Abstract
Forty years ago in most of western Europe, we used to think that poverty belonged in the past or in faraway places – images of Oliver Twist or Ethiopia would spring to mind. It was assumed that it would disappear entirely once less-developed countries became ‘modern’ and that residual poverty in advanced industrial countries was largely due to idleness or alcohol.
Few can still believe that now. Despite dramatic advances in productivity resulting from computer technologies, and a boom time for the super-rich, child poverty statistics are a scandal. The problem is widespread, but sharper in some places than others, particularly where the neoliberal erosion of welfare provision has been greatest. Statistics for the United Kingdom show that child poverty more than doubled during the 1980s, falling only slightly after 2000 when the last (Labour) government set a slow pace for its abolition. It is going up again since the financial crash: austerity politics squeeze blood out of the poor, while the incomes and bonuses of business executives rocket.
Nearly a third of children in the United Kingdom are living below the poverty line. Poverty particularly affects lone-parent families, largely headed by women, and those where parents are unemployed, though not only such families: three-fifths of children in poverty have two resident parents and more than half have working parents. However, despite common myths, most people in poverty are working, often in part-time or low-paid jobs, with unemployment as a repeated hazard, not a continuous state.
Considerable confusion has been created over the years by theories which separate ‘the poor’ from other workers as a distinct section of society. Charles Murray (1996) labelled them an Underclass, ascribing poverty not to low pay and marginalisation but to moral failings and low IQ. Whatever the intention, more recent accounts of a ‘Precariat’ similarly posit a distinctive section of society. It is a small step from Standing’s (2011) notion of a ‘dangerous class’ to viewing the children as feral, worthless and unteachable. Research by Robert MacDonald (eg 1997) and colleagues clearly demonstrates that, even in the poorest areas, those left behind by deindustrialisation still seek reliable work and a stable family life: it is the economic situation which forces them to shift uncertainly between low-paid insecure employment and periods of unemployment. They are simply the most vulnerable members of a large and diverse working class who have ‘only their labour power to sell’ (Marx & Engels, 1996 [1948]). This does not prevent right-wing politicians stigmatising them by calling reliance on welfare benefits a ‘lifestyle choice’ and by condemning them as ‘skivers not strivers’. We have not yet begun to research the impact of this discourse on children at school.
While the causes of poverty are economic not cultural, the impact is both material and psychological. It impacts not only on health and nutrition, but also on social development and self-esteem. Research by Tess Ridge (2002) revealed how a shortage of money for leisure activities, transport, clothes and school trips restricts independence, self confidence and friendships. Living in a consumer society exacerbates the damage and sense of losing out. It affects confidence, social development and self-esteem: If you don’t wear trendy stuff . . . not so many people will be your friend ’cos of what you wear. (Charlene, 12 years, two-parent family)
While the statistical correlation between poverty and lower achievement is irrefutable, the explanations offered for this have been confused and misleading – a succession of false trails and half truths. My recent book Living on the Edge, written with John Smyth (Smyth & Wrigley, 2013), analysed this over many decades and found a succession of ‘blame the victim’ explanations based on faulty and sometimes fraudulent research: genetically inherited low IQ, language deficit, parental indifference and low aspirations. To compound matters, teachers working in the poorest areas are now being stigmatised and blamed for being ‘ineffective’ and failing to ‘close the gap’.
Gap talk
There is a huge difference between the average attainment of children growing up in poverty and the rest of the population, dramatically illustrated by percentages and graphs, but there are problems with the ‘close the gap’ discourse. First, by focusing on outcomes rather than inputs, it is looking in the wrong place if the intention is to change things: the real need is to boost provision and opportunities for learning (Milner, 2013).
Second, even the most perfect set of initiatives is unlikely to be completely successful. As Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) has pointed out, we are dealing with the effects of cumulative intergenerational deprivation and lack of opportunity. This is true in terms of the impact of poverty but also limited educational opportunities and divisive structures. Third, the insistence that there must be ‘no excuses’ is a rhetorical move which points the finger of blame at teachers while exculpating the politicians whose policies fail to tackle the underlying poverty.
Furthermore, the sharpness of demands to close the gap is leading to reductivist ways of looking at the problem, so that children’s real lives become invisible: the students become simply bundles of pathologies expressed through categorical labels – a free school meal, male, special educational needs and White British child. The frequent use of these labels in monitoring and target-setting processes gives teachers the illusion of knowing something about their students’ lives while keeping reality at a distance.
Finally, the urgent demand to ‘close the gap’ is pressuring school leaders to adopt quick-fix interventions which are supposedly ‘evidence based’. The spurious procedure of pouring together into a single pot hundreds of meta-analyses derived from tens of thousands of research studies, regardless of the quality or context or specifics of the intervention (let alone the often limited nature of the output measures on which success has been compared), is now recommended as the authoritative way for head teachers to decide on the most cost-effective action (http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit). All of these are occurring under the massive pressures of a draconian inspection system and the likely closure and privatisation of your school if artificial targets are not met. No wonder England’s teachers are working impossibly long hours (almost 60 hours a week on average, according to government surveys, Department for Education, 2014). The additional pressures for teachers working in poorer neighbourhoods to deal with social and psychological troubles make most attempts at gap-closing counterproductive.
Rethinking poverty and achievement
There are surprisingly few ethnographic studies of how families and communities experience poverty in affluent societies. Reflecting on what is available (e.g. Charlesworth, 2000; MacDonald & Marsh, 2005; Toynbee, 2003) suggests two pervasive emotional reactions: a sense of shame – low self-esteem, including the internalisation of social positioning – and a sense of futility – the feeling that whatever you plan or embark upon, obstacles will block your best efforts. These are powerful negative emotions, involving current identity and future pathways.
Unfortunately, traditional patterns of schooling, intensified under accountability or performativity regimes, work to reinforce them. For example, disadvantaged children are frequently assigned to ‘low ability’ tables soon after entry to primary school and later to lower sets in core subjects; there they are more likely to encounter a diet of decontextualised exercises – meaningless busy-work with little sense of satisfaction or progress. It is significant that a recent European Union study (INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2012) recognised the various forms of streaming, along with the distance between schools and communities, as the two most critical issues.
On the other hand, when visiting 10 successful inner-city schools with large numbers of bilingual pupils, I discovered communities and curricula which actively countered such emotions. This was happening in all the major aspects of school life: curriculum, pedagogy, ethos, links to the wider community, and the processes of school development (see The Power to Learn, Wrigley, 2000). The pursuit of case studies of successful schools in areas of poverty remains an important challenge for the research community. It is important to recognise, however, the need to spend sufficient time in each school: too many School Improvement case studies over the years seem to have been based on a one-to-one with the head teacher followed by a cursory walk through the school. Some critical sense is also needed, in order to penetrate beyond the approved discourses of ‘how to turn a school around’.
The teaching and learning I observed in these schools proved a stark contrast to what Haberman (1991) has labelled ‘pedagogies of poverty’ and to the patterns which Anyon (1981) observed in schools in the poorest locations: Most spoke of school knowledge in terms of facts and simple skills . . . A fifth-grade teacher in the other school said she did social studies by putting notes on the board which the children then copied . . . A second-grade teacher when asked what was important knowledge for her students said, ‘Well, we keep them busy’. (p. 7) Essentially, it is a pedagogy in which learners can ‘succeed’ without becoming either involved or thoughtful. (Kohn, 2011) The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality; the inner-city kids meanwhile are trained for nonreflective acquiescence. (Kozol, 2008, p. 121)
We should not simply blame teachers for this, but understand the pressures which lead many in this direction and the lack of supportive and reflective staff development to try out alternatives. As Haberman has since observed, the current accountability regime in the United States and elsewhere is actively encouraging such ‘pedagogies of poverty’: The overly directive, mind-numbing, mundane, useless, anti-intellectual acts that constitute teaching not only remain the coin of the realm but have become the gold standard. (Haberman, 2010)
This question is still to be seriously explored in many other places, including England and other parts of the United Kingdom.
The School Improvement literature makes frequent use of the term ‘culture’, as a way of looking holistically at a school. Unfortunately, the meaning is often somewhat flat, overlooking the real dynamics and contradictions. When ‘culture’ is viewed simplistically as attitudes which the head teacher must learn to manage, the colours of real life are bleached out, including hidden inequalities of power, along with the complex and often problematic interactions between students and teachers with their different assumptions and lifeworlds. The field of School Improvement needs to take culture much more seriously, particularly in areas of deprivation, including the following:
Examining the cultural messages of classrooms which are dominated by the teacher’s voice, closed questions and rituals of transmission of superior wisdom;
Developing a better understanding of cultural difference, in order to prevent high levels of exclusion;
Understanding how assumptions about ability and intelligence are worked out in classroom interactions;
Discovering how assumptions about single parents, ethnic minorities and ‘dysfunctional’ working-class families operate symbolically in classroom interactions (Wrigley, 2003, pp. 36–37).
Returning to this question in Living on the Edge (with John Smyth, 2013, pp. 7–9), I highlighted the importance of symbolic interactionism, particularly as exemplified by Goffman’s (1968) Asylums, a book which describes the pressures on individual identity of ‘total institutions’ such as barracks, mental hospitals and boarding schools. Most schools are not ‘total’ in this sense, but students face the repeated daily problems of adjusting between the worlds of home and school. We need to observe more carefully the competing expectations of teachers and students, and the ‘interactive trouble’ when they are unable to share each other’s perspectives and assumptions.
This is just part of the story. The neoliberal drive to demolish public democratic structures of governance such as local authorities has been accelerated in England and elsewhere by austerity politics, making it increasingly difficult to provide coherent support to children and families. The impact remains to be researched. We are nowhere near appreciating the impact on young people and their education of the ‘benefit scroungers’ discourse issuing from the mouths of right-wing politicians and the keyboards of their favourite journalists. We have hardly begun to develop ways of including children’s lifeworlds and ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) in the curriculum and of bridging between their vernacular knowledge and the high-status knowledge we wish them to learn.
More questions here than solutions . . . but serious questions and tentative explorations are worth more than glib answers. The field of School Improvement is still a long way from taking seriously the lives of children, and particularly those whose lives are damaged by poverty. It is a privilege, therefore, to introduce the papers included in this special issue, which in their different ways open up new directions towards a satisfying and successful education which can really ‘make a difference’.
Stephen McKinney, in ‘The Relationship of Child Poverty to School Education’, takes an international perspective covering both advanced industrialised countries and the global South. He then evaluates the significance of a diverse range of government initiatives, their benefits and limitations.
Lori Beckett and Terry Wrigley, in ‘Overcoming Stereotypes, Discovering Hidden Capitals’, explore the consequences of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’, namely, the misrecognition of positive features of children’s lives. On the basis of practitioner research in urban schools, the interviews described here provide a means for teachers to engage with the realities of young people’s lives, including both serious limitations of experience and sources of enrichment and support from peer groups and extended families.
John Smyth, in ‘Improving Schools in Poor Areas’ with its provocative subtitle ‘It’s not About the Organisation, Structures and Privatisation, Stupid!’ provides a heartfelt critique of the way in which high-stakes regimes of schooling are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real lives and struggles of many young people. He provides a welcome survey of his own work and that of Australian colleagues in engaging with marginalised young people, particularly in community settings.
A very different setting and practice, but with a remarkably similar philosophy, is presented by Laura Ruiz in ‘Moroccan Mothers’ Involvement in Dialogic Literary Gatherings’. These reading circles engage adults with limited formal education, in this case recent migrants to Catalonia,providing the opportunity to relate to rich literary texts, as cultural tools which shed light on their own lives and experiences. The significance of these gatherings for the women’s engagement with their children’s learning is shown through the words of the mothers.
Finally, Gabrielle Ivinson, in ‘Ghosts From the Past’, gives us a unique insight into growing up in a deindustrialised region. She focuses on two teenage boys in a former mining town in the Welsh Valleys, to demonstrate a rich knowledge of the Earth and its secrets, the culture of mining and its stories, the dangers and comradeship. She illustrates graphically the gulf between a boy of early physical maturity and his role as school pupil, raising questions about how the school might understand his values and relationships. These two examples provide an embodied foundation for discussing how schools might relate to young people, their communities, their past and future.