SRHE/UALL series: Researching and Evaluating
Widening participation – Schooling, attainment and
admission to HE
White Middle Class Identities and
Progression to Higher Education
(and is WP ‘a nut to crack a
sledgehammer’?)
22nd January 2015
David James
Cardiff University
Some provocative questions
 If WP is the answer, what is the question?
 What concepts, models of the person, models
of behaviour, images of success, assumptions,
measurements etc. are common in WP policy
and practice?
 How coherent are these? (see Harrison 2012;
McCaig & Adnett, 2009)
 How does HE participation in general and WP in
particular look from a sociological viewpoint?
What’s the unit of analysis?
 In Western and strongly Anglo-Saxon-influenced
cultures, psychological, economistic and commonsense models of human behaviour stress the
individual and his or her actions
 But whilst individuals are always important, an
individualistic lens is not the only (or always the best)
way to understand the social world
 ‘No man is an island’ (John Donne, 1624): what
individuals do is socially derived, motivated and
meaningful and affects the worlds of others (i.e. it has
further social effects)
 Even emotions are produced in a social setting
Educational trajectory - some
mainstream mechanisms
 ‘Emotional geographies of elite schooling’; the
production of ‘a sense of entitlement’ (e.g.
Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009; Maxwell & Aggleton,
2013)
 School choice, league tables, inspections,
marketisation (e.g. policies fostering diversity and
competition between secondary schools) (Ball, 2003)
 Parenting (esp. mothering) (Reay, 1998; Lareau, 2003;
Golden & Erdreich, 2014)
 Hot, warm and cold information (Slack, Mangan,
Hughes & Davies, 2014) and self-marketing (Shuker,
2014)
What drives WP practices (as well as
policy)?
 HE a social good?
 HE a source of advantage, so fairness?
 HE a source of nurturing talent, so
efficiency/productivity/good of the economy?
 Increasing social inequality?
 An expectation that education can remedy rampant
inequality?
 Institutions conforming to expectations about access
and rules about finance?
“Our examination of who
gets the top jobs in Britain
today found elitism so stark
that it could be called
Social Engineering”
The Rt Hon. Alan Milburn
Chair, Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission
“We in the Commission hope this report prompts a re-think in the
institutions that have such a critical role to play in making Britain a country
where success relies on aptitude and ability more than background or
birth”
Britain’s elite: formed on the playing fields of independent
schools? 71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior
armed forces officers, 55 per cent of Permanent
Secretaries, 53 per cent of senior diplomats, 50 per cent of
members of the House of Lords, 45 per cent of public body
chairs, 44 per cent of the Sunday Times Rich List, 43 per
cent of newspaper columnists, 36 per cent of the Cabinet,
35 per cent of the national rugby team, 33 per cent of MPs,
33 per cent of the England cricket team, 26 per cent of BBC
executives and 22 per cent of the Shadow Cabinet
attended independent schools - compared to 7 per cent of
the public as a whole.
Britain’s elite: Finished in Oxbridge’s dreaming spires? 75 per
cent of senior judges, 59 per cent of the Cabinet, 57 per cent of
Permanent Secretaries, 50 per cent of diplomats, 47 per cent of
newspaper columnists, 44 per cent of public body chairs, 38 per
cent of members of the House of Lords, 33 per cent of BBC
executives, 33 per cent of the Shadow Cabinet, 24 per cent of
MPs and 12 per cent of the Sunday Times Rich List attended
Oxbridge - compared to less than 1 per cent of the public as a
whole.
The project Identity, Educational Choice
and the White Urban Middle Classes
 Investigated a cross-section of againstthe-grain examples of school choice,
where white middle-class families
deliberately chose ordinary and lowperforming secondary schools for their
children
 We interviewed parents and children in
125 households in London and two other
cities in England
 See Reay, Crozier and James, 2011/2013
Glimpses of our analysis
 These against the grain choosers were highly
educated, usually ‘incomers’, usually worked in public
sector, and got involved in the school (e.g. as
governors).
 Few had strong political or welfarist motives
 More common motives were securing an educational
breadth, a multicultural environment, and avoiding
narrowness
 However, in reality social mix does not equate to
social mixing
More glimpses…
 The young people had nearly all been selected for extra
resources in the form of the ‘Gifted and Talented’ schemes
 Mutual affinity between needs of the schools and needs of
these parents - e.g. Drama A level kept open for one
student!
 Parents rejected ‘league table thinking’ as too crude
 Were very confident indeed of their own children’s
‘brightness’
 ‘Risky investment’ metaphor very useful
 It ‘paid off’: High success in terms of achievement and
University entry across the sample
The ‘risky investment’ metaphor
 White middle class choice of an averagely or lowperforming secondary school was usually a positive one,
based on what the schooling could contribute to a broader
educational project. Multiculturalism was particularly
highly valued, as were specific ethnic minority friends. This
stood in stark contrast to the way many of these families
denigrated white working class people.
 There was a clear ‘mutual affinity’ between needs of
schools and these parents/families;
 Nevertheless, the choice was usually seen as a risky project
which required close monitoring and families had the
means and the will to ‘pull out’ should that become
necessary.
Sociological insight is helpful for our
work in WP because:
 Some people will need reminding that even higher
education is not some sort of neutral, benign process that
functions above and beyond the tramlines of social
inequality
 Different kinds of HE have quite different socio-economic
student body compositions…and status differs too
 It’s important to disentangle institutional interests from a
wish to help people – one can often cloud the other
 It is helpful to keep our work in proportion, knowing that
we are up against so much more than disparities in young
people’s ‘aspirations’ ‘information’ or capacities for
‘decision-making’
References
 Ball, S.J. (2003) Class Strategies and the Education Market – the
Middle Classes and Social Advantage London: RoutledgeFalmer
 Bourdieu, P. (1998) Practical Reason, Cambridge: Polity Press
 Gatzambide-Fernandez, R. (2009) The best of the best: becoming
elite at an American boarding school Cambridge, MA: Harvard U
press
 Golden, D. & Erdreich, L. (2014) ‘Mothering and the work of
educational care – an integrative approach’ British Journal of
Sociology of Education 35 (2): 263-277
 Grenfell, M. and James, D. (2004) ‘Change in the field-changing
the field: Bourdieu and the methodological practice of educational
research’ British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25 (4): 507-523
 Harrison, N. (2012) ‘The mismeasure of participation: how
choosing the ‘wrong’ statistic helped seal the fate of Aimhigher’
Higher Education Review 45 (1): 30-61.
 James, D. (2015) ‘How Bourdieu Bites Back: Recognising
misrecognition in education and educational research’ Cambridge
Journal of Education, DOI:10.1080/0305764X.2014.987644
 Lareau, A. (2003) Unequal Childhoods: Class, race and family life
Berkeley: U of California Press
 Maxwell, C. & Aggleton, P. (2013) (Eds) Privilege, Agency and
Affect Basingstoke: Palgrave
 McCaig, C. & Adnett, N. (2009) ‘English Universities, Additional Fee
Income, and Access Agreements: Their impact on widening
participation and fair access’ British Journal of Educational Studies,
57:1, 18-36, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8527.2009.00428.x
 Reay, D. (1998) ‘Engendering social reproduction: Mothers in the
Educational marketplace’ British Journal of Sociology of Education
19 (2): 195-205
 Reay, D., Crozier, G. & James, D. (2011/2013) White Middle Class
Identities and Urban Schooling London: Palgrave
 Shuker, L. (2014) ‘”It’ll look good on your personal statement”: selfmarketing amongst university applicants in the United Kingdom’
British Journal of Sociology of Education 35 (2): 224-243
 Slack, K., Mangan, J., Hughes, A. & Davies, P. (2014) ‘”Hot”, “cold”
and “warm” information and higher education decision-making’ ’
British Journal of Sociology of Education 35 (2): 204-223
 Wacquant, L. (1989) ‘Towards a reflexive sociology: A workshop
with Pierre Bourdieu’ Sociological Theory 7, ,26-63)