Liaison Officer
Manager Public University Academic Public
Middle Manager, health Public Not known
service
Education-out-of-school Public Secondary Head Public
Service Manager
Finance Manager Public University Academic Public
Insurance Manager Private Teacher Public
Not working Prof Musician & Teacher Priv/Third
Executive Third Not known
University Marketing Public Area Housing Manager Public
Manager
Appendix 3
The Sample Families in Terms of
ACORN Categories

178
Acorn Category ‘RED’ CATEGORIES ‘ORANGE’ CATEGORIES ‘GREEN’ Unknown
CATEGORIES

1 9 13 14 15 16 6 7 18 19 20 25 21 39 37 38 45 55 56

Norton
N = 32 3 5 7 2 3 4 3 1 4
Percentage 9% 16% 19% 6% 9% 13% 6% 3% 13%
London
N = 63 2 9 2 15 4 10 1 1 11 1 1 1 1 1 3
Percentage 3% 14% 3% 24% 6% 16% 2% 2% 17% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 5%
Riverton
N = 30 1 1 10 2 1 1 1 11 2
Percentage 3% 3% 33% 6% 3% 3% 3% 37% 6%
Totals N = 125 4 8 26 2 17 5 2 1 10 1 5 11 15 6 1 1 1 1 1 7
Percentage 3% 6% 21% 2% 14% 4% 2% 1% 8% 1% 4% 9% 12% 5% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 6%
(rounded up)
Grouped N = 62. (49.6%) N = 51. (40.8%) N = 5. (4%) N = 7. (5.6%)
numbers and
percentages

Note: Acorn Categories as described on the Acorn website: www.caci.co.uk. The categories provide indications of types of housing and demographic
information about the residents.

179
 180
‘RED’ categories
1. Very high income and education qualifications. High knowledge of current affairs and high number of couples with children. This type of postcode
encompasses some of the most affluent people in the United Kingdom. They live in wealthy, high-status suburban and semi-rural neighbourhoods,
particularly in the Home Counties. Most are highly qualified professionals, senior executives and business owners, often in their 40s and 50s.They
tend to live in large detached houses with four or more bedrooms, many of which are owned outright.
9. High income, very high education, very high number of couples with children. Professionals often with older children. Homes are typically
semi-detached.
13. Very high income, very high level education, very high number of couples with children. Well-off professionals and managerial occupations, large
houses and converted flats. Some young singles starting their careers and some students.
14. High income; well-educated; professional and managerial. A mixture of couples, families and singles; more retired people than the national
average. Low number of children. Suburban houses and apartments; prosperous neighbourhood.
15. Very high income, very high level of education and knowledge of current affairs current affairs. Low numbers of couples with children. Affluent
urban professionals. They work in professional and senior managerial occupations. These people live in affluent urban areas, where large attractive
houses have often been converted into flats. Whilst many do own their home, the proportion of rented accommodation is relatively high, where
large attractive houses have often been converted into flats. Most residents are either young singles or couples. There are very few children and
those there are tend to be under five, which suggests that young families move on from these areas.
16. Very high income and education. Low numbers of children. Prosperous professionals and managers. High levels of younger people (25–29). These
young people live in urban areas in purpose built and converted flats. They are very highly qualified, and are making their way up the career
ladder in the professions and managerial roles. Forty per cent of people live alone. There are also high numbers sharing larger properties. They are
typically renting rather than buying, which reflects the more transient nature of these communities.

‘ORANGE’ categories
6. Medium income, very high level education and high numbers of couples with children. People tend to be older with older children. Houses are
large and detached.
7. Medium income. High level of education. Medium number of couples with children. Most households are older couples, although the number of
single pensioners is also relatively high. Residents who do work tend to be in well-paid senior management and professional occupations, or work
in agriculture. These people live in prosperous areas, often where tourism is important and holiday homes are popular. These are affluent people
and they tend to live in detached homes with three or four bedrooms.
18. Young multi-ethnic communities found mainly in London. Medium income and good education. Most are professionals or in managerial jobs.
Most people are between 20 and 30 years old and developing their Category careers. Very few children. Most are in rented accommodation.
However, the area is very diverse and there are those living in Housing Association accommodation and some are unemployed.
19. Well-educated and with incomes well above average. A mixture of private renting and home ownership. Mainly younger people developing their
careers.
20. Medium income. High levels of education. Low number of couples with children. Cosmopolitan professionals; shared accommodation or students.
These are cosmopolitan areas of shared flats and bed-sits.
Households tend to be young single people renting small one or two bedroom flats, which may be purpose built or converted. Around a third
are student households. This is a fast changing environment with a high turnover of occupancy.
21. Medium income. Very high levels of education. Medium number of children. Singles and shared accommodation. Inner London and outer
Metropolitan areas. White collar with high concentration of Minority Ethnic groups. High number of public sector workers.
25. Medium income. High levels of education. Low number of children. Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be white-
collar singles or sharers living in terraces and flats. This type is a mixture of young professionals and students in prosperous provincial towns and
cities.
39. Medium income and education. High number of children. Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be skilled older families
living in terraces.

‘GREEN’ categories
37. Low income; characterised by high numbers of Asian families living in terraced housing and students sharing and first-time buyers. Tendency to
overcrowded accommodation. Low levels of education and high unemployment.
38. Low-income Asian families and other minority ethnic groups. Also a minority of students. Low levels of education qualifications. High proportion
of single (mainly mothers) parents.
45. Low income. Very low level of education qualifications. Medium number of children.
55. Low income. Densely populated characterised by young multi-ethnic population. Purpose built local authority housing estates and housing
association property. Almost a quarter of African Caribbean families in this type of housing and also white low-income families. High numbers of
single people including single pensioners, young people and single parents. A small proportion of students.
56. High percentage of purpose built blocks of flats. Large proportion of young multi-ethnic families. Large numbers of children many of whom live

181
in single-parent households. High unemployment. Large numbers of students.
Notes

3 Habitus as a Sense of Place

1. ACORN is a website (www.caci.co.uk) which provides geodemographic infor-
mation of the United Kingdom’s population. It segments small neighbour-
hoods, postcodes or consumer households into 5 categories, 17 groups and 56
types.
2. In the case of Norton when we accessed schools the only available data were
2004; for Riverton and London the data relate to 2005.
3. For example, in 2004, 90 per cent of pupils at Mountvale Primary achieved the
expected level 4 in English, 89 per cent in maths and 95 per cent in science.

7 Young People and the Urban Comprehensive: Remaking

Cosmopolitan Citizens or Reproducing Hegemonic White
Middle-Class Values?
1. We were unable to access more precise data regarding ethnic minority pupil
intake either from the local authority or from the school itself. These details
referred to here were indicated on the school website in the OFSTED report.

182
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Mentor.
Wood, A. W. (1990) Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Young, I. M. (1997) ‘Asymmetrical reciprocity: On mutual respect, wonder, and
enlarged thought’, Constellations 3 (3): 340–363.
Zizek, S. (2006) The Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Index

ACORN categories, 46, 179–81 Bourdieu, P., 3, 15, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27,
Adams, M., 23, 116 29, 32, 45, 55, 70, 89, 93, 101,
Adkins, L., 106 102, 106, 112, 115, 119, 121, 128,
Aggleton, P., 19 149, 159, 169
Ainscow, M., 68 Bradley, H., 7
Allatt, P., 23 Brandtlinger, E., 1, 5, 129, 161
anxiety and fear, 54, 76, 90, 91, 93, Brewer, J., 170
102–9, 110, 112, 118, 121–2, Bridge, G., 47, 49, 57
132, 135, 139, 148, 154–5, 163 bright/brightness, 33, 34, 91, 103,
Applebaum, B., 6 116–17, 129–31, 135, 137
Apple, M., 2 Brint, S., 17
Archer, M., 70 Brodken, K., 84
Avineri, S., 100 Brown, B., 92
Bruce-Biggs, B., 17
Back, L., 83, 106 Burbules, N., 153
Bagguley, P., 14, 17 Burke, M., 158
Baker, S., 92 Butler, J., 121–2
Ball, S., 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 17, Butler, T., 5, 7, 12, 16–18, 30, 44, 46,
18, 21, 30, 35, 65, 76, 84, 47, 49, 56, 57, 59, 66, 98, 101,
106, 110, 124, 126, 134, 124, 126, 162, 168, 169
140, 150, 155, 161, 162, 163, Byrne, B., 83, 94, 106
168, 169
Bamfield, L., 18 Caldeira, T., 148–9
Baumann, Z., 95 capital, 28, 80, 128, 150, 163, 165,
BBC, 69 166, 167
Beck, U., 3, 99, 124, 166 cultural, 18, 20, 60, 78, 83, 88, 89,
Beedell, P., 37, 71, 81 98, 100, 132, 135, 165, 166, 172
Behreandt, D., 4 multicultural, 8, 82, 88, 93, 94, 95,
Bell, R., 12, 13 98, 99, 100, 152
Ben-Ner, A., 3 social, 75, 88, 98, 100, 132, 165, 172
Bennett, T., 15, 17, 88 Carey, J., 107, 111, 115
Berking, H., 3, 112, 153 Chapman, C., 68
Bernstein, B., 14, 29, 30, 135 Charlesworth, S., 169
Biesta, G., 28 ‘Chavs’, ‘Charvs’, ‘Charvers’, 98, 105,
Binnie, J., 154 133, 140–1
Blanden, J., 2, 3, 64 Chen, Y., 92
Bollas, C., 119 choice
Boltanski, L., 128 to meet specific needs, 39–42
Bondi, L., 146 and policy, 61–5, 69, 79, 102
Bonnett, A., 100 preference and commitment in,
Bottero, W., 14 69–72, 79
Boulton, P., 66 of residential location, 49, 66

197
198 Index

civic commitment and engagement, 6, family residence, 46

9, 46, 72, 75, 85, 87–8, 95, 97, fear, see anxiety and fear
146–9, 155–7, 159, 162 Fontana, A., 171
Clarendon Commission, 19 Forsey, M., 63–4
Cobb, J., 2, 98 Fortier A.-M., 143, 162
Coldron, J., 66 Foster, J., 3
Coleman, J., 94 Francis, B., 138
Collins, R., 134 Frankenberg, R., 83, 96
commitment to comprehensive Fraser, N., 81, 161
schooling, 72–4, 80, 147–8, 151–2 Freeman-Moir, J., 2
common good, the, 4, 6, 95, 98, 100, Freud, S., 117
147, 158 Frey, J., 171
communitarian orientation, 151, 153,
157–8, 164 Gewirtz, S., 65
community, 57–9 Gibbons, M., 88
Connell, R., 2, 17 Giddens, A., 2, 5, 15, 162, 172
Cooper, A., 6 ‘Gifted and Talented’ scheme, 113,
Corbin, J., 169, 172 130–3, 160, 166
Crosland, A., 4, 80 Giroux, H., 83
Crow, G., 3 Goldthorpe, J., 18
Crozier, G., 2, 29, 78, 124, 128, 129, Gouldner, A., 17, 28, 29
147, 165, 172 Grenfell, M., 55, 169
Cucchiara, M., 145 Griffin, C., 117, 140
Curry-Stevens, A., 2 Gunn, S., 12, 13
Curtis, P., 83
habitus, 20, 22, 23, 26–8, 42–3,
70, 83, 92, 101, 104, 106, 111,
De Certeau, M., 50
115, 116, 119, 121, 135
Diment, K., 28
departures from, 39–42
Dobbernack, J., 3
of family, 31
Dowling, R., 11
metropolitan, 44, 56, 60
Du Bois-Raymond, M., 130
reactions to, 31–6
Duncan, J., 13 re-creations of, 36–8
Duncan, N., 13, 136 Hacker, J., 2
Dunleavy, P., 14 Hage, G., 83, 89
Dunn, J., 3 Hall, S., 99
Durkheim, E., 29 Halsey, A. H., 15
Hamnett, C., 5, 7, 66, 101, 126
Edwards, T., 36 Hargreaves, D., 69
Ehrenreich, B., 4, 5 Harker, R., 23, 26
Elliott, A., 119, 149 Harvey, D., 56, 64–5
entrapment in privilege, 100 Harvey, M., 69
Erickson, B., 88 Haylett, C., 93, 99, 115
ethnic diversity, 44, 49, 54, 55, 59, 80, Hey, V., 138
82–5, 87–8, 90, 125, 133, 135, Hillier, J., 42, 45
139, 142, 153 Hill, M., 83
seen as a positive feature of Hoggett, P., 104, 120–1
schooling, 75, 84–7, 89 Hollway, W., 104, 169, 170, 171, 172
Etzioni, A., 147, 151–3, 158 Holt, M., 117, 140
 Index 199

Honneth, A., 161 MacWhirter, I., 4

hooks, b, 83, 97 Mahony, P., 138
Horton, T., 18 Major, J., 13
Horvat, E., 145 Mansell, W., 83
hot knowledge, 75–6 market as an economic principle,
Hoyle, E., 76 63–5
Hughes, C., 112 Marquand, D., 164
Hursh, D., 150 Martin, A., 7
Hutton, W., 4, 148, 164, 165 Martin, J., 78, 83
Marx, K., 100
individualism, 103, 132, 146, 153, Massey, D., 51, 56–7, 59
159, 162, 164 Maxwell, C., 19
Mayer, J., 15
James, D., 22, 28, 37, 55, 71, 81, 97, May, J., 56–7, 59, 60, 89
169 May, S., 26
James, O., 3, 5 McGrath, D., 161
Jefferson, T., 169, 170, 171, 172 Mcleod, J., 1, 2, 103
Jenkins, R., 26 McNay, L., 103–4
Jordan, B., 7, 74, 147, 156, 159 Melucci, A., 7
Justesen, M., 150 middle-class differences
geographical, 16–17
Kalleberg, A., 3 horizontal, 14–15, 29–30
Kern, R., 88 lifestyle, 14–15
Khalenberg, R., 145, 160–1 vertical, 15–16
Knox, P., 13 middle-class segmentation
Kuriloff, P., 161 established middle-class, 29, 102
first-generation middle-class, 28–9,
Lamont, M., 18 46, 102, 139
Lansley, S., 102 second-generation middle-class, 29,
Lareau, A., 1, 78 46, 102
Lasch, C., 3 Miliband, D., 150
Lash, S., 17 Miller, P., 6, 149
Laurie, N., 146 Miller, T., 106
Lawler, S., 122 Mills, C., 28
Layard, R., 3 Milner, M., 2
Layton, L., 102, 104, 111, 115, 117, Milton Friedman, 63
164 Mishel, L., 4
league tables, 7, 8, 9, 39, 52, 67, 70, Moll, L., 166
81, 107, 112, 131, 139, 150, 165 Mongon, D., 68
Lemert, C., 149 Moore, R., 134
Leonardo, Z., 91, 105 moral Darwinism, 3
Levitas, R., 150 Mouffe, C., 6
Ley, D., 57 multicultural capital, see capital
Lipsitz, G., 83, 133
Lockwood, D., 19 Nakayama, T., 83
Lucey, H., 78, 107 Nayak, A., 58, 140
neoliberalism, 5, 64, 79, 101, 146, 148,
MacFarlane, R., 158 149–50, 153, 159, 161–2, 163–4
Machin, S., 3, 64 Noblit, G., 2
200 Index

Oakley, A., 171 Revill, G., 57

Obama, B., 4 Ridge, M., 92
OECD, 63, 65 Robbins, D., 26
Ofsted, 47, 70 Robson, G., 5, 12, 16, 17, 18, 44, 46,
Olssen, M., 64 47, 49, 56, 59, 98, 124, 168, 169
omnivorousness, 88–9, 90, 97 Rodger, J., 122, 150
O’Reilly, K., 169 Roediger, D., 96
organic solidarity, 29 Rooksby, E., 42, 45
Oria, A., 7, 108 Rose, D., 169
Other, the, 8, 82, 83, 86, 90–5, 98–100, Rose, N., 6, 104, 149
102, 105–6, 112–15, 117–23, 127, Rutherford, J., 64
133, 135, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, Ryan, J., 111, 119
153–5, 160, 162, 164, 167, 173
Savage, M., 1, 2, 14, 15, 21, 30,
Page, R., 122 49, 50, 51, 57, 99, 156,
parents 164, 169
educational background of, 24–6, Sayer, A., 2, 4, 27, 70, 87, 96, 97, 112,
129 124, 159, 162, 169
as incomers, 55, 67 school choice
intervention by, 75–9 and gender, 135–8
managerialism, 71, 76 and geography, 52–5
occupations of, 45, 174–7 as provisional, 74–5
political activism amongst, 46 and social diversity, 37–8
political orientation of, 71, 80 school governors, 166
qualifications held by, 25 see also parents, as school governors
as school governors, 46, 75, 115, Scott, A., 2
146, 155–6 Seager, A., 2
Parkin, F., 17, 134, 140 Seed, J., 12
Passeron, J., 29 Sen, A., 63
Pearmain, A., 4 Sennett, R., 2, 7, 98, 167
Perkin, H., 14 Sibley, D., 99, 135
Perry, P., 84, 106 Skeggs, B., 2, 4, 21, 84, 93, 94,
Peterson, R., 88 106, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119,
place, significance of, 56 122, 169
Plank, D., 61–3, 65 Skelton, C., 138
Platt, L., 92 Smith, S., 13
Power, S., 14, 19, 29–30, 35, 169 social class fractions, see middle-class
Prout, A., 124 differences; middle-class
Putnam, R., 57, 76 segmentation
Putterman, L., 3 social diversity and location, 49–50
social mix/mixing, 55–6, 81, 89,
Raisborough, J., 116 94, 119, 125, 133, 145, 151,
Ravaeud, M., 154 160, 162
Razack, S., 90 Southerton, D., 140
Reay, D., 2, 16, 28, 42, 78, 83, 84, specialness of the young person, 74,
89, 105, 113, 119, 122, 126, 154, 98, 129, 130, 143
159, 169 Spradley, J., 170
Regan, R., 63 Stallybrass, P., 107, 122–3
Reinharz, S., 171 Steinmetz, G., 101
 Index 201

Stevenson, N., 149 Walkerdine, V., 78

Strauss, A., 169, 172 Wallace, M., 76
suburbanization, 12–13 Warde, A., 88
Sykes, G., 61–3, 65 Ware, V., 106
Szreter, S., 149 Warren, J., 93
Watt, P., 13, 58
Tabb, W., 64 Webber, R., 7, 160
Taunton Commission, 19–20 Weis, L., 1, 2
Tawney, R., 115 welfare state, 4, 6, 103
Taylor, M., 160 commitment to, 45, 72, 146
Thatcher, M., 63 West, A., 66
Thomas, G., 169 Wetherell, M., 11, 21, 22
Thompson, A., 96 White, A., 107, 122–3
Thompson, E., 13 ‘white trash’, 92, 93, 98
Thompson, J., 28 white working-class, 83, 91, 92–3, 105,
Thrupp, M., 94 122
Tomlinson, S., 19–20, 65, 66, 92 Williams, K., 135
Twine, F., 93 Williams, R., 57
Willis, P., 2
university ambitions, 128–30 Willmott, P., 13
Urry, J., 17 Wolfson, M., 3
Wood, A., 27
Van Galen, J., 2 World Bank, 63
Van Zanten, A., 88, 154
Varlaam, A., 66 Yates, L., 1, 2, 103
Vincent, C., 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, Young, I., 121
76, 78, 106, 155, 156 Young, M., 13
‘vocabulary of association’, 9, 74,
147, 156 Zizek, S., 6, 80