Multicultural Mixing or Middle-class Reproduction? The White Middle Classes in London Comprehensive Schools

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with White middle-class families who choose to send their children to London comprehensive schools, this paper focuses on the construction of Whiteness and middle classness as privileged identities. The paper explores the contradiction between parents’ desire for multiethnic ‘mixed’ environments for their children's schooling and their fear and ambivalence about their children being ‘out of place’ in these contexts. It examines how various practices and processes set these children apart and result in a reification of Whiteness and middle classness as normative. The paper concludes that comprehensive schooling can do little to dismantle privilege in a wider system of structural inequality.