Multicultural Mixing or Middle-class Reproduction? The White Middle Classes in London Comprehensive Schools

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with White middle-class families who choose to send their children to London comprehensive schools, this paper focuses on the construction of Whiteness and middle classness as privileged identities. The paper explores the contradiction between parents’ desire for multiethnic ‘mixed’ environments for their children's schooling and their fear and ambivalence about their children being ‘out of place’ in these contexts. It examines how various practices and processes set these children apart and result in a reification of Whiteness and middle classness as normative. The paper concludes that comprehensive schooling can do little to dismantle privilege in a wider system of structural inequality.

Acknowledgements

This paper is drawn from an ESRC research project, entitled Identities, Educational Choice and the White Urban Middle Classes (ESRC Award no. RS-148-25-0023) led by Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James with Phoebe Beedell and Fiona Jamieson in addition to the authors of this paper. The authors would like to thank this research team for their invaluable support in writing this paper. They would also like to thank Peter Jackson, Heather Mendick, Caroline Nagel and Peter Hopkins for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

Comprehensive schools in Britain are the result of the Education Act of 1976, which abolished the country's tripartite educational system of selective ‘grammar schools’, vocational ‘technical’ schools and ‘modern’ schools. While grammar schools had at one time been promoted as a way for non-élite children to gain access to universities, by the 1960s, it was evident that these schools were mainly the preserve of the affluent middle classes. Secondary moderns, meanwhile, offered their mainly working-class pupils little opportunity to pursue higher education. Comprehensive schools were intended to mix together students of differing abilities and backgrounds, and to give working-class children the same opportunities and advantages offered to their middle-class counterparts.

See the Commission on Integration and Cohesion at http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1501520; accessed 23 May 2007.

The names of the cities are withheld to protect the anonymity of schools in these cities.

A note on positionalities: the first author is from a White British background, but has grown up living in the Middle East as well as the UK. She has lived in London for 4 years and currently has no children. She would consider herself middle-class but was the first in her immediate family to go to university, and is interested in her family's working-class roots. The second author is from a Black British background and has grown up in London. She attended a comprehensive school in south London and has no children. She would consider herself middle-class by profession and education, although she grew up in a council estate in the inner-city.

Mothers, fathers and their offspring were, on the whole, interviewed individually, but in a few cases both parents were interviewed together.

The majority of families were intact, two-parent families, although a large proportion were unmarried. Only 10 per cent of the sample were single-parent families, in a city where the average number of lone-parent households is 30–50 per cent.

The criteria were: parents identifying as White and middle class, with at least one of their children attending or having recently attended a London comprehensive school. We further refined the sample to prioritise inner London schools (but have a few in outer London boroughs); community comprehensives over church (voluntary aided/voluntary controlled) schools; and those schools achieving ‘below average’ in government performance tables, over those achieving ‘above average’.

In the UK in 2001, the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) replaced Social Class classification based on occupation (SC, formerly Registrar General's Social Class) and Socioeconomic Groups (SEG). Class 1 is managerial and professional occupations and class 2 is intermediate occupations (see http://www.ons.gov.uk/about-statistics/classifications/current/ns-sec/index.html).

One of the young people interviewed was 27 years old, but we were keen to include her in the study as she was one of the only ‘children’ in our sample of mixed heritage.

The national average is currently 56 per cent of pupils achieving at least 5 GCSEs grade A–C.

The national average of children receiving free school meals is currently 13.4 per cent in secondary schools (see DCSF Schools Census, 2009).

Percentages and figures used in this paper pertaining to the composition of schools have been obtained from DfES on-line statistics. Where possible the figures stated are for the time when the child first entered the school, or 2001 (the earliest records). More detailed breakdown of ethnic and FSM composition of the schools is obtained from DfES (2006), a London Challenge document which provides detailed information on London schools.

All names of individuals and schools are pseudonyms.

Young people's articulations of difference and ‘otherness’ are discussed in more detail in other papers (see Hollingworth and Williams, 2009; and Hollingworth et al., forthcoming.)

See Hollingworth et al. (forthcoming) for more detail on the tensions and exclusions in relation to an academically successful identity.

Many parents and children—more so in the other two provincial cities in this study—refer to undesirable children as ‘chavs’ or ‘charvs’. Several authors have written about ‘chav’ as a new language of social class ‘othering’ (Hayward and Yar, 2006; Nayak, 2006). See Crozier et al., 2008, and Hollingworth and Williams, 2009, for a discussion of this in relation to our data.

David Gillborn (2005) would even go as far as to say that current UK education policy is an act of White supremacy.