‘Mostly Roughs and Toughs’: Social Class,Race and Representation in Inner City Schooling

Drawing on an ESRC funded project of children’s transitions to secondary schools in two London boroughs, this article works with spatial metaphors (Lefebvre, 1991; Shields, 1991) in order to interrogate dominant representations of inner city schools, but also to present the children’s own views and experiences of inner city schooling. It examines the processes through which certain secondary schools and certain groups of children come to be demonized in local and wider social imaginaries, exploring both the impact of damaging discourses of demonization and the connections between social and psychic realities in the increasing segregation and polarization of inner London secondary schools. Race and racism, as well as social class and gender, enter powerfully into representations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools and the article examines the consequences of such representations for both middle- and working-class children and their families.The article concludes with a discussion of the wider issues of social justice raised by growing processes of demonization and polarization.