‘Doing your best’ in a London secondary school: Valuing, caring and thinking through neoliberalism

Abstract

Focusing on pupils in the run up to their GCSEs exams, this article examines notions of success, worth and ‘doing your best’ as they emerge in everyday life in a London secondary school. This discussion is in critical dialogue with debates on neoliberalism and the particular interdisciplinary relations they entail. Whilst recognising that neoliberalism represents an important arena of shared exchange, the author also argues that we need to be wary of writing out the complexities of lived experience as we utilise these analytical framings. Drawing from 14 months’ ethnographic fieldwork, the author highlights how performance and audit shape everyday life in school. Whilst these practices rest on processes of commensuration – the production of equivalence – a focus on the emergence of different forms of value and worth draws attention to the incommensurable dimensions of selves also in circulation within school. Furthermore, a focus on the care extended by teachers to all their pupils, not just the ones defined as ‘successful’ within the terms of audit and performance, highlights the importance of an ordinary ethics within school that cannot necessarily be analysed in terms of broader political projects of inequality.