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'Unruly Places' : Inner-city Comprehensives, Middle-class Imaginaries and Working-class Children

Faculty of Education, Cambridge University, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2PQ, UK, dr311{at}cam.ac.uk

The White Paper on Education (2006) re-emphasises the importance of parents within education policy and, in particular, the key role of parental choice. However, this article argues that parental choice is an inequitable process in which privileged parents are far more likely to have and exercise choice than their less privileged counterparts. The consequences are geographies of schooling which are highly class differentiated. Compounding these inequitable geographies of schooling are invidious representations of inner-city comprehensives as unruly places, characterised by poor performance and bad behaviour. Drawing on Rob Shield's conceptualisation of 'places on the margin' and the voices of working-class students, this paper attempts to present a different perspective on inner-city comprehensives from those represented in dominant middle-class imaginaries.

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