Educational Binds of Poverty

Shortlisted for BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed's second Ethnography Awards in partnership with the British Sociological Association!

Educational Binds of Poverty tackles the assumptions made by many recent social and educational policy initiatives suggesting that the best way to improve educational prospects of children in poverty is through an increased emphasis upon a culture of control, discipline, regulation and accountability. In this book, Ceri Brown presents these assumptions against a review of the research literature and an original ethnographic longitudinal study into the lives of children in poverty, in order to highlight the gap between policy discourses and the lived experiences of children themselves.

Through the theoretical concept of a set of ‘binds’ against educational success, the book explores four key areas that children in poverty have to navigate if they are to be successful in school. These are:

material deprivation

the cultural contexts of school, home and the community

friendship and social capital

the effects of student mobility through atypical school changes.

In seeking to characterise and explain what life is like for young school children, this book questions why policy makers have a radically different frame of reference in purporting to understand how their policies will change the behaviour of those living in poverty. This leads onto a consideration of what lessons may be learned in order to contribute towards a more appropriate policy agenda that attends to the multiple binds that children in poverty have to negotiate.