Educational Binds of Poverty

The lives of school children

Ceri Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317448396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Shortlisted for BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed's second Ethnography Awards in partnership with the British Sociological Association!

Educational Binds of Poverty tackles the assumptions made by many recent social and educational policy initiatives suggesting that the best way to improve educational prospects of children in poverty is through an increased emphasis upon a culture of control, discipline, regulation and accountability. In this book, Ceri Brown presents these assumptions against a review of the research literature and an original ethnographic longitudinal study into the lives of children in poverty, in order to highlight the gap between policy discourses and the lived experiences of children themselves.

Through the theoretical concept of a set of 'binds' against educational success, the book explores four key areas that children in poverty have to navigate if they are to be successful in school. These are:

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• material deprivation

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• the cultural contexts of school, home and the community

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• friendship and social capital

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• the effects of student mobility through atypical school changes.

In seeking to characterise and explain what life is like for young school children, this book questions why policy makers have a radically different frame of reference in purporting to understand how their policies will change the behaviour of those living in poverty. This leads onto a consideration of what lessons may be learned in order to contribute towards a more appropriate policy agenda that attends to the multiple binds that children in poverty have to negotiate.

Chapter 1
Underachievement of children in poverty

Scoping the policy context

Introduction

This book is about the ‘culture wars’ between policy makers and children in poverty. It critically examines the cultural assumptions made by policy makers about the behaviour of students in poverty, and contrasts it with their everyday lives: their cultures of friendship and orientations to schooling. In showing how radically different these two accounts are, the book raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of education policy making. In turn this highlights the issue of the limits and possibilities of policy making. Are there ways in which the insights afforded by studies of youth in poverty can be addressed by policy makers?

The assumptions made by policy makers about those in poverty, and in particular those made in relation to working-class schooling, have changed significantly with the advent of the Coalition government. One way of understanding this change is through the policy framework developed by Ruth Levitas (2005) concerning approaches to poverty. She delineates three perspectives, which she discusses in relation to New Labour. This is a good point from which to start because it enables a discussion of the continuities and discontinuities between New Labour and the Coalition government.

Levitas’s first approach is that of RED which stands for redistribution, in which poverty and social exclusion were seen as part of a wider pattern of inequality. In the 1990s, she argued that the idea of policies based on redistribution was joined by two further approaches: a social integrationist discourse (SID) and a moral underclass discourse (MUD). SID understood the key to social integration through labour market participation and it was this approach that dominated under New Labour – so much so that Sure Start for preschoolers was seen as a means of intervention that would eventuate in favourable (paid) labour market outcomes. MUD, in contrast, viewed the socially excluded as morally distinct. This provides a cultural analysis of poverty in terms of moral failings, which sees the way forward in terms of making the poor morally and motivationally ‘fit’ for the labour market. This approach also penetrated New Labour social policy.

What we see in the discourse of the Coalition government is a greater emphasis on MUD but with elements of New Labour’s SID approach; this is especially so in relation to education and its links to the labour market. The Coalition has retained many of the mechanisms of control, which were intended to raise educational achievement under New Labour. The emphasis on testing and the raising of standards of performance through Ofsted inspections have been incorporated into Coalition policy, while there has been some emphasis on school and professional autonomy with respect to Academies and Free Schools. Nevertheless, these apparently more ‘teacher friendly’ policies have to be set against the MUD policies designed to regulate and control working-class behaviour within school, the family and community. However, as with New Labour, the aim of schooling is to prepare young people for the labour market. The former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has said that Andreas Schleicher, the Head of Indicators and Analysis for the OECD, which oversees and publishes the results of PISA tests, is ‘the most important man in English education’.¹ This is because Gove sees a more or less direct connection between results in these tests and England’s economic competitiveness.

What follows is an account of how policy discourses concerning working-class children and their families have shifted in the change from New Labour to the current Coalition government. This shift reflects an increasing blame culture targeted towards those in poverty and the associated need to control, discipline and punish those who don’t comply with government policies. The implications of this approach for policy making are then outlined in relation to the current government’s social and educational policy. The strategy underpinning this rhetoric and practice is then discussed.

Policy discourses on underperformance

In his speech to the North of England Education Conference (NEEC, 6 January 2012), the then Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, identified the first of three overarching goals guiding current government policy in educational reform: ‘to close the attainment gap between those from poorer and wealthier backgrounds’.² This is not a new policy interest. Indeed the issue of pupil performance dates back to the 1970s and ’80s where growing concern led a number of key educationalists towards advocating major changes to educational policy. By the mid-1990s the situation had escalated whereby large-scale change aimed at improving standards of achievement was on the agenda, taking the form of what was termed ‘performance based reform’ (Hopkins 2009). As expressed by David Hopkins, Chief Adviser on School Standards at what was then the Department for Education and Skills (2002–2005), it aimed ‘to set targets for performance for schools and then hold schools responsible for meeting them’ (202). This strategy of increased testing and school accountability has been termed by Lauder, Brown, Dillabough and Halsey (2006) as the ‘state theory of learning’, or more precisely:

A highly regulated system in which performance can be measured quantitatively by test results. The attendant theory of motivation is that teachers and pupils will be driven to improve against the state determined performance targets.

(Lauder 2009: 200)

Hopkins’ claim is that under the New Labour government agenda, this performative based strategy reaped some early gains, in the form of a leap in key stage two performance³ nationally, between 1998 and 2004. He attributed this success in large part to the National Literacy and National Numeracy Strategies, and to a lesser degree to the ‘high challenge, high support’ policy framework by which ‘under-performing’ schools came under very close government scrutiny; this often led to devolved leadership under the auspices of local education authorities, invariably led by ‘specialist’ core curriculum advisors. However, the claim to success is debatable, as this book will show. Torrance (2009) poses the general question of whether increased performance in national standardized tests is a genuine reflection of a more comprehensive student learning experience, or conversely, a more selective and targeted form of teaching because, as he notes: ‘Put desired objectives into testing programmes and teachers will teach those desired objectives’ (Torrance 2009: 218).

While Hopkins and Torrance may debate the success of an initial increase in test performance, it is clear that Hopkins (2009) now has doubts about the continued viability of this strategy. Rather he sees that it is time to move beyond centrally prescribed educational reform to a strategy that permeates the hearts and minds of those most closely involved with the daily teaching and learning of students. And to do this the balance must move from one wholly weighted towards prescription and accountability to one weighted towards school-level autonomy and control. The key here, and one that Hopkins pays little attention to, is the question of capturing the hearts and minds of learners, in particular those who come from backgrounds of poverty. As we shall see, to capture their hearts is not easy.

In having moved from a context of a New Labour government to that of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, the question here is: to what extent, if at all, has the ‘state theory of learning’ ethos moved on in adapting to in the contemporary social and cultural context of the second decade in the twenty-first century? How is the achievement gap between children from the wealthiest and poorest social backgrounds in England to be closed? In the same 2012 NEEC speech, Gibb cites recent international evidence in order to signal the high profile of this issue:

A PISA study found that England has one of the largest gaps in the world between high and low performing pupils, and a strong relationship between social background and performance… A recent report from the OECD also showed that deprived pupils in this country perform significantly less well than deprived pupils in most OECD countries – putting us 39th out of 65 countries.⁴

These are striking figures, yet given the history of attempts to improve education for those in poverty without addressing the fundamental issue of child poverty, the question remains whether educational change can compensate for economic and social inequality. The broad brush of policy is clear: that there will be changes in the structure of education, with increasing numbers of schools leaving local authority control and becoming academies, with a small group of ‘free’ schools being established by parent and community initiatives concerned with loosening the control over schools, from local authority influence. Furthermore, in the case of ‘free’ schools, parents can exert greater autonomy through a more direct role in curriculum and pedagogy. These initiatives are nominally about providing greater professional and parental freedom, and the principles of teacher professional autonomy are articulated in the education White Paper, The Importance of Teaching (DfE 2010).

Educational reform: In whose interests?

Now formalized in the Education Act 2011, the legislative proposals in the School’s White Paper, The Importance of Teaching (DfE 2010), represented the Coalition government’s position on whole-system educational reform. The paper is organized around three core principles that drive government policy. The first is to raise the competitiveness of the British education and economic system; the second is to increase the quality of teachers and teachers’ autonomy, and finally, to raise the achievement of all children, including those who experience poverty. What is so significant about the White Paper (2010) is that after a section on teaching and leadership the next section is devoted to behaviour. It is quite clear from its positioning that the Coalition government sees poor behaviour in school as holding back national educational improvement. Much of this section concerns strengthening the hand of schools in imposing discipline on students.

That this government should identify disruptive behaviour as a key issue in education is part of its wider narrative of what the Prime Minister describes as ‘broken Britain’. The response to this perceived national decline is authoritarian, identifying those in poverty as potentially the most disruptive influence. To see why this is, we need to provide a background as to the thinking behind such a view.

MUD and the blame culture

In discussing the notion of ‘the poor’ as part of an underclass which can be distinguished from the working class, Bauman (1998) has argued that the ‘underclass’ is not a class at all, given its reference to a social strata positioned outside of the labour market (and therefore the means of production), crucially lacking the possibility of readmission, and above all being ‘beyond redemption’ (Bauman 1998: 66). While underclass discourses have been traced back to the late nineteenth century (Welshman 2006), the twenty-first century revision of the term has been critiqued for its reduction in the causes of poverty to ‘the aggregate product of wrong choices’ (Bauman 1998: 71) and, ‘as a matter of voluntarily adopted lifestyles… unconditioned by economic structure’ (Westergaard 1995: 117). In order to contextualize the current Coalition government’s blame culture towards those in poverty, it is helpful to consider the evolution of the MUD under New Labour. Both governments can be seen to share a common approach to the social regulation of students from backgrounds of poverty, seeing their underperformance as part of the wider social and economic behaviour of their families and communities.

New Labour’s approach to the blame game

A comprehensive account of the state’s approach to young people in poverty is given by White and Cunneen (2006). Their argument concerns the role played by the state apparatus in conceptualizing vulnerable groups of young people as ‘problematic’ populations (17). This rests on the distinction reinforced by state welfare and law enforcement policies, between what they call the ‘virtuous poor’ and the ‘vicious poor’. The former were seen as aspiring towards self-improvement within the parameters of the law, and therefore comprised the deserving recipients of state welfare provision, what in today’s political rhetoric are called ‘working families’; while the latter were seen as lacking the work ethic. The response is to impose ‘varying forms of mutual obligation on the poor – below poverty line benefits and inadequate services in return for work search obligations and imposition of training and employment programme’ (White and Cunneen 2006: 22). The implication being that those who uphold their state welfare obligations should be capable of securing employment, whereas those who do not achieve employment are ultimately failing in their contract with the state. Underpinning such a distinction is the assumption that marginalized youth groups represent a form of ‘moral category’, therefore their status as ‘vicious poor’ is on account of deviant and harmful lifestyle choices. Such discourses are aligned with theories on youth culture emphasizing individual agency, which simply overlook the effects of econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Underachievement of children in poverty: Scoping the policy context
• 2 The educational binds of poverty
• 3 Clive: School life following relocation, in a single-parent family
• 4 Liza: School life following family break-up and relocation with father
• 5 Megan: School life as a highly mobile Irish Traveller
• 6 Codie: School life after community relocation due to unaffordable housing
• 7 Helen: School life following school change due to bullying
• 8 Robin: School life with a hearing impediment and relocation due to paternal redundancy
• 9 Unpicking the binds: Learning (in) lessons from those that don’t
• Index