Introduction

This chapter takes up the challenge posed the end of Chapter 5, to connect the processes of education, inequality and poverty with children and young people's experiences of living in areas of economic disadvantage (Ball, 2018). It explores young people's everyday lived experiences of poverty with a focus on education.

Across each jurisdiction levels of child poverty had been slowly declining up to 2013. Yet after the austerity politics initiative begun by Cameron and Osborne there has been an upturn in this trend across each jurisdiction, widening the gap between those children in poverty and those more well off. Clear links have been made in each of the preceding chapters between poverty and educational attainment. Analysis demonstrates that journeys within educational systems tend to increase rather than decrease levels of achievement for poor young people (for example, Connelly et al, 2014). That is, poor young people tend to have worsening experiences as they spend more time within the educational systems in England in particular, yet also within other educational systems in the UK. They experience a wider range of barriers to educational achievement as Diane Reay (2017) has movingly written about in her semiautobiographical book, Miseducation. Even in the Scottish educational system that might, arguably, be said to sit within a less marketised context to the English education system, Sheila Riddell, working Director of the Centre for Research in Education Inclusion and Diversity at Edinburgh University, maintained that despite equal access to education being wellestablished, policy inclusion is effectively hamstrung in practice due to a lack of resources and the absence of policies in areas outside education which would support it. Inclusion for all in the same way is impossible in practice in our society in part due to ‘the immense power of structural forces which reproduce a range of social inequalities’ (Riddell, 2009, p 287).

Schools alone cannot ameliorate the effects of poverty. Yet, worryingly, numerous reports of young people's experiences suggest that schools often amplify the effects of poverty (Ridge, 2002; Fortier, 2006; Farthing, 2016). There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand the subjective experiences of young people to appreciate how the structures of educational institutions further marginalise the more vulnerable.