‘I got rejected’: investigating the status of ‘low-attaining’ children in primary-schooling (original) (raw)

2019, Pedagogy, Culture & Society

This text makes a significant contribution to the debate on within-class attainment grouping in primary schools, by portraying the views and perspectives of children themselves, labelled as "low-attaining". Extensive, active individual interviews plus observations over three terms of schooling facilitated rich insights into whether, and if so, how 23 "lowattaining" primary-school children assimilated cultural values designating them as having subordinate status to other children. We consider the implications of our findings for social justice, employing an innovative analysis framework which takes Nancy Fraser's conceptualisation of justice as "parity-of-participation". Our research illustrates that these children had absorbed some values about "success" that posed considerable obstacles to them, which led to feelings of isolation and lack of social participation. In particular, the children found some aspects of attainment grouping obstructive to social interaction. Reactions to these discomforts sometimes led them towards subtly subversive behaviour or alternatively to flat denial of difficulty.

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