‘He was a bit of a delicate thing’: white middle‐class boys, gender, school choice and parental anxiety

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of gender on white middle‐class parents’ anxiety about choosing inner‐city comprehensives and their children’s subsequent experiences within school, particularly in relation to social mixing. Drawing on interview data from an ESRC funded study of white middle‐class parents whose children attend inner‐city comprehensives, we find that parents have higher levels of anxiety about their choice for boys than for girls, expressly due to fears about their sons’ ability to cope and maintain social reproduction in socially and ethnically mixed environments. These parents construct white middle‐class boys as ‘sensitive’ and the inner‐city school as the source of a problematic masculinity that is both threatening and antagonistic to academic success. These classed and racialised anxieties increase the pressure on boys and we find that boys appear to mix less freely than girls. Parental focus on boys also obscures the problems that girls face.

Keywords:

• masculinities
• social class
• school choice

Notes

1. The identities of the cities are not divulged, in order to protect the identity of the schools in these cities.

2. White in this case includes US, European as well as White British.

3. One Black African father and one Black Caribbean.

4. The term public school refers to elite fee‐paying schools in the UK.

5. The terms ‘setting’ and ‘sets’ refer to the system of putting pupils of similar perceived ability together for certain lessons. The top set is the class with the highest perceived ability in a particular year.