Place matters to education. It’s role in disadvantage is evident from long-standing geographies of inequality in England’s educational outcomes. Research institutes such as the Educational Policy Institute and my own research funder the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, have repeatedly mapped these inequalities. Even at aggregate scales, such as government region, patterns are evident. However, patterns only map symptoms, revealing little about causes.

Indeed, Pupil Premium, the government’s policy for tackling socio-economic disadvantage in England, has no place-based dimension, apart from then Education Secretary Justine Greening’s Opportunity Areas in 2017. This represented progress, defining places through multidimensional measures derived from opportunity, not only educational outcomes.

Pupil Premium (PP) is limited as my research and others’ have demonstrated. PP is individual-level poverty, derived from the crude binary of Free School Meals (FSM). Poverty, and its effects, clustered by place are overlooked. Place references in policy, or white papers, are simplistic and generalised, using aggregate or binary terms such as ‘north and south’, ‘big cities and small towns’, ‘coastal’ and ‘urban and rural’. The previous Conservative government’s Levelling Up white paper is a ‘hotch-potch’ of spatial concepts and scales. Recent government policy is dominated by the reliance on local authority boundaries, a convenient administrative boundary, but atheoretical.

Place is predominately operationalised at aggregate scales, from available administrative data with little theoretical consideration (Lupton & Kneale, 2012). Yet it is established in existing research, and my forthcoming thesis, that scale is significant: greater geographical scales diminish the effects on educational outcomes at smaller scales (Galster, 2008).

Geographical conceptualisations of place are limited when evaluated alongside multidisciplinary theorisations of place. Policy and quantitative methodologies ignore the socio-spatial dimension of place. The Marxist sociologist, Henri Lefebvre first developed socio-spatial theory in the 1970s, arguing that a place is established through social and economic relationships resulting in the production of ‘space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Following this, Massey and others identified the limitations of conceptualisations which consider places as only ‘fixed containers’ within which people live (Massey, 1994). This conceptualisation is at odds with social reality. The social spaces which people inhabit do not neatly fit within arbitrary administrative boundaries.

Socio-spatial theory is utilised across a range of disciplines demonstrating places exist socially and politically beyond, within and in relation to each other. Lupton, has advocated for the consideration of additional social or ‘acquired’ features of place, recognising that people are clustered and patterned by place with consequential effects (Lupton, 2003). Despite a ‘spatial turn’ in policy during the 1990s when the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) were introduced, public policy continues to overlook multidimensional and socio-spatial interpretations of place.

‘Despite a “spatial turn” in policy during the 1990s when the Indices of Multiple Deprivation were introduced, public policy continues to overlook multidimensional and socio-spatial interpretations of place.’

The current policy interpretation of place is reductionist. My thesis identifies that atheoretical conceptualisations limit the representation of poverty and place effects on educational outcomes. My research shows how multilevel modelling provides one way to integrate realistic complexity into quantitative research, currently excluded from education accountability. Multilevel methodologies facilitate an ecological theoretical approach to context, allowing researchers to consider the additional effects of place, beyond school. Furthermore, multilevel models can explore the ecological meso-level interaction of place and school in cross-classified models. Theoretically informed methodological approaches, reveal place is distinct to school, for educational outcomes.

My thesis also demonstrates that theoretical representations of place affect evaluations of individual characteristics, or the social facets of place. In quantitative research, individual characteristics such as poverty and ethnicity are routinely reduced to ‘control’ variables, overlooking clustering (Lupton, 2003). My forthcoming research demonstrates that multidimensional indicators such as IMD reveal a relationship between place poverty and educational outcomes at age 16.

There is a need for a theoretical lens when evaluating the role of place in education. Quantitative methodologies can be modelled in specific theoretically informed ways, yielding differential results. However, current policy models favour individual-level binary indicators for poverty implemented through limited linear regression models.

‘Policymakers would benefit from exploring the causes of educational disadvantage, rather than merely mapping the symptoms.’

Simplistic quantitative methodologies are the basis for high stakes accountability models, including the ‘disadvantaged gap’ measure. Consequently, policy often underestimates ‘place effects’ overstating ‘school effects’. Policymakers would benefit from exploring the causes of educational disadvantage, rather than merely mapping the symptoms. Theoretically informed quantitative research can illuminate the insides of these ‘black box’ place-based mechanisms, better targeting policy beyond the narrow metric of Free School Meals.

References

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell.

Lupton, R. (2003) ‘Neighbourhood effects’: Can we measure them and does it matter? CASE paper, CASE/73 (September) pp. 1–24. 

Lupton, R. & Kneale, D. (2012) Theorising and measuring place in neighbourhood effects research: The example of teenage parenthood in England. In M. van Ham, D. Manley, N. Bailey, L. Simpson, & D. Maclennan (Eds), Neighbourhood effects research: New perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2309-2_6 

Massey, D. (1994) Space, place, and gender. NED-New, University of Minnesota Press.