A historical geography of educational power : comparing fields and circuits of education in Sheffield and London

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).