Abstract
This article explores how children make, manage, or avoid friendships in super-diverse primary school settings. We draw on interviews and pictorial data from 78 children, aged 8–9 years across three local London primary schools to identify particular friendship groupings and the extent to which they followed existing patterns of social division. Children in the study did recognise social and cultural differences, but their friendship perceptions, affections, conflicts and practices meant that the way in which difference impacted relationships was partial and unstable. Friendship practices in the routine settings of school involved interactions across difference, but also entrenchments around similarity.
Highlights
Friendships are an integral part of personal social and emotional worlds, a key site in which individuals learn to negotiate public social worlds – interacting, forming opinions, The data forms part of a larger study investigating adults’ and children’s friendships across social and ethnic difference
Friendships made in primary school are especially important given that they are some of the first occasions in which children begin to develop understandings of social and ethnic as well as individual difference. We argue that those primary schools situated in urban ‘super-diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007; Vertovec and Nowica, 2014) environments, in which local populations are defined by the complexity of varied ethnicities, economic backgrounds, migration histories and legal statuses, have the potential to be one of the few sites to facilitate friendships between adults and between children from different social class and ethnic backgrounds
The extent to which living in diverse localities and routinely sharing social resources, such as schools, impacts intimate personal social relationships is explored by the project
Summary
The data forms part of a larger study investigating adults’ and children’s friendships across social and ethnic difference. Some studies of adolescents suggest that there is some, but limited, social mixing across ethnicity and class (e.g. Hollingworth and Mansaray, 2011; Rhamie et al, 2012), but examples of work on primary schools with ethnically diverse pupils evidences young children engaging in cross-difference friendships. In another study, Sime and Fox (2015) argue that children’s inter-ethnic networks post migration are influenced by age, class, gender, language, as well as perceptions of trustworthiness and cultural stereotypes These literatures highlight the extent to which social divisions and difference are recognised, known and used in children’s worlds and their friendship relations and practices.
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