Vale Geoff Whitty (1946–2018)

Editor note: Professor Geoff Whitty died on the morning of Friday 27 July 2018, following his struggle with cancer. His life touched many, often through his generosity of intellect and spirit. Since his death, many stories have emerged of his many contributions to the development of individuals and of the sociology of education. Among these, in 2006, Geoff joined the Editorial Advisory Panel of Critical Studies in Education, supporting its relaunch as a new forum for scholarship in the critical sociology of education. In memory of Geoff and of his leadership in education research and practice, we invited long-time colleague and friend, Stephen Ball, to write the following tribute. Trevor Gale, Editor-in-Chief.

Geoff Whitty was a major figure in education, educational research and the sociology of education – as an academic, through his work on policy and the politics of education, in a direct relation to policy and practice and as an institutional leader. In celebrating Geoff, I will concentrate on his academic contribution.

I first encountered Geoff, although I am not sure we spoke, at a Sociology of Education conference in 1974, organised by the Open University, at Balls Park College (now defunct). The conference was set within the theoretical and epistemological ferment that was the New Sociology of Education (NSE) and Geoff presented a paper ‘Sociology and the problem of radical educational change’ in which is coined the term naïve possibilitarianism and in which he sketched out the need for radical educational change to eliminate social inequalities and at the same time the difficulties involved in achieving change. This tension defined the rest of his career in education. Geoff was a key contributor to the NSE through his work on the sociology of the curriculum and the curriculum as ideological practice and last year his 1985 book, Sociology and School Knowledge, was reissued by Routledge. In the final chapter of that book, he considers ‘the nature of an appropriate political response to the insights about the curriculum that may be derived from recent work on the sociology of school knowledge’ (p. 167), again anticipating later concerns. During the 1970s, he also edited two collections of papers with MFD Young: (Whitty & Young, 1976) Explorations in the politics of school knowledge. Issues in sociology, politics and education and (Whitty & Young, 1977) Society, state and schooling: readings on the possibilities for radical education, which sought to make school knowledge a political issue and at the same time explored the possibilities of radical change.¹

In 1985, I succeeded Geoff as Tutor for the MA in Urban Education at KCL and he became a friend, interlocutor and a great source of support. In 2001, I succeeded him again as Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, he had become Director of the IOE (2000–2010). Following his retirement as Director, Geoff went on to posts at the universities of Bath, Bath Spa, and Newcastle, Australia.

Geoff’s academic work falls into three distinct but related phases and a fundamental concern with social justice and particularly with social class inequalities, patterns of social advantage and disadvantage, underpins all three. The first, as a part of the NSE, I have noted above. The NSE took researchers inside the ‘black box’ of schooling and deconstructed it neutrality – it was no longer simply a matter of how much schooling students of different social backgrounds got, but ‘the nature of what they encountered in schools’ (Whitty, 2002 p. 67) as Geoff put it. Knowledge, teaching and assessment became part of the explanation of inequality and necessary targets for change. The NSE was set over and against what might be called the LSE school of sociology of education (encompassing the work of AH Halsey, Jean Floud, Don Swift, Maurice Craft and others) that sought the sources of inequality primarily in the home. Although this position was bifurcated between on the one hand an emphasis on material conditions and on the other on attitudes and aspirations in the family; Geoff looked back on this phase of his work in a recent book chapter: (Whitty, 2017) ‘Taking subject knowledge out and putting it back in again? A journey in the company of Michael Young’.

What was missing from the NSE problematisations of schooling was the role of education policy – the focus was primarily on schools and teachers as organisations and agents of inequality. Policy was for some a space to be captured but was not an object of study in its own right. That was left to political scientists. The LSE position was rooted in a Fabian evidence-based relation to policy, to which Geoff was not entirely averse, and there were moments at which their research did have a relation to policy. Although Jean Floud said of her work at LSE, in giving the Charles Gittins Memorial Lecture at the University of Swansea in 1978, that ‘we saw ourselves as, first and foremost, students of social structure, not as advocates of social aims in education’ (p. 9).

The 1988 Education Reform Act changed all of that and over the next 10 years, policy became established as a major focus within the sociology of education – and in the second phase of his academic work, Geoff was involved in three massively important policy studies, laying the groundwork for what Jenny Ozga called ‘policy sociology’. They were The State and Private Education (Whitty, Edwards, & Fitz, 1989 with Tony Edwards and John Fitz), a study of the Conservative’s Assisted Places Scheme, Devolution and Choice in Education (Whitty, Halpin, & Power, 1998 with Sally Power and David Halpin), a study of school choice policies and practice in three countries, and Specialisation and choice in urban education: the city technology college experiment (Whitty, Edwards, & Gewirtz, 1993 with Tony Edwards and Sharon Gewirtz) a study of the Conservative’s CTCs programme, the forerunner of the New Labour Academies programme. These established a bold and innovative policy trajectory model of analysis that sought to trace policies from their inception within the educational state to their practice in schools and classrooms and are models of rigour and analytical insight. The APS study led on to a further social class-based research project, which drew directly and very fruitfully for its conceptualisation of social class and class relations on the work of Basil Bernstein, exploring the reproduction of middle class advantage through education: Education and the Middle Class (Whitty, Power, & Wigfall, 2003 with Sally Power, Tony Edwards and Valerie Wigfall). These studies are as pertinent and insightful in relation to current education policy issues as they were in the 1990s. Their prescience is quite remarkable.

The third phase of Geoff’s academic work, overlapping in various ways with his role as Director of IOE, has two aspects to it: a concern with the relations between research knowledge and policy, and practical involvements in the mediation of this relationship. He was able to move between research arenas and sites of policy with extraordinary ease and the insider/outsider perspectives so garnered gave a dimension to his writing that is unique and in particular made him one of the key commentators on the education policies of New Labour. The former aspect was announced in his 2002 book Making sense of education policy: studies in the sociology and politics of education and is represented more recently in Research and Policy in Education (2016) and his work on education studies as a discipline, as in Knowledge and the Study of Education, with John Furlong (2017). The latter aspect is evident through his roles as President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and of the College of Teachers, and as a Board member of Ofsted. He was Specialist Advisor to successive House of Commons Education Select Committees, one outcome of which was the rewriting of national school admissions policy in order to facilitate fairer access for families of all backgrounds. And with the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland, he developed innovative new teacher standards that supported a more holistic model of teacher professionalism. Later, he was involved in the London Challenge programme and was Chair of the Bristol Education Partnership Board. He was also instrumental in establishing the International Network of Educational Institutes, a global think-tank created to bring a global perspective to issues in education, and the World Education Research Association, an alliance of major associations dedicated to advancing education research.

One of the recurring aspects of his policy-related work both in research and practice was teacher education. Geoff’s career began as a temporary teacher at Belmont Primary School in Chiswick, he then did his PGCE at the IOE and went on to teach at Lampton School in Hounslow and Thomas Bennett School in Crawley, one of those schools that in the 1970s took comprehensive education very seriously. From there, he moved to the University of Bath as a teacher trainer. He was deeply committed to a conception of the teacher as a research informed professional and scathingly critical of recent reforms in the training of teachers (see e.g. Whitty and Furlong, 2000, and published this year Whiting, Whitty, Menter, Black, Hordern, Parfitt, Reynolds and Sorensen, 2018).

Geoff Whitty’s influence in national policy conversations and in the sociology of education has been profound and widespread, his academic work and leadership were driven by an unwavering commitment to social justice, and a firm belief that the insights that sociological analysis can offer can make a positive impact on educational experience and equity.² The list of his co-writers and researchers is a roll call of key figures in British sociology of education, and many of these collaborations spanned decades. As a colleague and friend I, like many others, will miss him but he leaves behind both an important research legacy³ and an array of possibilities for thinking for those who continue in the task of shaping fairer and more inclusive education systems and struggle for radical change in education.

Notes

1. Also in the 1980s, Geoff collaborated with Peter Aggleton on research and school practice about sex, sexuality and HIV.

2. His contributions and achievements have been recognised in numerous prestigious awards and visiting professorships. Most recently, these include the BERA John Nisbet Fellowship Award, fellowship of the American Educational Research Association and of the Society for Educational Studies, and, in 2011, a CBE for services to teacher education. In 2009, he received the Lady Plowden Memorial Medal for outstanding services to education. He was admitted as an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2002 and held visiting professorships at the universities of Bath, Bedfordshire, Birmingham, Oxford, Beijing Normal and Wisconsin-Madison. He held honorary degrees and fellowships from the University of the West of England, University of London, Hong Kong Institute of Education and UCL.

3. See https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/geoff-whitty/ for an excellent bibliography.