Are schools failing working class children or does working class life present alternative means for gaining social status that conflict with what it means to do well at school? Focusing on Southeast London, this book provides insight into class values and reveals the complex cultural politics of white working class pride.

Are schools failing working class children or does working class life present alternative means for gaining social status that conflict with what it means to do well at school? Focusing on Southeast London, this book provides insight into class values and reveals the complex cultural politics of white working class pride.

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In this book Diane Reay, herself working-class-turned-Cambridge-professor, presents a 21st-century view of education and the working classes. Drawing on over 500 interviews, the book includes vivid stories from working-class children and young people. It looks at class identity, and the effects of wider economic and social class relationships on working-class educational experiences. The book reveals how we have ended up with an educational system that still educates the different social classes in fundamentally different ways and, vitally, what we can do to achieve a fairer system. Book jacket.

Based on a critical Marxist ethnography, conducted at a state primary school in a former coalmining community in the north of England, this book provides insight into teachers’ perceptions of the effects of deindustrialisation on education for the working class. The book draws on the notion of social haunting to help understand the complex ways in which historical relations and performances, reflective of the community’s industrial past, continue to shape experiences and processes of schooling. The arguments presented enable us to engage with the ‘goodness’ of the past as well as the pain and suffering associated with deindustrialisation. This, it is argued, enables teachers and pupils to engage with rhythms, relations, and performances that recognise the heritage and complexities of working-class culture. Reckoning and harnessing with the fullness of ghosts is essential if schooling is to be refashioned in more encouraging and relational ways, with and for the working class. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in the sociology of education, and social class and education in particular. Those interested in schooling, ethnography, and qualitative social research will also benefit from the book

This book explores how working-class writers in the 1960s and 1970s significantly reshaped British children’s literature through their representations of working-class life and culture. Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner and Robert Westall were examples of what Richard Hoggart termed ‘scholarship boys’: working-class individuals who were educated out of their class through grammar school education. This book highlights the role these writers played in changing the publishing and reviewing practices of the British children's literature industry while offering new readings of their novels featuring scholarship boys. As well as drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, and referring to studies of scholarship boys in the fields of social science and education, this book also explores personal interviews and previously-unseen archival materials. Yielding significant insights on British children’s literature of the period, this book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of children’s and working-class literature and of British popular culture.