Jessie Abrahams’ new book reveals the extent of class inequality in schools in the UK.
By telling Jessie’s story and that of Jake, one of the young people in her research, this episode untangles the role aspiration plays for young people in school and the significance of the different choices that are available to different pupils in different schools.
Jessie puts forward ideas for changes that we can make, despite the limitations of what is a fundamentally unequal system.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript. We have made Jake’s story free to read for listeners of the podcast – download the pdf here.
Schooling Inequality is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £24.99.
Jessie Abrahams is Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. Follow her on Twitter: @AbrahamsJJ.
SHOWNOTES
Resources:
Learn more about the Paired Peers project.
Explore the Russel Group’s Informed Choices.
Discover the facilitating subjects.
Timestamps:
01:58 – Jessie’s story and how she came to write the book
05:37 – It’s about resources given to schools, not individual teachers
08:24 – Jake’s story
22:04 – Aspiration and the surprising difference between working and middle class children
30:39 – Blocking and the GSCE/A Level options available at different schools
40:19 – The missed chance to level the playing field during COVID
45:12 – Where can change be made?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: We know about the problems and inequalities in the education system and that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to enter university than their advantage counterparts.
Deep down, however, I think we still all want to believe that schools give our children and all children a fair start in life. Which is why Jessie Abraham’s new book, Schooling Inequality, makes a quite shocking reading.
I’m Jess Miles, and in this episode of The Transforming Society podcast, I’m speaking to Jessie, who is lecturer in education and Social Justice in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. Jessie spent time in three contrasting schools in the south of England. One was a fee paying school that was a high performing state school and an underperforming state school.
She spoke to pupils from different year groups, and careers advisers to look at the experiences of young people from different class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education. For all the political rhetoric around this that we hear. The book exposes that the assumption that raising aspirations is the key to raising attainment and widening access is fundamentally flawed.
More damagingly, it results in feelings of interiority and inability and the calculated perpetuation of social inequality. So how do educational institutions reproduce both disadvantage and privilege? Let’s speak to Jessie to find out more.
Hi, Jessie.
Jessie Abrahams: Hi. Hi, Jess. Thank you.
Jess: It’s really good to meet you today, and I’m really grateful that you’re giving us a bit of time to talk through this very important work.
Thank you. What I loved about your work and what I found intriguing and maybe quite unusual in the context of academic research is that it’s quite emotional and you give quite a lot of your story and you’re really open about that being a factor in your research and how you feel about it. I wonder if you’d be okay with starting with your story and how you came to write the book.
Jessie: Okay. Thanks, Jess. Yeah, I mean, it’s a big question. I think.
Jess: Sorry about that.
Jessie: No, I welcome the question. I think that it’s really important that as researchers, we are open and honest about ourselves and the the way that we come to do our research, our interests, and what motivates us and who we are. And I think that being, as you will hear and read, if you read the book, I think that being open about and being vulnerable I think is really important to actually supporting learning in lots of ways and helping people to feel comfortable, to be vulnerable themselves.
So I personally have found that I’m able to kind of be like this partly because some of the professors within my area of research have done that themselves, such as Diane Rae, which is very clear in her work that I have had that support. I’ve seen people be able to be open about themselves and I can see how powerful that makes their work.
So yeah, I hope that I can do that through my research for other people who also feel that. And so that’s kind of why that’s important to me. But to come back to your question of kind of what is the story? So I guess it’s difficult to do justice to my story without actually reading the book, but I’m going to try and give a little summary of points I think are relevant for this podcast especially.
I would say that my personal background in terms of my social class, I come from a very working class background. I grew up in quite a deprived area, which was and I was I was raised largely by my mother on her own, who has a disability. So because of that, we actually relied on the welfare state for income.
But in terms of my education, I would say I actually have experienced some privilege in that. I did attend a Steiner School, which is an alternative kind of educational provision, and I don’t really have the space to kind of go into the depths of that. But it is some of it is in the book, though, what I will do is I want to just quote something from the book about the Steiner ethos.
So on page 29 of the book, I say why the Steiner ethos meant that teachers respected pupils and treated them as equal individuals. They rarely raised their voices. There were no strict rules. No one wore uniform, and we addressed the teachers by their first names. In this school, I developed an enormous amount of confidence. I did not feel the way of authority, nor did I feel restrained or restricted by regulation.
So that was quite an empowering experience for me. I think for the formative years of my life, which was largely a choice that my mother made out of her own poor experiences with comprehensive education. But then, you know, due to the set up of our education system, I ended up attending a local mainstream, comprehensive school for the for the final years of my schooling.
And there I was confronted with a very different kind of education and one which was much more controlled, regulated and restricted, and one which was crucially presented very, very specific kinds of limited kinds of careers, guidance and options, and options for studying itself. And as I will emphasize throughout this book, I mean, I personally had a good experience in that school.
It was a loving, caring community, which I actually have learned a lot from. But ultimately they didn’t have the resources to actually provide as much options as maybe some other schools.
Jess: I think that something really important to say is, and that is that this your whole argument is very much about resources that are given to schools rather than what the schools are doing themselves or individual teachers.
Jessie: Yeah, Yeah, I think so. I mean, I will say that there are there are stories that I witnessed through this research that become very clear where there’s problematic behaviour from teachers in schools. And we shouldn’t shy away from saying that because there is actually a need for some more training, I think, around some of these things that we’ll touch on.
But I do think the big picture, ultimately the majority of the issues cannot really be resolved by training and things like this. The majority of the issues, the biggest barriers facing young people or the biggest inequalities is to do with resources and inequalities, not just to come back to my story. I think there’s another moment that’s quite important that then leads into how I came to write this book.
So fast forward through my schooling, attended college and I actually managed to get into an elite university as one of very few working class students at the time. And when I actually graduated, a professor took me under her wing and mentored me and I started working with her on a research project where we were comparing the experiences of 70 university students from different social class backgrounds.
It was called the Paired Peers Project. If anybody’s interested, it’s still ongoing and we listen to this well. As a researcher on that project, I was interviewing young students at the university and I’d just graduated from myself and felt very much like I knew what that felt like. And as I was listening to their stories, when I was hearing the stories of the kind of more privileged students talking about their transitions from school to the university and talking about the kind of careers advice they were faced with and the opportunities to support and the guidance that they received.
I was thrown back to my schooling and it was all very different and that was a moment that really sparked a curiosity in me to actually look in depth at these three very different schools and actually explore this issue and look at the different provisions and offerings that asset young people face, as well as and crucially, their actual experiences on the ground and how that might affect their sense of salvation and, you know, their aspirations, which I’m putting in quotation marks.
So I think, yeah, that was really that moment added to all these different kind of experiences I’ve had within education and with different groups of people has kind of been a big motivation to write a book like this or to do a research project like this. In fact.
Jess: Yeah, that really, really comes over in your writing and I just think it’s so amazing that you shared it in that way. I think there are actually two stories in the book. There’s your two human stories, there’s yours, but during the research you ended up supporting a young person called Jake, and you’ve brought his story into it as well.
And again, he’s been so open with this, but it really took an incredible emotional mental toll on you. I think so, yeah. The reading. Could you tell us his story as a way of introducing the issues that will go on to talk about him?
Jessie: I find Jake’s story very difficult to speak about. It was really emotional and actually it was a really big decision that I face. On whether to even include Jake’s story as a chapter of this book. So it was almost not a chapter.
Jess: Oh, okay.
Jessie: It wasn’t necessary. Yeah, I mean, I’d written this. It was written I needed to write it partly for myself. And I did kind of think through whether it was whether to include it because it is so personal. But as I said to you at the beginning, you know, I do think that there’s power in sharing personal stories. And and yeah, it’s also more than a personal story.
So I felt that I need to kind of move past my feelings and my connection to this story and actually expose this this what I saw happening, which I think is really important that people hear about on a human level, as you say, because sometimes we’re a bit more disconnected when we show big pictures and research. So yeah.
And so I do urge people to read the chapter instead of I will summarize because Jake’s story is really important to the book, and not least because it exemplifies some of the real flaws in our schooling system, and also because I don’t actually think Jake’s story is unique and many of us will when they hear this and read will recall either being Jake or actually knowing Jake.
So I personally could relate to Jake myself. And because of this, the chapter also explores my own personal journey and presents a very reflexive account of my work with Jake and why I felt such an affinity to try and help him. Jake, which is not his real name, was a year 11 pupil in my research who attended Eagle’s Academy, which is the school in my research.
Also not its real name is a school in my research, which was located in one of the most socioeconomically deprived wards in England and actually classified war. According to the average benchmarks for results, they were underperforming at the time.
Jess: So Jake would have been about 15 when…
Jessie: He was 15 when I met him, I think almost 16 perhaps. But yeah, at the beginning of year 11 and Jake was identified as being a bright student. According to many of his teachers on the bench, the kind of predicted grades or the target grades. He’d entered the school and they perceived he had quite a high level there.
But at the same time, he was also labelled as a naughty child, a naughty pupil, a troublesome student who they thought was not reaching his potential because of his poor behaviour. So I, I would argue and some of his teachers argued as well and told me this, that they thought he was misunderstood and potentially suffering from learning difficulties which were undiagnosed.
Jake had quite a difficult home life or things were happening in his home life, which it impacted on his ability to focus in school. And but despite this, Jake was continually being punished for his behaviour. And in some instances that was quite a clear and vocalized disregard for his own circumstances and comments made to me, especially when trying to kind of defend his actions.
So I first met Jake through interviewing him for my project. And during that interview he told me about his aspiration to become an architect, which was a, you know, a big focus of my project on what were young people’s aspirations. But it also became really clear during the interview that despite being a very capable and aspirational student, he was not getting much information or guidance about university at all.
And it became even more clear after talking with some teachers careers advisors about this, that it was because of his behaviour in the sense that they didn’t have confidence that he would be able to get to university because of his behaviour in a way that was just to kind of simplify it. But this was the thing that was blocking him from accessing programs to attend and visit universities, information about what kind of subjects you’d need to study, you know, various work that’s done with some pupils in schools to, you know, to widen participation at university and improve and raise aspirations.
So I kind of felt immediately like this is not okay. I thought it was an injustice. And I start to bring in some information in myself to Jake around architecture, which is what he wanted to do, and routes into this. And he was very much grateful for that. I also kind of started to work on motivating him to apply himself in certain subjects, which he really needed to get into architecture such as maths.
And I tried to do that through a specific kind of pedagogical approach, which kind of really centres around his interests. And I used the architecture itself as a hook to try to get him engaged with maths and understood sites and things like he liked music and music itself is, is, is kind of governed by maths. So I was trying to show him that the things he really is passionate about are part of these subjects that he does need.
And I was doing a lot of this work, which ultimately I will be honest, schools would not have the resource really to just do that right. Teachers can’t work in that case capacity. These with children, with young people. So I’m not even saying that that in itself is something schools can achieve, but it was incredibly valuable, I feel.
Yeah, I could see that that was really helping him so you could…
Jess: See a change in him. He was responding well to what you were doing and becoming more engaged and yeah.
Jessie: So this is a real, I guess potentially a point probably the school might disagree with me on.
Jess: Okay.
Jessie: It’s hard to know because I’m not a person that was in his classroom. So I can’t claim to know. But what I did see is a change in him as a child in his work with me, in just in the sense of him opening up more and seeming to like, you know, when you tell somebody or a young person something or talk to about something, can they go, Oh, wow, Like they have a light bulb moment, like, Hi, I’m a teacher, you know, So I can see I could see that that was things that were helping.
And not just that it was more the pastoral work actually that was happening because as I said, I think that Jake needed some support that the focus was more on kind of discipline on his behaviour. So I think partly because the school didn’t have the resources to show that care on a one to one basis. When I came in and started doing that and saying, you know what, you are really intelligent, I do actually think you can do this and I’m going to back you and do what I can with my resources to help you.
They told me, the young people told me when I would come in every week and work with them, that they really valued that because they had a high staff turnover, I guess, and they said to me that teachers come here and they say to us that they’re going to be here for us and they disappear and it doesn’t happen like that.
And it’s a difficult school. And I do think teachers were leaving maybe, you know, and and they just valued the consistency of my support. So for me, that was something I’d experienced with learning support, work as myself in school, actually. And I just wanted to apply that because I thought that that was really useful. Working closely and regularly with Jake, I really witnessed the way in the school that discipline and punishment came a lot of the time before love and care.
Yeah, and this is not one offs and this isn’t new. And Jake’s story is an example really of the pain that’s inflicted on many young people through our education system. The school asked me to leave and they told me to stop working with Jake, because as it comes back to your point on, was it helping him? Now the school’s out that I wasn’t helping his behaviour, and they asked me to stop working with him for that reason.
And so I think I found that difficult because my purpose wasn’t to not sounds bad, but I wasn’t trying to improve his behaviour in a way. Like I ultimately would have liked to. But I think it was a big challenge. But I was trying to overlook the behaviour and help him to move through the system and then get to a point where he could move on to what he wanted to do in his life. So I felt that he was responding and being more engaged with learning on subjects.
But perhaps what I wasn’t seeing is how he was behaving in the classroom. And I’m not I’m not trained to be able to navigate and deal with that. But so…
Jess: What was it that made the school say, really sorry, we don’t think this is working out and it needs to stop?
Jessie: It’s a really good question and something that I don’t know if I really ever had answered, because I think that part of the power of education, of the system of what happened is the vagueness. There wasn’t really something really clear.
Jess: And I got a little bit of a sense that this might be really wrong. But his behaviour, like you say, you weren’t prioritizing fixing the behaviour before anything else. You were just acknowledging that and moving on and doing all this stuff. Yeah. Was it was it a little bit like his behaviour wasn’t improving? So taking you away was a bit of a punishment?
Jessie: Yeah. So I really I absolutely wrote that. And I absolutely feel that what became really clear is that the school found it hard to deal with the fact that I, as a as a person from a university with bringing a lot of resources myself to the school was standing up there and saying, I want to mentor your naughty kids.
They didn’t like that because it wasn’t just Jake I was working with and they felt that that wasn’t sending the right message to the kids in the school because it was it was like, if you’re well behaved, we take you to a university in a way. So even though it might not have been a direct punishment towards Jake, it seemed to me symbolic.
Like when kids are talking about it, why is this person coming in and helping Jake? But he’s always disrupting my classes. It doesn’t feel like they saw it as a as a reward.
Jess: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s that conditional kind of you. But if you behave in this certain way, then will open up pathways for you. And if you don’t behave in a certain way, will close them down. You’ll quote in the book This is a question I was going to ask later, but we’re talking about it now. You describe a suspicion of any kind of love, attention, empathy and support directed at any pupil deemed to naughty. So that almost becomes mobility, almost becomes a bit of leverage, doesn’t it? And something that can be given or taken away as a way of controlling behaviour?
Jessie: Yeah, I was going into that school so regularly to work with them, but it’s just it’s Jake had been in trouble. I was not allowed to work with him and I was not rich. And, you know, and I do. So I still find that hard to navigate because even my experience in school, we had learning support workers Gary and Lloyd shout out Gary and Lloyd Donald’s names and they were incredible.
And if you were in trouble, they picked you up and they felt like they cared about us. It felt like they were on our side and they took us on. They and we we would maybe do our work, but it would help to calm down a situation and de-escalate a situation. And I think that sometimes that the system at the moment or the schools within schools, there are things that they can do because I think that there are things where schools need to understand how to navigate and handle that.
When a young person is in that state and is always about is, I know there’s an element. We have to understand that the classroom is full of young people and there’s a lot of them to consider. And but it doesn’t mean that we can just disregard those difficult students.
Jess: Yeah, that is quite a… it feels as if there’s a forgetting somehow about what that particular young person needs. And the end of your story with Jake was really brutal, wasn’t it? Because basically you were told to not have any contact with him anymore.
Jessie: Yeah, they did. Yeah. And not and not was something that I found that was very difficult. I mean, the school, the school told me that they were going to inform Jake that they’ve told me I can’t work with him anymore, but I don’t know. It’s not happened. I have not heard from Jake or that I don’t know what happened to Jake.
I know, I know. I said I had to say I didn’t want to get emotional in this. I will because. Yeah, I, I don’t know. Jake isn’t his real name, but if you’re listening to this, I hope that you made it, you know, made yourself happy and you’ve been able to fulfil the potential that you have, I think has a way of use as a way of introducing the themes in the book.
And what I’ve said so far, which is really about care and lack of care, I think, and support and love. That’s a huge, a huge thing that I want to stress and I think I come back to later. But there’s another element of Jake’s story that was that’s really key, that that actually touches a speaks to the rest of that.
The other themes in this book as well he written his story in terms of his aspirations and the barriers and the inequalities that he faced it faced in the opportunities to progress towards what he wanted and illustrates a lot of the themes that that that are in the book, that are based on the research with, you know, much more than just Jake.
And but it does highlight that like just to say, for example, the fact that Jake wanted to be an architect, okay, his school would not have offered him the option to study the correct subjects, to package himself in the best way to get into a course to study architecture. So the combination you need to study of subjects was blocked for him.
So yeah, yeah.
Jess: So let’s, let’s talk about that aspiration bit because I mentioned it in the introduction is at the heart of the book. So young people are told by politicians quite a lot that being aspirational is really important and then fail to give them what they need to be able to reach those aspirations. You found out something really interesting about young people and aspiration. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Jessie: Yeah, I did. I got quite a few things, so I’ll try to be brief. But I guess first of all, what I found is the young people I spoke to had high aspirations.
Jess: They all did, did they? Yeah.
Jessie: Well, they had a lot of aspirations and they yeah, they, the majority of them had aspirations. The majority of the people I spoke to sorry, said, you know, actually wanted to attend university, had aspirations for particularly kind of middle class careers, if you want to say something like that. And but they were not always aspiring for careers. Aspirations are vast and broad and it’s not just yeah, employment and education. And this is something other people have written about as well. But what I want to focus on is what is meant by then having an aspiration in a very middle class and specific way. Because what was clear is they all have aspirations. But how is that a differentiator?
What was actually happening that was causing some of them, some of them to actually be able to fulfil their aspirations in a way? Or what was the distinction in the aspirations that they presented to me? Because there was some distinction in it. So what I noticed I think was really interesting was that the there was a difference in terms of social class around their expressions of aspirations as a clear concrete.
This is what I want to do in my future versus I’m not really sure what I want to do. I want to see how I see how I feel. And I might want to be this or I might want to be that. And it was a bit more vague and a bit more general broad keeping options open and interesting.
I’m not sure if listeners will hear that and be able to assume and work out which way round, because I think that in the past that would be that’s almost the policy targeted at raising aspirations is potentially assuming that young people don’t have a concrete aspiration. So we need to give one. But it was the more working class students or that had a concrete aspiration.
So almost you could it almost felt as if the policy has come through now that just like this is what I want to be and they have to have something and they have to say something.
Jess: Oh, right. Okay. Because that’s what that’s what I meant by the interesting thing, because I kind of assume middle class kids would have a clear, clear plan, pathway and plan, and it would be the working class kids who are a bit more open and unsure about what they wanted to do, because that’s what the policy talk makes you think.
Jessie: I think that that was it was a having a clear plan, one to prove the aspiration, but also as a strategy to achieve it. Like this one. I think that they felt that that was what they needed to do in a way and what they wanted. Like, you know, okay, and when I say what they needed to do, I’m talking about already maybe by the time they’re getting towards year 11, because it’s now when it’s like, okay, I need to have a plan.
I need to know where I’m going. I come up, I have a career because I need to make option choices, you know, and I need to know what options I’m making to get to that future. Okay? And because the stakes are so high within that school, in that context, I think it becomes really important because without that, it’s like if you don’t have like it is important for them.
And I’m not even saying it isn’t important because it is. I think that that’s part possible, part of helping them because they do need to have a plan and have those understanding of subjects. And that what was I think it was the strategy almost of advancement of the middle class. I think that that strikes me because now it’s almost like the rules of the game of advantage have changed because we are all now constructing a plan and aspiration and taking the appropriate steps to get there.
How does the middle class and upper class differentiate themselves in a way and this is a very kind of academic way of thinking about it, but not necessarily really conscious, but that are conscious stages to it. So I think that it’s about it’s a kind of strategy of advancement that centres around keeping options open. So you’re trying to you’re not forcing yourself to have to make a decision because you’re growing and you’re young and you’re going to be able to explore learning and find out your pathway. You know that steps and there’s a kind of confidence that everything will be okay.
Jess: Is privileged, isn’t it? Is, yeah. Yeah. Yes. I thought about privilege quite a lot when I was reading the book and just that very idea that you have got choice and you have got different options and you can keep all of those if you want, is a privilege that probably in the middle class has happened. Other people don’t have so much.
Jessie: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It, it really felt like that. And you know, the time to play with ideas, whether you have that privilege and that luxury of time to just, you know, all go and have work experiences and think about what you want to do as opposed to having to construct a plan to support you in the steps to take.
That’s very clear. And I and I do have something else I really wanted to say about aspirations because I was kind of two prongs to this. And the other thing that struck me that was really interesting about was actually, as I said, the majority had high aspirations and I didn’t want to make judgments about what actually classifies as a high or low aspiration personally.
But what I will say is that I made an observation that the use of an aspiration is across the schools in a way with the most gendered and classed. They were the only real ones that appeared to me as classed and gendered, as I said. What I mean by that is yes, I’ve had pupils in my kind of disadvantaged academy school were much like they expressed aspirations for very working class careers, which you wouldn’t expect if you’re on the back of like raising aspiration policy, say for example, and you see in the book on the plasticine models made like, oh.
Jess: The plasticine, the models were a great way of getting the kids to express themselves. Thanks.
Jessie: Yeah, so much fun. Yeah.
Some of them I’m sorry I don’t have time to go into it, but you really recommend that. And there’s some lovely pictures, you know, plasticine models and so, you know, plasticine models of hairdressing. I want to be a hairdresser or I want to be a builder because I want to be a mechanic. And these were gendered, the boys.
I was saying those things because we had just and it was a beautiful thing. Like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And they were telling me, you know, my mum is a hairdresser and that’s so I wanted and I still don’t think there’s any issue with that. But of course the system applies of frameworks that says this is not the kind of aspiration you could know, especially if you’re a student that’s getting good grades and you no, why didn’t you look into something else?
So the system is working. How politicians would like it to in that the teachers in the school are trying to boost these kids up and and say to them, come on, come on, you can do it. Do you want to be a teacher? And you can get this quality of life or this middle class profession if you want to know, which is another story that then becomes really cruel when they’re not actually supported to achieve it.
Yeah, the point I’m making at this point is it’s really interesting to observe that this is happening in year seven only because I would kind of I would like to suggest and speculate whether this is to do with the aspiration discourse that then is applied through the school. So by year 11, they don’t feel able to have an aspiration to be a builder or an electrician or a hairdresser.
Perhaps I didn’t speak to the ones who still held those aspirations. And again, that might be because they didn’t feel that they could present, not because that isn’t really a legitimate and accepted aspiration for them at year 11. Yeah, in terms of what society is telling them. So and not feeling so sad.
Jess: So you have to have an aspiration that’s good enough and acceptable and you kind of push that push towards having that aspiration somewhere between seven and year 11. Yeah, but then come here 11 like day, if there’s any kind of other element of your behaviour that’s unacceptable, then all the resources to help you get towards that aspiration that you may not have even wanted in the first place and taken away.
Yeah, yeah. It’s just such a unfair set up. It’s such an unfair way of setting people up. Yeah. So aspiration is a huge part of the book and the other huge part of the book is opportunity. And that comes through and Jake story as well, because of the opportunities that were presented to him and then taken away the opportunities that you offered.
But I think you talk about opportunity quite a lot, a lot in the context of blocking. And what options are made available. And as I was as I was reading your book, I have a 14 year old who was kind of doing his GCSE options form at the same time as I was reading the book. So it was really resonating and I was really surprised at the extent to which different GCSE and A-level choices are made available in different schools.
So you kind of expect in like the private school you get your Latin and you get in that kind of thing. But even between the two comprehensive schools, there was a big difference, wasn’t there? And that obviously blocks choices for certain people. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jessie: Yeah, thanks. Absolutely. I mean, thanks for saying that. I actually think that’s something so key. I wanted to highlight in my work is the real contrast within the state comprehensive sector, because as you say, when you’re going to go and pay for a private education, well, you almost expect them to have a much faster range of provisions. And that’s you know, I’m not going to go into whether I agree with that.
But that’s that’s a fact. So but actually, when yeah, when you look at the comprehensives and then I hold on there is this is this isn’t fair.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: And this so yeah. I mean as a as I say in the book, I mean this is, there’s a real a vast difference in the amount of options they’re faced with at GCSE and A-level and the type of subjects that they’re given and but not just the, the, the quantity and the quality like it is about this blocking.
So it’s about timetable options, blocking systems. Right. And this is something that was so clear to me in my schooling. I had to do this. I had to pick subject options for my GCSEs based on timetable. BLOCK So you have to pick one option in block one in block B, C, D, and people will probably listeners will probably remember doing that in school.
Yeah, I think a lot of people did. So I was actually shocked when I went into the quite advantaged comprehensive that they didn’t operate with a timetable blocking system. So that was a path for me. I guess based on my experience that seemed like, whoa, so these children have like 30 subjects they can choose from. And there are certain restrictions, as you can read in the book.
But, you know, overall, they can create vast combinations of subjects. And whereas in my academy school, they’re subject combinations that they could make were very limited because they only had a few in each block, and that’s what they have to choose. So that’s.
Jess: That’s, that’s basically whether that timetabling was done first. Yeah.
Jessie: You have the school based at timetabling on student choices or do they fast timetable this the classes and then offer it like that. But what I want to say is that that might sound like the schools just making a poor decision in how they structure their teaching. But it is not that it is much more than that because it’s also about the resources that the school has to timetable with the freedom.
Yes, timetabling around student choices, that isn’t something that was an option. I don’t think in the school that I was working in because they had very, very limited teaching staff. And in terms of the subjects that the teachers can even teach, which is partly why they have a limited array of subjects.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: So that they use the same teacher to teach multiple subjects. So obviously, you know, you and you’re going to have slight issues there in terms of what students can and can’t study on that and the timetabling restriction. So that’s why I think there’s a huge implication in resources being directed to enable schools to actually throw out blocking systems and timetable blocking systems and give more freedom.
I’m just a little bit radical maybe because I would say if that’s not possible, if we’re striving for equality, we should impose timetable blocking systems across the board so all young people have to make choices within that. And then it’s something that’s just a norm. And we’re not we’re not seeing one part, one young person as as making better choices than another, which is technically false because they were only the options they were presented with were far more restricted. Does that.
Jess: It does make sense. And it’s really interesting because when we talk about creating a level playing field, this probably isn’t just in education. We kind of go top down that we think this is the best possible scenario and this is what. So all subjects are available to everyone and that should go down throughout the whole system. Oh, but it can’t because there’s not enough resource.
We never go the other way and go, okay, this particular school has to apply timetable blocking. So to create a level playing field, it’ll go up and all. But we never do it in that way round obviously because.
Jessie: Yeah, yeah.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: Because ultimately we do care, you know… But not just that it’s hard for us as humans I think to say yeah, let’s impose like when there is a restraint.
Is not being restricted. Why would you say I’m restricting these children? You know, because we also believe in meritocracy and fairness and we believe in young people or even that their parents, you know, have the capacity to send them to a school like this because they worked really hard and they deserve to reap those rewards and their children deserve to reap those awards.
You know, So it’s quite harsh. We do buy into this and we believe in it. And we we want this system to exist in a hierarchy. We do.
Jess: That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Yeah. Well, and that makes I was thinking about that as well. And I was there’s this really nice table I’ve got on one of the pages of the book that just lists the GCSE options available in each school, and that makes it really clear. Yeah. And I was looking at that and I was thinking there is a capital has been going on, isn’t there?
Because some subjects aren’t available in the less privileged school than the top school. But then also some subjects are available in the less privileged schools that they wouldn’t study in the top school. I’m thinking things like health and social care. I doubt I’m construction. I’m. Yeah, I’m making assumptions now based on my stereotypes, but like food, food and nutrition that might have been in the top one as well.
But there’s like a so there’s a capitalism that’s been going on as well, isn’t there, to feed out certain people into certain roles?
Jessie: Yeah, absolutely.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: And I think it’s framed in different ways and it’s framed about the ground supporting specific young people as their skills and giving them options that they they can do well in. And I do think sometimes schools believe this because trying to get grades, they’re trying to get outcomes. So they’re like. Which is you know… some of the young people in that school wanted to be hairdressers and builders, so why are they So yeah, well, we’re offering them what we consider to be an option that will help them get to that in some ways. So it’s like so.
Jess: It’s not much to do with skill, though, is it? It’s not. There’s nothing in class that will make you better at hairdressing or better at health and social care. No, it’s creating the people to do these jobs.
Jessie: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Obviously. How how we can see that, like you said, is difficult though, because I do hear I do hear it because I’ve been a young person. Like there is a level where if it’s something you feel passionate about and interested and excited in, then you might apply yourself. So I see the strategy of providing.
Jess: Okay, yeah, that’s there’s options.
Jessie: Young people because it’s the kind of works is what I’m saying about focusing on their interests. And like I do having read policy, I know that schools, some of this is coming from a good place. Actually, I’ll try. But the result of it is that young people are coming out with very different qualifications that are not compared equally, partly because we don’t put value in construction and health and social care.
So you because like I would I would say health and social care could be a fantastic subject like high quality critical thinking and universities. And some point we will people like that’s a silly subject It was not it’s fantastic. Yeah there’s certain things so I think you know in the book I write about that there has been a devaluing of certain kind of subjects like BTECS and things like that.
And it’s so complicated because I’m not even arguing that we should bring them back because the risk is what happens after and how young people are perceived.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: So yeah, access to different kinds of knowledge in and of itself can be seen as a, as a welcome policy. But the, the knowledge this that then producing and all the things that they’re learning on enabling them. That’s that’s the issue and like you say because even if they get something personally from studying health and social care, is it leading to what they want to do?
And sometimes maybe, but often not. So if I actually give an example, then as we think about BTEC science was something that came out strongly in my research that young people were being streamed in that academy school into BTEC, out of the schools, desire to get them some kind of qualification because the school didn’t believe they were capable of doing the GCSE and they had this option.
But then later on when they come to choose what they wanted to do in their career, if they needed some kind of science, they were blocked.
Jess: Yeah.
Jessie: They’re trying to help them with what they consider is more appropriate, but it’s actually potentially blocking them later. Yeah, they’ve labelled those people as not being capable of a certain level in a way.
Jess: Yeah. Thinking about ways of levelling the playing field. In the book, you say that during COVID, during the pandemic, we kind of had the chance to do this. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Jessie: Yeah. So this is a really clear example to me, this moment that I’m going to talk about of how our system consciously reproduce this inequality, I think for a purpose, as we’ve mentioned. So yeah, during COVID when young people weren’t able to sit their exams, many of you will be aware of what happened with the with an alternative examination system that was constructed on this algorithm that you may have heard of that was basically applied to all the teachers were asked to grade pupils just based on basically give predicted grades.
Yeah. And then the algorithm kind of took all the grades that were made and made kind of amendments and, and used the algorithm was based on past information about the school that the young person with these grades was coming from.
Jess: Oh, okay.
Jessie: So they essentially what they essentially did, a lot of people don’t realise this is like our system can’t support all grades to be really high. This is to do with like grade inflation and about lives and economic things. I personally am not exceptionally expert on, but I will say that what we needed is losses to carry on is for the cards to still work.
So they need some grades to be lower in some grades to be higher, right. That’s the way I see it. And so what happened is this algorithm is applied to to kind of counter what they consider to be teacher bias and try to make the results fit with previous years. So it didn’t it wasn’t like really inaccurate. So and so.
Jess: The teachers predicted grades fed into the system and then they kind of run the algorithm to give that cause that they would expect.
Jessie: Yeah, Yeah. So if you were in a school that was like historically underperforming, let’s say you had more chances of your grades being pulled down because if the grades from your school looked too high, it didn’t seem accurate. Right? So that was the intention behind this just to kind of actually pull it because it is hard thing to do.
So teachers say we’re going, okay, those teachers probably could be boosting them up a bit. Let’s let’s pull it back down a bit. And there was outrage That was public outrage. Right. This was actually kind of overturned. But what actually happened is they they overturned the downgrading of some schools, but they they allowed other schools to still be upgraded.
So we cancelled the downgrading. And this is, you know, saying about actually we can’t see how that in itself is problematic because if we down we allow to some to be upgraded, we’re effectively still downgrading people. We’re still creating a different differentiator, a hierarchy. We’re manipulating it. And we’re in this situation. They are artificially enhancing it because they needed it to exist.
So what I really wanted to mention, if you look in my book as well, that’s clear. There is actually points where the the algorithm that was written, that was an acknowledgment by policymakers that the algorithm will reproduce inequality, that in doing this, by the nature of what they’re doing, unfortunately, it will reproduce inequality. They’ve acknowledged that. And then they acknowledged that they explicitly are not going to try to change it.
Jess: Because we reproduce inequality all the time. So yeah, so yeah, so fit. But then equally you could have an algorithm that took different kinds of schools into account.
Jessie: Yes, exactly. And so in the book I argue how we could have just flipped this. We could have used the algorithm to account for inequality. Then you stop the people who were…
Jess: Like, You’d have been smoothing that curve. They wouldn’t… yeah.
Jessie: Yes. So I mean, who didn’t happen at all? I don’t see how it feasibly would within our economic system that we have, it wouldn’t work. But that’s an example of how we can actually change something and how positive it was. So positive discrimination, but it’s not. But it’s like recognising markers of all the historical disadvantage and historical privilege and instead flipping them and saying, because you’ve been historically disadvantaged, let’s actually push you up rather than say we’re going to push you down because you have been historically disadvantaged, you need to say that like, yes, quite shocking.
Jess: Yeah. And it’s it’s possible, isn’t it? Is the kind of the ways of doing these things to make it more fair. But they just don’t have the system do they.
Jessie: Yeah. They don’t say the will to change. Is it really that. I don’t think.
Jess: Yeah. Yeah. So we kind of need to get towards the end of the episode now. So on the Transforming Society podcast we always try and think about what we can actually do with all this stuff and what we can do with the learning and everything we’ve been talking about has been showing that this is just a fundamental structural problem bigger than individual schools, a capitalist reproduction of the status quo.
So it might feel like the system’s just too powerful to be changed. But you do identify places where change can be made to finish off. Can you talk us through these? Give us something hopeful to go away? Yeah.
Jessie: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks. I think sociology Jess of a tend to be notoriously not great at just providing the solutions I was saying we yeah this is all the problems but actually yeah you know I would say we need to overthrow capitalism. I do think over interest. I know, but yeah, it is bigger than these things. But yeah, like you say, sometimes feels too powerful that, but there are little places that we can make transformation.
So the first thing I would say is we need to I think we said it. We need to remove blocking systems. I won’t stick with that too long because we have said the.
Jess: That’s to do with like the timetabling and then yeah, yeah, yeah…
Jessie: Remove timetable blocking systems to or apply timetabling blocking systems throughout the board. So there’s a level playing field in the choices that young people are given or options that they’re given. We need to stop trying to focus on raising aspirations and instead focus on opportunities for progression towards a university or whatever it is that they want to do.
And so raising aspirations is a big one and it’s not a new one. A lot of people have said this, and I’ve done research that shows this. So yeah, I do think that’s something that needs to it needs to change.
Jess: I just had another thought on aspirations that I should have asked you earlier, but by putting it on the aspiration, you’re individualising it, aren’t you? So then when the young person doesn’t succeed, it’s on them because they weren’t aspirational enough.
Jessie: Yeah.
Jess: Yeah, yeah.
Jessie: And that’s a big, big issue and it’s, it’s a big part of what’s wrong with this discourse because yeah, we neglecting to recognise the structural inequalities that are lying behind this and it doesn’t take all the agency away from young people and in, in being able to move through, you know like I’ve done it, but I really don’t want to be seen as a symbol of meritocracy or a symbol of anyone can make it.
Because there was a lot of reasons why I did, and I don’t think it’s just as simple as that.
I mean, but like I say, I don’t want anyone to lose hope. You know, I don’t think it’s impossible for young people to make their way to what they want to do, even faced with really difficult circumstances. And that’s what I saw a lot of young people with, with a strong desire to do that. And we still see that.
Jess: So the transformative bit is moving the focus away from that aspiration and towards creating the opportunities to do something with them.
Jessie: Yeah, exactly. And then I guess kind of connected. I feel that there’s a real implication for universities. I think that universities need to understand students CVs or the choices that they’ve made in terms of the subjects and how they’ve presented themselves. When they apply for university, they need to understand the combinations that they may have had restrictions in place before they made their subject choices.
Yes, we need to see student subject combinations within context of the opportunities they were presented in the first place.
And that and I think I didn’t get to mention earlier, I really want to just mention facilitating subjects being key that and that not all young people are taught or have an understanding of what that means. Facilitating subjects are subjects that Russell Group universities advise pupils to take if they don’t know what they want to do, are unsure.
So again about keeping the options open.
So there’s a but, whether or not young people had the choice of studying all these facilitating subjects is key. So we need to look at their CV and acknowledge the potential barriers.
Jess: What kind of subjects are facilitating subjects.
Jessie: So facilitating subjects, so like there’s a specific number of them is like English, History. I’m trying to think that is in the book, but it’s not. So there’s this document called the Informed Choices Document that the Russell Group of Universities produce, which some of my schools were using with pupils, not all of them, and they actually list them and they say these are subjects – that are the reason they’re called facilitating subjects – their subjects are required more often than not in the entry requirements for courses at university.
So it’s literally that direct. So it’s like if you’re not sure what you want to study, but you want to go to an elite university, study these subjects because they will mean that there’s the most range of degree courses open to you.
They are all kind of academic things like English, Science, Maths. I think it’s, it’s things like that. So yeah, if you want to look at it, either Google, I think it will tell you look yeah, it’s really interesting actually in terms of whether they were supported to take those or not. Yes. And then, okay, so that’s…
Jess: Changing the university application processes need to have something somewhere to indicate on that basis these subjects were chosen. Yeah. Okay.
Jessie: Something quite simple. It really could happen, you know.
Of all kinds of widening participation …. Yeah. We’ve done things like universities have elite universities have done these contextualized offers where we understand young people’s grades as an outcome of an unequal education system where some of them, you know, had a chance to show and demonstrate that potential more than others. So like that and we make specific grade offers that might be reduced to a lower grade entry for students from certain areas in schools, because we think that they have high potential.
But then why didn’t we do that with subjects? Why didn’t we also acknowledge that maybe this student could be capable of doing this degree so we can give the real example? We want to go into architecture. You don’t have every single subject that they desired and you’re now looked at as less desirable than another consider.
Jess: But actually.
Jessie: Maybe you didn’t have the choice.
Jess: It could be something as simple as like a checkbox on a form…
Jessie: So my final thing I would say should be clear and place I really want to end this is we need to think about a better behaviour management system that starts with support. We need more labs and care and empathy to be directed to students. And I want to share then this come back to Jake, just to share with, for example, a moment, which to me is the kind of things we should be doing with young people who are in these situations.
And, you know, Jake, one day just before I was asked to leave the school, this was when things had really built up. He was really in trouble and he kept being punished and he kept missing his punishments. And he was in a cycle. And I came in and he told me, I found out that he’d been in a fight with somebody in school.
And he told me that what happened is that his button had fallen off his shirt in the fight and he’d or his shirt had been ripped off and his blazer didn’t have a button. So during a fight he became really exposed and he ran home and he the school would just present this as if he disappeared. They didn’t know what happened to him.
So when I came in and heard this, I was quite shocked. And the next day that I went to see him, I a needle and thread and I sewed a button onto his blazer and he did it up and like he was so chuffed, he was like, I don’t remember the last time I could actually do this. And it just felt like such an important small moment of care.
And I could see on his face how much that meant to him and to see that to feel that a teacher or someone in that fashionable context recognizes the importance of that and takes that care can have such a profound effect on them and on capacity. Their motivation, I think, to learn and to engage. And then so bell hooks, I want to end with a quote from bell hooks, because I think she’s the Bible in some ways around this area.
And she says to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
Jess: I’m very happy to end on bell hooks. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate that. Thank you for the chat and thank you for writing this book as well. It’s a really important one. The book’s called Schooling Inequality Aspirations. Opportunities in the Reproduction of Social Class is by Jessie Abrahams, and it’s out now. You can find out more on our website, which is bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and you can also get 25% of all of our books by signing up to our mailing list when you’re on the site.
Thank you Jessie, for a fascinating discussion and thanks to everyone for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you.
Jessie: Thanks, Jess.
Schooling Inequality by Jessie Abrahams is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £24.99.
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