Helen Lucey

Children, School Choice and Social Differences

Research into school choice has focused primarily on parental perspectives. In contrast, this study directly explores childrens experiences as they are going through the secondary school choice process in two inner London primary schools. While there were important commonalities in childrens experience, in this paper we have concentrated on the differences. These, we argue, lay in (a) childrens material and social circumstances, (b) childrens individuality, and (c) the ways in which power is played out within families. However, despite both individual and family differences there remains a strong pattern of class-related orientations to choice. We also found that while the vast majority of children were actively involved in the choice process, the childrens accounts highlight an important distinction between making and getting a choice. In this particular urban locale, there is less choice for black and white working-class boys than for other groups of children.

Project 4:21 Transitions to Womanhood: Developing a psychosocial perspective in one longitudinal study

In this short piece we discuss how we approached the messy and intractable issues of objectivity and reflexivity, fiction, fantasy and the production of knowledge in the qualitative, longitudinal study of girls growing up, ‘Project 4:21 Transitions to Womanhood’ (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989, Walkerdine 1996, Walkerdine et al. 2001). We try to give a sense of how we worked with conscious and unconscious psychological processes and theorized their place, not only in the research process but in the very constitution of contemporary gendered and classed subjectivities. This kind of approach, though it does require a willingness on the part of the researcher to look inward, is not a turning away from an engagement with the social world (May 1998), but rather an attempt to take account and make sense of that which tends to be denied or refused in researchers’ and participants’ rational accounts of the social world and linear accounts of history (especially the history of the working and middle classes). For instance, sociological accounts which assert the death of class because of the lack of evidence of ‘class consciousness’ amongst the working classes are silent on the overwhelming evidence of the ‘unconscious’ aspects of social class; of the kinds of identifications, ‘dis’identifications (Skeggs 1997), disavowals and desires that go towards the blurring and the breaching of contemporary class boundaries and the persistent reproduction of class difference. In order to engage with psychological processes in individual and social life, we had a number of interconnected starting points: that there are hidden aspects of human mental and emotional life which are active at the dynamic level of the unconscious; that the human subject is not an entirely rational subject (Cohen 1999, Hollway and Jefferson 2000); that anxiety and the psychic mechanisms developed to defend against it are central to the

Stigmatised choices: social class, social exclusion and secondary school markets in the inner city

Abstract The transition to secondary school is rarely conceptualised as an important influence in maintaining and contributing to wider processes of social exclusion in the inner city. This article argues that the seeds of social exclusion are sown in under-resourced, struggling inner-city schooling, and their germination is found in class practices, particularly the exclusionary secondary school choice practices of the middle classes. Drawing on Jordans conceptualisation of the choices available to parents in the new UK educational markets, we examine middle-class strategies of ‘voting with the feet’, exit and self-exclusion, plus the more covert practice of ‘exchanging addresses’. The article examines how these processes have implications for the construction of a polarized market where some schools are ‘demonized’ and others ‘idealized’ along class, racial and ethnic lines. It also raises questions about what it might mean for the mainly working-class children who have no choice but to go to such demonized schools.