Quaco Cloutterbuck's List: Capability Approach

• I want to try to explain why it is that, as far as social equality is concerned, education policy is not working or not working very well - and in particular why educational outcomes and the benefits of education in terms of labour market access and income, etc. in the UK appear to be no more equal than before the current regime of educational reforms were begun in the 1980s and, indeed, by many indicators may be more unequal.
• My point is that if we want to understand and explain persistent educational inequalities and do something about them through policy, then increasingly, the school is the wrong place to look and the wrong place to reform - at least in isolation from other sorts of changes in other parts of society.
• In a similar vein, a recent report on social mobility written for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) ([17] Nunn et al. , 2007, p. 72) concludes that "there are strong influences on educational attainment that are outside the scope of formal educational provision".
• To some extent, then, I want to revisit arguments made 38 years ago by Basil [3] Bernstein (1971) that "education cannot compensate for society", although the substance of my case in relation to this assertion is somewhat different to his.
• I also want to make the point that the problem for policy here is not simply one of raising standards, or introducing other new kinds of provision and support to working class families, or even addressing economic inequalities, although that is of fundamental importance, as I hope to show, but is also a matter of civic values, sociality and political leadership.
• More generally, a whole variety of studies in the "school effectiveness" field show that on average schools account for somewhere between 5 and 18 per cent of achievement differences between students, after control for initial differences.
• Some of this research suggests that more effective schools tend to improve the attainments of all students but that they do not remove overall patterns of difference related to students' backgrounds (Harris and Bennett, 2001). Perhaps Wiliam over-states the case when he says that school effect sizes here are "insignificant"; schools can make a difference to the life chances of some students, perhaps in ways unrelated to performance measures, but they do appear to be able to make only marginal impact on pre-existing "gaps" in attainment.
• A different body of research offers another perspective on questions of outcome gaps and their consequences. The study Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain ([5] Blanden and Machin, 2008), funded by the Sutton Trust, reviews evidence related to children born between 1970 and 2000, to determine whether the decline in social mobility between previous generations has continued:
• - Inter-generational income mobility for children born in the period 1970-2000 has stabilised, following the sharp decline that occurred for children born in 1970 compared with those born in 1958.
• Parental background continues to exert a very powerful influence on the academic progress of children:
• Inequalities in degree acquisition, meanwhile, persist across different income groups. While 44 per cent of young people from the richest 20 per cent of households acquired a degree in 2002, only 10 per cent from the poorest 20 per cent of households did so.
• The statistics analysed in the report indicate that the proportion of the explanation of difference between the incomes of father and that of their sons that can be attributed to educational factors has actually declined (from 0.38 to 0.31).
• Following significant improvements attainment can be seen to be levelling off, and evidence suggests performance still has a stronger link to socio-economic background that is the case in the world's best systems.
• If we take these statistics seriously then they suggest one or both of two things. First, schools are distinctly class biased, marked by an ingrained "institutional classism" working systematically through various organisational procedures and teacher expectations for the interests of some and against those of other categories of children
• This was in essence Bernstein's argument and it has considerable force and merit. Second, we need to look elsewhere to explain these phenomena, particularly we need to consider "the economics of the family". As [9] Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992, p. 233) put it: "The family is [... ] the unit of class "fate" [... ] at the "micro-" level, a key unit of strategic action pursued within the class structure".
• Sociologically this is dangerous territory. The immediate response of many sociologists of education would be that any attempt to explain class inequalities through the medium of the family places us on the slippery slope toward forms of social pathology and deficit theorising, criticism that was levelled against Bernstein in relation to his work towards a theory of pedagogic discourse and modalities of symbolic control (see [4] Bernstein, 1996, Chapter 5)
• However, that was not his logic, nor is it my argument . I am certainly not referring here to forms of cultural deficit but attempting to demonstrate that increasing amounts of the "work of learning" is done outside of school, in and around the home, as part of what the [7] Cambridge University Primary Review (2007) calls the "scholarisation of childhood" and that access to much of this "work of learning" costs time and money and demands particular sorts of energy and social resources.
• Increasingly demanding strategic and navigational skills are needed to manage children's learning in and out of school, particularly as parents are expected to "choose" their children's schools and school designations and statuses, curricular routes and forms of qualification become more complex and fuzzy
• What follows from all this is that, for some children, we actually need to think about their school performances not as indicators of individual effort or ability but, rather, as the outcome of a collective effort of the whole family, sometimes undertaken very directly in relation to school work. For such reasons, echoing Bourdieu, I want to try to explain some proportion of outcome differences in terms of a focus on advantage rather than deficit.
• Viewed in this way, researchers sometimes forget that inequalities happen in a complex and dynamic interplay of structures and processes crucially involving decisions, values and priorities and the actions and interests of various parties deploying unevenly distributed capitals and resources.
• They involve things done within families, things being done to families and forms of complicity, including what Bourdieu calls "self-exclusion", decisions involving the avoidance of places which are not for "people like us" resting on perceptions and understandings about how the world is ordered in terms of what is valued, what is to be chosen and avoided
• Inequalities are also formed and reproduced within policies and processes of government, civil society and through the "institutional orderings" or schools as forms of racism, sexism and classism.
• Again I will return to policy later, concentrating attention first on one aspect of it that we might call the "economics of learning".
• I want to illustrate some of the ways in which expenditures, energies and planning of various kinds within families are becoming increasingly important in achieving performance enhancements for some children and, more importantly, ensure performance advantages, thus reproducing class structures and class inequalities through education.
• As Bourdieu (2004, p. 23) puts it: "Academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family)".
• As a DWP report notes "a number of studies suggest that middle class parents seek out opportunities to maintain the social advantages of education for their children, including using resources to make sure they are able to make effective choices over schooling. In doing so they may limit the opportunities available to working class children"
• What this means is that parents, or at least some parents, now operate within a market in educational services which is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions but is a diffuse, expanding and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes, both publicly and privately provided.
• For many parents educational opportunities are now sought for their children through a judicious mix of state and/or private institutions and paid-for add-ons, like educational toys and software and other learning materials, tutoring and other commercial educational services and activities, drawing upon sources of information and advice (like School and Higher Education Guides) and support (like parenting courses). Some examples of commercial "learning" businesses are: the buying-in of experiences and advice and support, like the "activities", or tutoring or parenting classes or, in the case of children with special education needs, the purchase of diagnoses and "specialist support", are some of the more obvious ways in which acquisition of cultural capital is linked to possession of economic capital.
• They must take and enact their responsibilities for their children through engagement with the market. Indeed, such conditions of responsibility give rise to a new form of inequality "the inequality of dealing with insecurity and reflexivity".
• n many respects educational services are now provided no differently from other goods and services marketed at children and families as part of an on-going commodification of "the social".
• There is a conceptual and very practical shift, from education as an intrinsically valuable, shared resource which the state owes to its citizens, to a consumer product or an investment for which individuals who reap the rewards of being educated (or their families) must take first responsibility.
• This conceptual shift changes fundamentally the relationship between citizen and state and what it means for a society to educate its citizens.
• The state and its schools can no longer be trusted on their own to deliver social advantage and social reproduction which effective, choosing parents expect. This shift in and heightening of responsibility is encouraged by a seething and swarming of official discourse around parenting the state itself engenders in its constant reiteration of such concerns.
• If we look at current education policies there are four points to be made. The first is that it can be argued that the emphasis of education policy is misdirected, indeed, misleading. Policies which focus on schools to both raise achievement and close achievement gaps are looking in the wrong place and perhaps that is not a matter of simple chance or error. Secondly, policies may actually, as a result, be making things worse. Those in England aimed at schools and intended to "raise standards" also work to exacerbate the external inequalities that I have been outlining through emphases on setting, differentiation and arrangements like gifted and talented programmes ([11] Gillborn and Youdell, 2000). Differences generated elsewhere are taken to be essential and fixed characteristics and indicators of the capabilities of children and built into differentiations and opportunities and expectations in schools, becoming self-fulfilling in many cases in terms of performance. Resource differences and collective efforts and investments made or not within families become translated into individual "ability" differences or indicators of different sorts of "abilities". They become distinctly marked-off from one another within "institutional orderings" and give rise to distinct academic identities. Right from the beginning of primary school, these identities become tied to routes and programmes inscribing social barriers and academic boundaries which are constantly re-privileged within education policy and schools. In all of this, the conditions of acquisition , the costs, inputs, investments underlying performance and accumulation of symbolic capitals, are obscured, their properties simply seen as "legitimate competence".
• Rather I am saying that they cannot do so in isolation, and within the current policy regime may, indeed, be required to contribute to, rather than remediate, existing inequalities. Furthermore, there are a number of policies or initiatives in play, like Sure Start or Extended Schools , or programmes funded or run by charities like Shine and SchoolFriends (Shine on Saturdays , Serious Fun on Saturdays , etc.) which do offer out of school experiences to a small number of working class children which echo the efforts and investments of middle class parents.
• Thirdly, it must, therefore, be argued, educational policies are also exacerbating social segregation, divisions and problems, contributing to a decline in civil society, tolerance and trust, by changing or limiting the ways we relate together. Two complementary education policy discourses have dominated under New Labour and as [20] Thrift (2005, p. 24) explains: "discourses are metalanguages that instruct people how to live as people". Both work to totalise, individualise and commodify their educational subjects.
• One, the discourse of standards/achievement, which works through testing, benchmarks, league-tables, "coasting" schools, special measures etc., totalises, individualises and commodifies the student as an "ability" - a cluster of performances. And in turn gives rise to "local economies of student worth" that "value" students differently within the processes of "school choice". The other, the discourse of choice and active parenting, totalises, individualises and commodifies parents and families as "consumers" of education and investors in cultural capital. "We have now reached a point at the beginning of the 21st century when parental involvement is no longer optional as parents are increasingly seen to be co-educators alongside their children's teachers" ([18] Reay, 2004, p. 76).
• Both discourses seethe with values. Policies which give undue and overwhelming stress to excellence, competition, standards and performance as the defining characteristics of our education system encourage and give credence to strategic rather than social relations.
• All of this, in more general terms, gives rise to a perception that there is a "decline of values" and of "community", as indicated in a recent public consultation funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. When Rowntree set up his three trusts, in 1904, he identified his worst social evils, which included poverty, war, slavery, the opium trade and gambling. One hundred years on Joseph Rowntree Foundation decided to find out what people think are the social evils of the 21st century:
• Schools and colleges and universities are encouraged to compete and be more business-like and more like businesses, an approach which encompasses their relation to students and prospective students. Parents are encouraged to compete and seek relative and relational advantages for their child. In this new moral arena education is increasingly like any other commodity and children's development is a lucrative market opportunity for capital.
• Fourthly, now that we know the specific and very direct ways in which social, political and economic inequalities are transformed into educational inequalities we must stop compounding them by acting on simplistic, de-contextualised notions about the possibilities of parental support and parental engagement. This systematic neglect does symbolic and practical violence to economically disadvantaged households both by erasing the relationship between income and opportunity, and by privileging middle class values of competitive advantage over those of "community" within policy.

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