ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what groups are, how they are held together and maintained. Given education’s, the school’s and teachers’ valorisation of the individual, the focus here is on the work children do in groups as well as on the consequences of that work. Faced with the demand to achieve the highest possible standings in the local league tables, and the highest possible National Curriculum levels for children, the mass of children together can come to be seen as a pragmatic convenience but an organisational nightmare: they squabble, argue, gossip, insist on playing in work time and resist learning. Why would a teacher not feel overwhelmed when there are 30 of them and only one of her? Here we look at what lies behind some of these non-compliant and annoying (to adults) behaviours as they relate to the formation and maintenance of groups. Groups are fundamental to the way we live and organise our lives, they permeate our ways of being and thinking but the chapters so far have focussed on individuals. The culture within education at the time of writing is very much of individuality, and personalised learning has come to dominate the framing of many social and educational policies. As Stephen Ball notes:
The personalisation process is a relatively new one on the educational policy agenda . . . The extent to which the rhetoric of personalisation is translated into institutional and classroom practices remains to be seen but it will provide new opportunities for forms of differentiation and social advantageseeking that interested parents will undoubtedly pursue . . . [P]ersonalisation is one instance of an emphasis within social and educational policy on individualism, the making of the individual within and the subject of policy . . . Individuals are required ‘to make something of their lives and use their ability and potential to the full’ (Blair, 2002). All of this encourages individualistic engagements with and responses to policy.
