This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ A historical geography of educational power Comparing fields and circuits of education in Sheffield and London Gamsu, Sol Joseph Pickvance Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 11. Oct. 2021 A historical geography of educational power: Comparing fields and circuits of education in Sheffield and London Sol Gamsu Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Geography at King’s College London. November 2016 Abstract The driving question behind this thesis is how regional divisions within England are present in patterns of social reproduction through schooling and how this interacts with and shapes differentiated institutional hierarchies. Specifically, this focuses on disentangling London- specific middle-class and elite circuits of education from broader national socio-spatial patterns of social reproduction through the school system. This draws on, but ultimately moves beyond, earlier debates around whether the circuits of schooling (Ball et al., 1995) associated with inner London gentrifiers (Butler and Robson, 2003c; Ball et al., 2004; Butler and Hamnett, 2011) are specific to the capital or whether there are provincial parallels (Savage et al., 2005; Bridge, 2006a; 2007). A mixed methods approach is taken, combining interviews/focus groups with post-16 students and teachers across several schools and colleges in London and Sheffield with social network analysis and geographical analysis of various educational datasets. There are three central findings, firstly that London’s ‘super- state’ schools form part of a ‘new urban elitism’ in education which is largely distinctive to London and some of the more affluent towns and cities of the South-East. Second, drawing on an analysis of regional trends in private schooling since the 2008-09 crisis, as well as data on catchment-area housing costs and the role of ethnic minority suburbanisation at an elite suburban grammar school, I reveal new lines of regional division in middle-class identities and orientations to subtly different institutional hierarchies. Finally, I show how stable middle-class enclaves around particular primary and secondary schools, traditionally in suburban areas but increasingly in central areas in London too, form a national pattern with an associated set of local, middle-class ‘continuity’ circuits. These regional divisions are in some ways a continuation of old arguments and debates around the dualism of class relations and structures in England and the UK more broadly (Rubinstein, 1987a; Cain and Hopkins, 1987; Martin, 1988), and how this affects and is affected by an education system with clear regional biases (Bradford and Burdett, 1990; Hoare, 1991). However, it also suggests new fracture lines and divisions commensurate with new approaches and analyses of the geography of social class in the twenty first century (Savage, 2015b; Wakeling and Savage, 2015a). 1 Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 1 List of figures ..................................................................................................................... 5 List of tables ...................................................................................................................... 6 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... 8 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 10 2 A structural history and a spatial topology of elite and middle-class schooling in England 18 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 18 2.2 Conceptualizing space and education through circuits of education ...................... 20 2.2.1 Circuits of schooling – a socio-spatial approach to the school choice literature 20 2.2.2 Bringing in urban processes – gentrification and circuits of education ............ 22 2.2.3 Completing the circuits - from pre-primary to post-16 ..................................... 24 2.2.4 Suburban circuits of education and the growth of an ethnic-minority middle class 26 2.2.5 Rural ‘gentrification’ and circuits of education across London’s commuter hinterland ..................................................................................................................... 27 2.3 Understanding elite education through a combination of circuits and field ............. 29 2.3.1 A social network analysis approach to field .................................................... 29 2.3.2 From circuits to field – field as a conceptual framing of elite educational institutions .................................................................................................................... 32 2.4 Towards a spatial topology of elite schooling in England ...................................... 34 2.5 Doing the necessary ‘work of transposition’ – the structural history and the spatial topology of the field of elite education in England ............................................................ 38 2.5.1 Educational elites in the South-East – building an infrastructure of elite social reproduction, spatializing the field of power .................................................................. 38 2.5.2 Anderson-Nairn, the ‘gentlemanly culture’ of elite education in England and the economic and social underpinning of the Oxford-London-Cambridge nexus ................ 40 2.5.3 The politics of regressive modernisation: England’s educational state and the preservation of elite educational forms ......................................................................... 46 2.6 Urban middle-class educational practices – a historical analysis of enclave building 56 2.6.1 The scholarship school – ‘a force in its own right’: patterns of scholarship winning and contemporary parallels ............................................................................. 57 2.6.2 Post-war practices and strategies of the urban middle classes: from grammars to comprehensivization in the suburbs and the creation of stable ‘enclaves’ in the city 61 2.6.3 Middle-class colonisation of the local primary school – continuing ‘the scholarship tradition’ under the tripartite system........................................................... 62 2.6.4 Comprehensivization, post-war suburbanisation and the growing importance of selection at 16 .............................................................................................................. 64 2 2.6.5 The historically situated gentrifier ‘stable enclave’ in inner London ................ 67 2.7 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 69 3. Methodology: analysing schooling and class across space and time ........................... 73 3.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 73 3.2. Research questions .............................................................................................. 75 3.3. Comparing cities and education over time and through space: a theoretical approach ......................................................................................................................... 76 3.4. Research design: case selection ........................................................................... 81 3.4.1. Choosing cities: Sheffield as a provincial contrast to London’s field of schooling 81 3.4.2. Choosing schools: London’s super-state schools and the suburban comprehensives ........................................................................................................... 87 3.5. Data collection, methods and analysis .................................................................. 88 3.5.1. Qualitative data collection, methods and analysis .......................................... 89 3.5.2. Quantitative data sources, methods and analysis .......................................... 93 3.6. Conclusions: towards a social science of accumulations ...................................... 94 4 Infrastructures of social