This paper starts from the propositions that (a) pedagogy is central to the achievement of socially just education and (b) there are existing pedagogical approaches that can contribute to more socially just outcomes. Given the ostensible commitments of the current English Government to reducing educational inequality and to the importance of teaching, we set out to explore the conditions that would need to be put in place to enable these approaches to be developed and sustained consistently in disadvantaged schools in England. We start by analysing classroom observation and interview data from four primary schools with contrasting socio-economic composition, highlighting the different pedagogical practices that emerge in working-and middle-class schools and also in working-class schools in different circumstances. Interviews with pupils show the impact of these practices on learner identities. We then draw on a variety of literatures on school composition, markets, leadership and teacher identities to present an account of the ways in which these different pedagogies are consciously or unconsciously produced. We point to systemic constraints: a mismatch between student demands and organisational capacity; teachers' attitudes and professional identities and performative pressures on school leaders. All of these suggest the need for fundamental reforms to educational purposes and system architecture, rather than the naïve reliance on teacher agency to transform educational outcomes. Nevertheless, the current policy environment in England does offer some possibilities for action and we close the paper with some suggestions about ways in which capacity for more socially just pedagogy could be built within English schools.

New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio‐economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the cognitive, well‐being and social benefits of RfP. Children's volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools in the United States, Australia and England. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand how this potential might be realised and its effects on children's engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children's volition and engagement because teachers' understandings of reading focused upon proficiency. Such teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional to underpin RfP pedagogies. The paper provides new insight into the challenges of developing genuine RfP pedagogy and other pedagogies that profile volition and active engagement with learning in low SES schools.

To cite this article: Amelia Hempel-Jorgensen (2009) The construction of the 'ideal pupil' and pupils' perceptions of 'misbehaviour' and discipline: contrasting experiences from a low-socio-economic and a high-socio-economic primary school, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30:4,[435][436][437][438][439][440][441][442][443][444][445][446][447][448] To link to this article: http://dx.AmeliaHempel-Jorgensen a.hempel-jorgensen@ioe.ac.uk This paper examines the effect of school social class composition on pupil learner identities in British primary schools. In the current British education system, highstakes testing has a pervasive effect on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and pupils. The data in this paper, from ethnographic research in a workingclass school and a middle-class school, indicate that the effect of the 'testing culture' is much greater in the working-class school. Using Bernsteinian theory and the concept of the 'ideal pupil', it is shown that these pupils' learner identities are more passive and dominated by issues of discipline and behaviour rather than academic performance, in contrast to those in the middle-class school. While this study includes only two schools, it indicates a potentially significant issue for neo-liberal education policy where education is marketised and characterised by high-stakes testing, and schools are polarised in terms of social class.

This paper extends the ongoing debate about socially just pedagogy by arguing that disadvantaged learners' capacity to exercise learner agency, which is essential for learning but has been shown to be unequally constrained, can be more effectively enabled. This is accomplished by critically discussing the possibilities and limits of a selection of existing literature on socially just pedagogies, including Critical and Productive Pedagogies, for enabling learner agency. Using sociocultural theory of learner agency, the paper argues that these pedagogies implicitly aim to support learner agency but are to varying extents limited in this respect. It is argued that through a dialogue with the research on pedagogy for Possibility Thinking, disadvantaged learners' agency can be significantly increased. The paper argues that this could lead to extending learner agency from learning in the form of meaning-making and knowledge construction to learners coimagining socially just pedagogies and co-transforming existing unjust pedagogical practices.