‘Off The Model’: resistant spaces, school disaffection and ‘aspiration’ in a former coal-mining community

Abstract

Discussions of ‘aspiration’ influencing contemporary education policy and practice are framed almost exclusively in terms of individual – or, at most, familial – ambitions towards economic prosperity. The failure to achieve ‘social mobility’ in British society is often posed as being due to the ‘low aspirations’ of working class children, particularly in formerly heavily industrialised areas. In a classic case of ‘blaming the victim’ the social exclusion that undoubtedly exists in such areas is blamed on those who suffer it. Things would be different, the argument goes, if only people aspired to ‘get on’. This paper looks at material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of some former coal-mining communities in the north of England which are often popularly characterised as insular and lacking in ambition. In contrast to this stereotype, however, the data suggests that working class teenagers growing up in the impoverished and abandoned geography of Victorian colliery model villages, rather than suffering a failure of aspiration, often angrily and powerfully aspire – but for something contrary to the dominant model. Reviewing the ethnographic data in the light of a sociological and historical literature that attests to the exceptional nature of coal-mining communities, I suggest that such exceptionality impacts on young people's dispositions towards the educational project as a whole through a complex process of cultural transmission. A historically and locally situated notion of counter aspiration – that I call, here, resistant aspiration – is evident. I propose, in conclusion, that an acknowledgement of such resistant aspiration might help understand the widespread ‘school disaffection’ of working class youngsters not only in these former coal-mining communities but also in other post-industrial settings – nationally and internationally – that are similarly characterised by contested histories.

Keywords:

• coalfield communities; ethnography; intergenerational; disaffection; resistant aspiration

Notes

Names of all people and all places at a sub-county level have been changed. I couldn't resist borrowing ‘Beldover’ from D.H. Lawrence's oeuvre, some parts of which are set in the research locality .

‘The Model’ refers literally to the three Victorian colliery model villages and the other former colliery housing. It also refers, as I explain in the text, to a powerfully affective space of injury, betrayal, longing, belonging and dreaming.

Upwards of a 100 men were killed at a colliery near Beldover in the 1930s and around 20 at the same colliery at a later date. Scores of men were also killed in an underground disaster at ‘Cragwell’ Colliery in the period after World War 2. The vagueness of statistics here is deliberate and with a view to protecting identities of participants.

The question of gender is critically important in the ethnography as a whole. I presented a paper –‘Not takin’ no shit'. Disaffected masculinities and aspects of gender, resistance, community and schooling in a former UK coal-mining area – at the 2009 Oxford Ethnography Conference, St Hilda's College, Oxford and a linked paper – ‘On refusing to be ‘plastic’: Educational disaffection and ‘aspiration’ as experienced by women and girls in a former UK coal-mining area – at the 2010 Oxford Ethnography Conference at New College, Oxford.

Beldover has a village-wide curfew preventing young people being on the street in numbers after 9 pm. Other villages have spaces of controlled movement. Interestingly, the geography of curfew and surveillance very neatly reflects the ghosted social geography of the coal-mining industry and its conflicts, particularly the strike of 1984–1985.

To be developed as a book length study in the Ethnography of Education series.

That is to say, it looks at issues affecting young people as they emerge from the accounts of both young people and the adults that work and/or live with them. Where quotations are given, the status of contributors will be made clear as either ‘adult’ or ‘young person’.

Entry to Employment, commonly known as ‘E2E’, is a programme for those NEET (not in employment, education or training) 16–18 year olds aiming for an apprenticeship study programme but ‘not yet ready’. Go 4 it! is a pre-E2E programme. I also studied the associated, 14–16, Go 4 it! programme aimed at those still in school but ‘at risk of exclusion.

The ‘Let's move to…’ column in The Guardian of 20 March, 2010, focussed on ‘Let's move to… Sherwood Forest and the Dukeries, and live the legend’ It noted ‘a hidden world of villages and market towns as picturesque as you'll find, and countryside rolling with gorges and copses’. Unfortunately, it registered ‘The case against’, namely ‘the coal industry which has left swathes of countryside pretty bleak looking’.

The level of industry related illness and subsequent unavailability for employment is high enough in the northern part of Derbyshire – a county now without a single mineworker – to occupy three full-time National Union of Mineworkers officers in pursuing injury compensation claims.

All statistics referred to in this section are derived either from the 2001 census or are publically available from Derbyshire County Council's website.

Discussion with Stacey, youth worker, Coalbrook.

Coalbrook is an example. A major development, World of Leisure – funded significantly by regeneration money – occupies a site on the old colliery area in the heart of Coalbrook model village and employs a workforce the majority of which is made up of East European economic migrants.

Frank Lowe, adult, former coal miner now community tutor, Coalbrook.

Liam McCain, adult, ‘fathers worker’.

Christine Wolf, adult, education manager, Coalbrook.

Such comments are completely commonplace, being a discourse of derision in their own right.

See Rebecca Solnit's ‘What apocalypse are you nostalgic for? in Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2010. That Solnit – a celebrated, progressive public intellectual – might so easily forget to mention the notoriously exploitative conditions of coal extraction, is remarkable.

I am deliberately echoing bell hooks' (1990) exhortation in Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness which runs thus: ‘Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space.’

I am drawing on Byrne's account (Byrne 1999). Byrne distinguishes between various ‘solidarisms’, both ‘collectivist’ and ‘communitarian’. Some viewpoints regard market capitalism as reformable, others do not.

Beldover's ‘lost’ banner shows the pit being handed over – by a handshake – from the coal owners to the workers on vesting day, 1 January, 1947, when the National Coal Board was established. The motto under the scroll ‘National Union of Mineworkers, Beldover Branch’ is ‘Our heritage’. I am indebted to Nottinghamshire NUM and their Retired Members Section for searching for an image of the banner and to the former secretary of ‘Beldover’ branch of the NUM, for finally providing me with one. Beldover's modern NUM banner shows the arrest of Arthur Scargill at the Orgreave mass picket during the 1984–1985 strike. These two contrasting images represent the uneasy coincidence of plaint and militancy in coalfield iconography.

Gary Charlesworth, then the NUM Branch Secretary at Coalbrook pit, describes the period: ‘It were terrible … what you'd got, you'd got people goin’ to work from out o'village and then you got [long pause] people breakin' their windows, painting black crosses on their doors … all this and that. They [the police] were marchin'‘em in [to work] from village an’ all. Oh, aye, Model Village, aye. They were walkin ‘em [working miners] down, youth. Aye, used to get more abuse in their families an’ all. It were just, well, horrendous'. Gary also described the storming of Coalbrook police station and the burning of ‘scab’ buses in Coalbrook during the strike, the latter of which led to custodial sentences for strikers.

The term used by Neville, a former miner from Cragwell. He described Cragwell ‘as occupied for a whole year by the Metropolitan police’ during 1984–1985.

Karen, at the time of interview a learning support assistant with young people, now a probation worker. Interviewed in Coalbrook.

ASBO Jonnyo, young person, interviewed in Coalbrook.

Leanne, young person, Coalbrook.

Cocker, young person, conversation in Beldover Community House.

Dave, young person, interviewed in Coalbrook.

Names used by young people to describe their home villages.

See Bright (2010c) where I review some key concepts from Paulo Virno's work which looks at ‘exodus’ and ‘defection’ as forms of political refusal. Virno uses Aristotle's distinction between ‘incontinence’ and ‘intemperance’ to drive a wedge between apolitical and politically potent refusal.

The past. This usage seems to be unique to Cocker.

The local name for Beldover.

An informal after-school, girls only, youth group in Beldover.

Growing up in the same locality, I played ‘knock-a door-run’ and went ‘hedge-hopping’ in the 1960s. My mother (1916–1996) spoke to me of doing the same things in the 1920s.