Introduction

The school system increasingly seems like a mirage, the source of an immense, collective disappointment, a promised land which, like the horizon, recedes as one moves towards it.

Building on the empirical case studies drawn on in the last chapter, this chapter explores in more depth how the working classes deal with the constant spectre of failure and the elusiveness of success that they encounter daily in schooling. They also increasingly have to deal with a lack of recognition, both as successful learners and as valuable individuals, so a key question this chapter engages with is ‘How do the working classes experience a relative educational failure that has come to be seen as “a personal lack”?’ These working-class dilemmas will be explored through empirical case studies. The case studies focus on interviews with working-class young people about their experiences of being in the bottom set, as well as those young people whose only educational option is low-status, inner-city comprehensives seen by both themselves and others as demonised and pathologised educational places.

I was struck by an assertion made by one of the respondents in the Great British Class Survey, a survey of social class in the United Kingdom carried out by Mike Savage and his colleagues at the University of Manchester in 2013. A male professor commented that he would prefer to think of people for their inherent value rather than their class. But the problem in England is that the question of an individual’s inherent value can never be disentangled from their class position. This differential valuing of the upper, middle and working classes not only infuses the educational system, but has shaped its structure, influenced its practices and dictated the very different relationships that different social classes have to the system. Despite an expectation that the working classes should have the same relationship to state education as the middle classes, unsurprisingly – in view of the history of state schooling – they do not. As Andy Green shows, the history of working-class education has been one of control and cultural domination. It would be hard to portray working-class experiences in education as generally fulfilling, as being about ‘bettering oneself’ in the classic middle-class mode.