Twelve years ago, Diane Reay argued that neoliberalism in the UK had ‘worked to bury social class’ (Reay, 2012: p. 592). This is not an unproblematic comment: it turns neoliberalism into an actor and begs the question of how the burying was done and by whom. These are questions I have been looking at in research carried out at the University of East Anglia. I argue that what has in fact occurred is a process of ‘redescription’.

The evidence for this claim is to be found in a wide range of speeches, white papers and other documents dating from the mid-1970s. In official state discourse, class has long been referred to indirectly. One reason for this may be because it is seen to be too blunt and divisive. More recently, it has been rendered through various euphemisms: ‘inner city areas’, ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘deprived’ areas, ‘challenging circumstances’, ‘weaker inner boroughs’ or ‘areas of underperformance’. These are more than just euphemisms, however; they are ways of constructing the kind of phenomena we think is at issue. Such terms transform social class into something which seems natural rather than social and is not the result of human agency (see Finlayson, 2007).

In recent history this process of redescription started with a rhetorical intervention by Keith Joseph in 1974. Speaking to the Edgbaston branch of the Conservative Party, Joseph made a speech which identified state schools and attainment as inferior. He argued that increased education budgets led to increasing levels of delinquency and a decline in educational standards, claiming that some secondary schools ‘are dominated by gangs operating extortion rackets against small children’ (Joseph, 1974).

Rhetorical political analysis works by examining the arguments that political actors use to persuade other actors to support a course of action. In constructing arguments, actors make appeals on the basis of ethos (character/authority) and pathos (emotion) as well as logos (reason). This was evident in Joseph’s speech, where claims that state education was dominated by gangs and run by hypocritical social experimenters were foregrounded (a reference to the William Tyndale controversy). Such arguments are likely to be highly persuasive precisely because they are based on ethos and pathos, rather than logos.

Joseph’s speech also put ‘quality’ onto the education policy agenda. Hiss key argument was that equality had to be replaced with ‘quality’ and an agenda of ‘choice and diversity’ in place of an agenda which he saw as promoting self-evidently low-quality comprehensive schools and progressive teaching methods.

‘The argument for “quality” has become highly influential across the political spectrum. It is sufficiently flexible to fit into various ideological positions.’

This argument for ‘quality’ has become highly influential across the political spectrum. It is sufficiently flexible to fit into various ideological positions. In the 1990s, it enabled John Major to remonstrate against educational inequality, saying that he was not prepared to see children in some parts of the country have a ‘second-class education’. Later on in the decade and into the new century, it enabled Tony Blair and the Conservative-led coalition government to decry ‘bog standard’ comprehensive schools and ‘educational apartheid’.

This is how politicians and others (for example local authorities, Ofsted, the Department for Education, school improvement experts, the teaching profession) have ‘buried’ social class. What ‘quality’ does is to provide another way of talking about ‘class’. It’s not that it masks social class or even reduces it; rather it redescribes it, casting schools, teachers and pupils as either outstanding, good, requiring improvement or inadequate. It has decontested the promotion of difference and choice and boosted the status of particular identities and positions; it is these that ‘quality’ describes, maps and renders as evidence. In doing this, those using the concept transform the school into a ‘black box’; political actors express their concerns over the attainment gap and the ‘challenges’ of deprivation, yet maintain that only the school is responsible for this state of affairs; only the school can fix it. In making this argument, the force of ‘quality’ as a class referent is simultaneously used and neutralised.

‘What “quality” does is to provide another way of talking about “class”… casting schools, teachers and pupils as either outstanding, good, requiring improvement or inadequate.’

There is a contradiction at work here: while political actors continue to refer (crudely) to class differences in the empirical description of the attainment gap, they appear blind to the causal role of class (they say it cannot be an excuse) and to the possibility of policy solutions aimed at tackling inequality at root.

References

Abbott, D. (2023). ‘Quality’ in English education policy discourse 1974–2016. [Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia]. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94736/

Finlayson, A. (2007). From beliefs to arguments: Interpretive methodology and rhetorical political analysis. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9(4), 545–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856X.2007.00269.x

Joseph, K. (1974). Our common stock is threatened. Speech at Edgbaston. http://margaretthatcher.org/document/101830

Reay, D. (2012). What would a socially just education system look like?: Saving the minnows from the pike. Journal of Education Policy, 27(5), 587–599. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.710015