Continuities and transformations: what has changed since Jackson and Marsden and what has remained the same?

The continuities

This book has been an attempt to follow in the path of Jackson and Marsden’s ground-breaking book on education and the working classes. Although their book is commonly seen to focus on the successful working classes, a haunting presence in the book are those working classes who were not educationally successful, those in the lower sets, technical schools and secondary moderns – the vast majority of the working classes, then as now, who are left to fail. I hope I have demonstrated that a further theme throughout their book was the damage done to the working classes, even those who were seen to be educationally successful. While the differences and changes between Jackson and Marsden’s 1950s and 1960s and today are what immediately strike the reader, this first section of the conclusion also focuses on a number of arresting continuities. In particular, it is argued that, despite myriad educational policy changes, the English educational system is still one that educates individuals according to their class background. It remains a segregated system where different social classes are largely educated apart rather than together. Also, the ways in which social mobility operates to dislocate the educationally successful working classes from their communities of origin is just as pervasive as it was at the time when Jackson and Marsden were writing.

The most troubling continuity is that most working-class children and young people experience education as failure. I have tried to explain why this is still the case in the face of so many policy initiatives to improve working-class educational attainment. I have argued that in place of ‘the usual suspects’, namely either working-class culture or the ‘failing’ schools that invariably have predominantly working-class and BME intakes, we need to focus on the operations of power within education. This involves looking at relational aspects of educational achievement and examining the actions and attitudes of the middle and upper classes as well as those of the working classes. It also requires a historical, contextualised perspective that recognises over a century of class domination within state schooling, and the symbolic power of the private sector that continues to be held up as embodying all that is best in English education.