In the first instalment of this series, I set out ways in which the education system is classist and why the classroom isn’t working for working class students.
The first step towards countering classism is to acknowledge that it exists both in society and in schools, and then to unpack the causes and consequences of classism in order to identify the solutions.
Now it is time to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty suggesting some practical solutions. To get us started, I want to explore something called “secret knowledge”.
Working class students
Article 1: In pursuit of equity in education: Published May 1, 2023
Article 2: Four domains of secret knowledge: This article
Article 3: Curriculum equality: Published May 16, 2023.
Article 4: Curriculum equity: Published May 23, 2023.
Secret knowledge
In our book, The Working Classroom (2023), Andy Griffith and I use the term “secret knowledge” to refer to the knowledge favoured by the privileged. With this knowledge, the elite feel born to rule the world.
It is no secret why a parent would want to send their child to a private school. After all, by so doing, they are guaranteed smaller class sizes and therefore more attention and feedback for their child.
The quality of teaching is not likely to be any better than in most state schools, but private schools tend to be better resourced and have their own swimming pools, cricket pitches, music equipment, and so on. Also, by sending their child to private school, many parents hope their child will mix with the “right kind of people”.
On their own terms, private schools are very successful, and I certainly envy them their facilities. But I don’t like the fact that a student’s birth dictates their access to such facilities. I’d like everyone in society to have equal access.
Maybe we can’t change the system or increase school funding, but together we can better understand what beliefs, skills, and attributes private schools teach their students that are often denied to working class children and then find ways of including them in the state school curriculum. In other words, we can drag this “secret knowledge” out of the shadows.
Andy and I believe that one way to do this is by embedding four knowledge domains in the curriculum.
Four knowledge domains
The definition of social justice Andy and I adopted for our book comes from the late Professor John West-Burnham, who argued that “social justice requires deliberate and specific intervention to secure equality and equity”.
Social injustice is not an inevitability – it can be reduced by intelligent action and one way to do this is by thinking about the types of knowledge that our students develop. These four knowledge domains can act as an antidote to “secret knowledge”:
- Disciplinary knowledge.
- Cultural knowledge.
- Personal knowledge.
- Social knowledge.
Disciplinary knowledge
Disciplinary knowledge is, put simply, the ability to speak, read and write in ways that befit each subject discipline. For example, it is being able to speak, read and write like a mathematician, a historian, an artist, a scientist, and so on. The development of disciplinary knowledge dominates the secondary school curriculum and rightly so because a lack of disciplinary knowledge holds students from lower socio-economic backgrounds back.
Personal knowledge
Building personal knowledge is about wisdom and wellbeing. What you learn in school helps you get the best out of yourself. This encompasses developing an empowering self-concept through the story you tell yourself about who you and who you might become. It is also about self-motivation, time management, realising strengths, and managing emotions – especially negative ones such as anger and anxiety that could derail you from taking a successful path.
We believe that growing personal knowledge is a key indicator of future success. In practice, it involves:
- Learning about our emotions (such as anxiety, anger, and sadness), understanding the reasons for their existence and the best way to process them.
- Developing metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation skills – key ingredients of academic success.
- Understanding notions of “self” and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the beliefs we hold, and how we can alter our own personal stories or scripts.
- Realising personal strengths and interests that can unlock future career and leisure paths.
Cultural knowledge
When you hear the word “culture” what do you think of? Every secondary school faces the dilemma of deciding, within the 5,000 or so hours available to them, what types of cultural knowledge they will try to impart.
Andy and I think a school’s cultural curriculum should stress two things. First, that knowledge of culture by the dominant class can be used as a tool for excluding others. As such, cultural knowledge should involve learning about so-called “high art” and other art created by the working classes.
Second, that no matter what social class someone comes from, they can enjoy any form of art or culture that they want to. People should enjoy what they enjoy and not allow others to decide that a form of culture is not for them.
Social knowledge
The fourth knowledge domain is social knowledge which refers to a study of the way society is organised and in whose interests it operates.
Andy and I think that learning about the writings of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu can be very instructive to young people, especially if they are from a working class background. Bourdieu’s work on “field”, “doxa” and “habitus” may be complex, but it’s also highly instructive…
A “field”, Bourdieu says, is a structured social place with its own rules – or what Bourdieu calls “doxa”. “Habitus”, meanwhile, refers to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess because of our life experiences.
Each decision about which film to watch or which leisure pursuit to follow – and indeed which occupation to pursue – is shaped by one’s habitus. In the right situation, our habitus allows us to successfully navigate certain fields and “feel like a fish in water”. However, the same set of skills and dispositions can, for other fields, prove useless.
Teaching social knowledge requires helping students to recognise that some professions or fields are very hard to enter if you are from a working-class background and to appreciate how society is rigged in favour of the dominant classes.
Teaching about social knowledge inevitably involves raising students’ political awareness. Done well, students will leave school with a greater understanding of why things are as they are. For example: why do we have so many food banks? Why do refugees want to come to this country? Why do we have a House of Lords?
Then what?
Once we have embedded the four knowledge domains into our curriculum, we need to tackle the causes of classism in the classroom. We can do this by coming back to the 3Es we introduced in the first article in this series.
- Equality through the core curriculum: This is about achieving equality in the way we design the core curriculum (that is to say, timetabled lessons and extra-curricular activities) and by giving all students access to the same ambitious curriculum, irrespective of their backgrounds, starting points and different needs.
- Equity through curriculum adaptations and interventions – this is about achieving equity through adaptive teaching approaches and additional support strategies that are designed to help disadvantaged students access the same core curriculum as their peers and achieve.
- Extension through curriculum extras and enhancements – this is about extending the curriculum experience for working-class students through extra-curricular activities and carefully designed enrichment activities which provide long-term opportunities for students to acquire the secret knowledge and skills otherwise denied them.
A final factor to consider
In the third and fourth parts of this series, I’ll look more closely at the first two of these Es and provide some practical solutions. Remember the four knowledge domains permeate all of this, too. But first the elephant in the room – there is another reason the classroom isn’t working for working class students…
School funding
According to Professor Diane Reay – author of Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes – working class students get less of everything. This is because less money is spent on them. Interviewed in Interviewed in The Guardian in 2017 in 2017, Prof Reay said: “There are predominantly middle class comprehensives and predominantly working class and ethnically mixed comprehensives – and despite all the rhetoric around pupil premiums, pupils in the more working class comprehensives get less money per head. They get less qualified teachers. They get higher levels of teacher turnover and more supply teachers. Even if they are in the same schools as middle class children, they are in lower sets and yet again they get less experienced teachers.”
Prof Reay and others highlight that the funding deficiencies suffered by state schools have led to a marked decline in art, drama, dance, and music provision. Less affluent families cannot afford to pay for their children to experience these activities out of school.
There’s been a funding crisis in the state sector for many years. Every government makes economic choices. Policies such as austerity and tax and spend have clearly led to schools being substantially underfunded. The difference between amounts spent on educating children privately and in the state sector is stark.
Prof Reay cites research from University College London that shows £12,200 a year is the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. At secondary level, it’s £15,000 compared with £6,200.
- Matt Bromley is an education writer and advisor with more than 20 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher, principal, FE college vice-principal, and MAT director. Currently, he is a public speaker, trainer, school improvement advisor, and primary school governor. Matt is author of numerous books on education and co-hosts the award-winning SecEd Podcast. His new book, The Working Classroom, co-authored with Andy Griffith, is due out soon. Read his previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-bromley. Visit www.bromleyeducation.co.uk
Further information & resources
- Bromley & Griffith: The Working Classroom, Crown House Publishing. 2023: www.theworkingclassroom.co.uk