Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article draws on data from 20 years of qualitative projects with parents to discuss and analyse four issues. The first is the apparent responsibilities of parents to deliver both the school and home setting which will provide ‘the best’ for their children. Second, the gendering of parental responsibilities. Third, I investigate how class and ethnicity shape parents’ relationships with educational institutions. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, I consider how parents’ habitus and the forms and volumes of capital they both possess and can activate inform their struggles for position in the field of schooling. Fourth, I seek to complicate the binary between middle-class and working-class parents with the former commonly assumed to be powerful and effective in the field of schooling, and the latter powerless and ineffective. I conclude by considering the direction of future research on home–school relations.
Highlights
The words of a white working-class London-based mother, cited in the title, sum up the sense of responsibility many parents feel towards their children’s schooling
This article draws on data from 20 years of qualitative projects with parents to discuss and analyse four issues
The data are from qualitative projects based on semi-structured interviews with parents from a range of class backgrounds and ethnic origins, and were collected as part of research into parent–school relationships in primary and secondary schools (e.g. Vincent 1996, 2001); parents’ social relationships with others unlike themselves (Vincent, Neal, and Iqbal 2016); middle-class and working-class parents choosing childcare (Vincent and Ball 2006; Vincent, Ball, and Braun 2010) and the educational strategies of Black (Caribbean-origin) middle-class parents (Vincent et al 2012a; Rollock et al 2015)
Summary
This was one of the drivers for our research into the educational strategies of the Black middle classes, to understand the intersection of class and race in determining parental priorities and actions around the education of their children This is not the place for a detailed discussion of intersectionality, and so it is enough to say here that in a seminal paper, Crenshaw (1991) emphasised that identities are not reducible to just one dimension; that a theoretical focus on, say, class can simplify and reduce, and through reduction, miss and misrepresent the experiences of, for example, Black working-class women, and the inter-related roles of class, race, and gender in their lives. The degree to which this is a persuasive argument is for others to judge
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