Class and Race Relations in UK Schools: Unraveling Discourses of the Good Mix

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. RGC and Education

Abstract

In the UK context scholars studying the urban middle classes have written about how discourses of the ‘good’ mix circulate amongst White middle class parents, with respect to choosing urban schools for their children (Byrne, 2006a; see also Diane Reay et al., 2007). In this paper I develop our understanding of the circulation of these discourses of the ‘good mix,’ as processes of class-making, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on multiculturalism and the promise of happiness, and a cultural class analysis (Skeggs, 2004). Through qualitative, interview-based research in two London schools, I demonstrate how different ‘social logics’ (Bradford & Hey, 2007, p. 600) or local dynamics in terms of demographics; external market forces; internal governance and institutional practices, produce different circumstances under which the mix of a school can be viewed as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ I explore 'who' or 'what' gets seen as converting bad feeling into good feeling, and good into bad, and show how this is intimately connected with academic success. I discuss claims to space and how at one school the shifting composition towards a Whiter and more middle class student body generates celebratory discourses of the ‘good mix’ and allows the school to be saturated with, and radiate ‘good feeling’. While at the more socially, ethnically, and academically ‘inclusive’ school, proximity to the ‘unhappy objects’ (Ahmed 2007) of academic failure generates middle class anxiety, and the school, sticky with bad feeling, thus ironically comes to be constructed as a space of not quite the right mix.

Author

• Sumi Hollingworth, London South Bank University