BERA Bites 15

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‘So I suppose they think I’m a failure’: How schools (unwittingly) marginalise white working-class families

EMMA SIMPSON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

This blog post 1 relates to a qualitative research project focused on the engagement and achievement of white working-class students carried out in three comprehensive secondary schools in an inner London borough and presented at the annual BERA conference in September 2023. 2 For further details, see Simpson (2024 and 2025). This research found that the pressure schools are under to secure exam results, together with chronic funding cuts, have led to a privileging of academic attainment which implicitly devalues working-class culture and marginalises some working-class students and their families. I am not saying that working-class students should not be enabled to pursue academic pathways; just that the current system devalues non-academic pathways which makes it more difficult for students (from all backgrounds) who are not academic to feel that school is working in their best interests. ‘The current system devalues non-academic pathways which makes it more difficult for students (from all backgrounds) who

As a member of staff from a focus group in this research put it: ‘If you’re not academic, what’s in it for you? You get a certificate for looking smart every day, that’s what’s valued – do you wear the correct uniform and are you academic. We need something more.’ In discourses about white working-class underachievement, lack of aspiration is held up as a key barrier (Adams, 2018). Yet many students I spoke to had clear aspirations, as typified by this student: ‘I know what I wanna be, an electrician.’ However, when asked if the school and the student’s current studies were supporting this goal, she responded: ‘I haven’t really spoke about it to the school.’ It is not a career pathway the school wants to hear about, or the curriculum supports. When academia is presented as the only form of success, other strengths and aspirations are understood as ‘less than’. The title quotation was an aside made by a parent during a senior leader talk which equated success in life to academic success. The parent’s inference was reasonable. Feeling implicitly judged as a ‘failure’ is not conducive to parental or student engagement and affects how students feel about themselves as learners. Many of the white working-class students in this study had a learner identity made fragile by their experiences of school which manifested as difficulties with concentration, resilience and confidence. The following were found to be protective factors that strengthen learner identity:

are not academic to feel that school is working in their best interests.’

1 Original blog post, published 13 March 2024: https://www. bera.ac.uk/blog/so-i-suppose-they-think-im-a-failure-how- schools-unwittingly-marginalise-white-working-class-families 2 https://www.bera.ac.uk/conference/bera-conference-2023

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