Education’s ‘inconvenient truth’: Persistent middle class advantage

Abstract

Inaugural lectures are all about celebrating scholarship but their content, of course, is not necessarily celebratory. Indeed if there is anything to be celebrated about my work to date, it is probably a stubborn refusal to be satisfied with education policy, practice and research while we have such an unequal society and important political pressures towards greater inequality. Instead, as a policy sociologist in education, I have long been drawn to uncomfortable questions about whose interests are really being served in and through education (Thrupp, 1999a). I have been interested in how developments in education policy and practice can lead to greater social inequalities and how seemingly worthwhile policies and practices can be undone by other developments (Thrupp, 1999b). In recent years I have also increasingly turned