ABSTRACT
This paper examines the impact of gender on white middle-class parents’ anxiety about choosing inner-city comprehensives and their children’s subsequent experiences within school, particularly in relation to social mixing. Drawing on interview data from an ESRC funded study of white middle-class parents whose children attend inner-city comprehensives, we find that parents have higher levels of anxiety about their choice for boys than for girls, expressly due to fears about their sons’ ability to cope and maintain social reproduction in socially and ethnically mixed environments. These parents construct white middle-class boys as ‘sensitive’ and the inner-city school as the source of a problematic masculinity that is both threatening and antagonistic to academic success. These classed and racialised anxieties increase the pressure on boys and we find that boys appear to mix less freely than girls. Parental focus on boys also obscures the problems that girls face.
