‘Off The Model’: resistant spaces, school disaffection and ‘aspiration’ in a former coal-mining community

Abstract

Discussions of 'aspiration' influencing contemporary education policy and practice are framed almost exclusively in terms of individual-or, at most, familial-ambitions towards economic prosperity. The failure to achieve 'social mobility' in British society is often posed as being due to the 'low aspirations' of working class children, particularly in formerly heavily industrialised areas. In a classic case of 'blaming the victim' the social exclusion that undoubtedly exists in such areas is blamed on those who suffer it. Things would be different, the argument goes, if only people aspired to 'get on'. This paper looks at material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of some former coal-mining communities in the north of England which are often popularly characterised as insular and lacking in ambition. In contrast to this stereotype, however, the data suggests that working class teenagers growing up in the impoverished and abandoned utopian geography of Victorian colliery model villages, rather than suffering a failure of aspiration, often angrily and powerfully aspire-but for something contrary to the dominant model. Reviewing the ethnographic data in the light of a sociological and historical literature that attests to the exceptional nature of coal-mining communities, I suggest that such exceptionality impacts on young people's dispositions towards the educational project as a whole through a complex process of cultural transmission. A historically and locally situated notion of counter aspiration-that I call, here, resistant aspiration-is evident. I propose, in conclusion, that an acknowledgement of such resistant aspiration might help understand the widespread 'school disaffection' of working class youngsters not only in these former coal-mining communities but also in other postindustrial settings-nationally and internationally-that are similarly characterised by contested histories.

Social class differences in early education

“…• low SES children not feeling valued at school (Reay, 2006;Bright, 2011)and being demotivated by messages that they are failing.…”

Young people and UK labour market policy: A critique of ‘employability’ as a tool for understanding youth unemployment

“…family, school, peer socialisation etc.). For example, the "one-step transitions" from school to work in the 1960s and 1970s are more readily associated with working class youth, with different trajectories for the middle-classes with relatively more access to power resources (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997); and the work of Willis (2014Willis ( [1977) and Bright (2011) informs of the neglected importance of peer and family socialisation in shaping the social worlds and choices of youth (i.e. different processes of individualization).…”

“…In the mid-1970s 'two-thirds of teenagers went straight into employment at age 16, at the end of the 1990s less than one in ten 16 year-olds looked for work as they completed compulsory schooling' (McDowell, 2002, p.42). Thompson (2011, p.789) argues that policymakers reduce the growing complexity of school to work transitions to a problem to be addressed at the individual level: 'Low attainment, restricted aspirations, and negative attitudes and behaviours are essentialised, regarded as properties of young people, families and communities, rather than as consequences of structural inequality' (see also Bright, 2011). In other words, the fragmentation of youth transitions is reduced to the very same supply-side orthodoxies underpinning narrower conceptualisations of employability.…”

“…Indeed, our primary focus here is on those at the bottom of the class structure who find themselves in a much weaker position relative to previous generations and also to their middle-class peers. These young people are invariably: the marginalised section of the youth cohort for whom middle-class notions of individualization as an empowering force do not hold true given their relative lack of access to economic, political and cultural capital (Bright, 2011;Skeggs, 2004;Lawler, 2005;Willis, 2014); an increasingly stigmatised group facing widespread contempt (Skeggs, 2009) and 'diminished levels of empathy from the middle-classes' (Vertigans, 2015); and are therefore deemed to warrant a targeted approach by the techniques of welfare conditionality due to their perceived individual, cultural and moral inadequacies (Kennedy, 2014). That said, though the tropes of employability are focused on this group, the effects resonate across a wider youth cohort including unemployed graduates for instance.…”

‘Non-Servile Virtuosi’ in Insubordinate Spaces: School Disaffection, Refusal and Resistance in a Former English Coalfield

“…Picking up the theme of this special issue of EERJ, I want to explore some data from my ethnography of educational disaffection in a former coalfield area of England (Bright, 2010(Bright, , 2011 that cluster around the idea of what seems to be a straightforward, unambiguous and active refusal by some young people, both girls and boys, of the education project as a whole: its values and practices, its visible and its hidden curricula. In doing so, I will look at the extent to which this refusal among contemporary youth relates to patterns of resistance to school as lived by an older generation of participants in my research who 'learned to labour' in the same localities but in economic conditions that were very different from those of today.…”