The everyday classificatory practices of selective schooling: A fifty-year retrospective

Brine, Jacky

Abstract

The fifty-year retrospective has led to recent media interest in the comprehensive school. Bristol, located in the south-west of England, is frequently portrayed as an early provider. This article draws on documentary evidence and life-history interviews with ex-pupils to explore this claim. It finds that they were not comprehensive schools, but selective bilaterals that, despite including grammar and secondary modern streams within the same physical site, constructed, through their curricular and non-curricular practices, a rigid divide between the two. The selective schooling of the bilateral consolidated the classificatory practices that began in primary school. Framed by Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, disposition and classificatory practices, it is a study of explicit selective schooling that was reliant not only on key moments of selection, and differentiated curricula, but on everyday practices and signifiers of difference. © 2006, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006
• Journal: International Studies in Sociology of Education
• Print ISSN: 0962-0214
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-5066
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 37-55
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19620210600804269
• Keywords: classificatory practices, selective schooling
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1041565
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19620210600804269
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This article, focused on the policy implementation and effect of the 1944 Education Act, is informed by the concept of lifelong learning and by an interest in the relationship between compulsory and post-compulsory education, and between education, employment and life-chances. It is based on life-history interviews and on documentary/archival policy text analysis. It explores classificatory practices within a highly stratified pre-comprehensive schooling system in Bristol. The paper draws on sociological studies of the 50s-60s, historical studies and contemporary understandings to theorise the finely differentiated classed, gendered and raced constructions of white working-class pupils. This work informed the design of a contemporary HEFCE-funded study into continued low-achievement in South Bristol (see outputs for Raphael Reed).