ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of ‘the current state of play’ for the working classes in English education. It argues through the use of two case studies – testing and assessment, and tracking and setting – that despite over 150 years of state education, they remain Bourdieu and Champagne’s (1999) ‘outcasts on the inside’. The chapter shows the consequences of decades of neoliberal educational policy which has encouraged growing practices of polarization and segregation within state schooling as advantaged parents invest time, energy and resources in ensuring their own children dominate the top sets and tracks, and occupy the position of ‘best learners’. The voices of working-class children portrayed in the chapter reveal the damage inflicted at both the individual and wider societal levels. It concludes that at a time when the English working classes are increasingly portrayed as ‘left behind’ and a ‘residuum’, it is vitally important for complex and informed understandings of working-class experiences to counter stereotypical and oversimplified mainstream representations.
