Class, Culture And Control: the Transformation Of Educational Work In A Gentrifying Primary School

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that white middle-class families’ engagement with urban schools in gentrifying localities is often characterised by strategies of dominance and control, which support claims of belonging and identity, as well as securing educational advantage for their children. This is referred as ‘class colonisation’ or ‘school gentrification’. However, there has been a neglect of educators’ perspectives and responses to urban social change and middle-class parental practices. In this paper, I offer an institutionally-focused analysis of class colonisation as a feature of educators’ working lives. I argue that class colonisation produces organisational ‘turmoil’ through parental practices and interactions which unsettle staff’s social and cultural control over key aspects of their work situation and institutional boundary maintenance. This turmoil is experienced as disruptive of the social order, generating staff cynicism, conflict, ambivalence, and alienation. I draw on ethnographic data with teachers and teaching assistants from a gentrifying inner-London primary school to empirically specify these arguments. Theoretically, this paper integrates elements of Bourdieu and micro-sociology, to foreground how agents use their unequal resources to negotiate their interpersonal institutional realities, and in the process, re-produce classed and racialised boundaries and relations within the changing contexts of urban education.

KEYWORDS:

• School gentrification
• class colonisation
• urban education
• white middle-class parents
• educational staff
• urban sociology
• bourdieu

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the schools and participants in the original study. I am also grateful to Meg Maguire, Charlotte Chadderton, Alan Cribb, Tony Green, Heather Mendick, and Katherine Hodkinson for their feedback and support during the various stages of the writing process. I would also like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Northwick and Plumtree are pseudonyms.

2. This framework is discussed more fully elsewhere (Mansaray, A, 2018).

3. Northwick and Plumtree are pseudonyms.

4. This resonates with the socio-demographics of the middle-class parent sample which included: four journalists working for national newspapers, four solicitors, a press photographer, a music promoter, a writer, a medical research scientist, a painter, and four education professionals. The majority were educated to degree level and above with origins in the south-east of England.

5. Geo-demographic data for Northwick indicates that residents were over five times more likely than the national average to be readers of The Guardian – widely regarded as the voice of the liberal intelligentsia. The neighbourhood is also staunchly Labour voting.

6. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is the statutory education inspection body for the UK.

7. Most of these activities were funded or subsidised by fund-raising by the PTO.

Additional information

Funding

The original empirical work reported in this study was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant PTA- 030-2003-00794

Notes on contributors

Ayo Mansaray

Ayo Mansaray is a Lecturer in the Sociology of Education and Policy in the School of Education, Communication & Society, King’s College London. He is a sociologist of education whose research explores how urban social change inflects institutional identities and processes.