ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by asking the following questions: How do young people become classified through mathematics education? How do educators professional practices contribute to this? How might they respond in light of this awareness of their collusion in such classificatory processes? Social class is a complex, shifting and contested notion and often goes unrecognised which makes its influence hard to see and to measure. UK Governments use a number of these proxy measures in their analyses of student progress—and other countries will undoubtedly use similar measures. The weakness of these sorts of measures is that they rely heavily on economic capital and on spatial aggregation and ignore the equally import dimensions of cultural and social capital. The challenge is to try and engage young people more effectively with mathematics rather than focus on structural organisational principles.
