The deployment of social capital theory in educational policy and provision: the case of Education Action Zones in England

Abstract

Heavily influenced by Putnam's particular variant of social capital theory, the New Labour government in the UK has introduced several initiatives designed to raise educational achievement by building the social capital of families identified as socially excluded. One such initiative was the Education Action Zones (EAZ) policy. Whilst this policy has recently been eclipsed by other initiatives designed to enhance education in areas of disadvantage, many of the social capital‐building components of EAZs have now become relatively widespread in schools in disadvantaged areas. In this article the authors use qualitative data from a study of EAZs to explore how parents experience initiatives designed to build their social capital and to examine the interactions between parents' values and the values implicit in these initiatives. In doing so, they identify and elucidate some key limitations of current attempts to operationalise social capital theory. The analysis offered in the article thus has significant implications for policy and policy scholarship. In particular, it draws attention to the need for policy makers and practitioners concerned with challenging social exclusion to pay closer attention to the real, as opposed to imagined, local sociocultural environments within which policies are implemented and to the voices, choices and values of the people these policies are designed to help. In so doing, the article also underlines the importance of policy analysts attending to these same complexities.

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank Alan Cribb and Carol Vincent for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. A ‘Google’ search on ‘social capital’ reveals the frequency of the use of the concept across UK government departments and agencies. The significance of the influence of the concept on New Labour policy making generally is underlined by Szreter (1999), who has gone as far as to suggest that ‘social capital could come to be seen as being as important as the Keynesian revolution, in providing an alternative theoretical and practical guide to the economy’.

2. As one of the anonymous referees has correctly reminded us, a research focus on the ‘weaker’ discourse of social capital can run the risk of contributing to the displacement of ‘stronger’ discourses of ‘poverty’ and ‘oppression’, which are better placed to explain and illuminate inequality of attainment in education. However, given the extent of the influence of the discourse of social capital on contemporary social policy, we contend that it is vital to subject this phenomenon to rigorous empirical and theoretical scrutiny.

3. The study, Paving a ‘third way’: a policy trajectory analysis of Education Action Zones, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Ref: R000238046) (see Power et al., 2002).

4. Later in the article we draw on Bourdieu's conception of social capital in our discussion of the limitations of the less complex, prescriptive versions manifest in New Labour policy and practice.

5. See also David Blunkett's speech to the Ash Institute (Blunkett, 2004), which cites Putnam's work.

6. As we noted at the start of this article, the empirical basis of claims about the relationship between social capital and educational achievement has been contested. We do not have space here to engage with these debates. Rather, we are interested in what can be learnt about the deployment of social capital theory by looking at how the ideas have been operationalised by educational practitioners and experienced by parents in the context of one particular policy.

7. This section draws on the analysis presented in Power and Gewirtz (2001).

8. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article to preserve the anonymity of zones, schools and participants in the research.

9. This lack of involvement was also reflected in the process of constructing the bids. In the case of first round zones, this can, at least in part, be explained by the tight deadlines imposed by the DfES for bid submission.

10. We are aware that our interviews with these parents have given us only one side of the story and that the teachers and other professionals involved in these cases may well have given different or conflicting versions of the same events. However, this does not detract from the point we are making here, that such parents perceived a difficulty in getting their voices heard by the professionals they were dealing with.