Miseducation

4 Oct, 2018 at 00:08 | Posted in Education & School | Comments Off on Miseducation

When Diane Reay, Cambridge University professor of education, started researching her book about working class children’s experiences of education, she had no idea just how much inequality she would uncover in state schools today … She expected to find the English state system was providing roughly the same education for all. “But it doesn’t” …

Reay’s background informs her book and her opinions. The daughter of a coalminer, and the eldest of eight, she grew up on a council estate and received free school meals. She then spent 20 years working as a teacher in London primary schools before moving into academia and ending up at Cambridge …

“I learned as a small child I had to work at least twice as hard as the middle class children to achieve the same result. When I did show ambition – to go to LSE to be a political researcher – I was told it wasn’t appropriate.”

How much has changed? “This government is making inequality in education worse, not better,” she says.

Donna Ferguson/The Guardian