Educational area based initiatives - issues of redistribution and recognition

Carlo Raffo


Poor educational outcomes continue to be located in the poorest towns and cities in the UK.  Educational policy over the last 40 years has tended to respond to this inequality in predominately one of two ways. Firstly there have been attempts to raise standards across the system as a whole. Where these attempts have failed, policies have then been developed to redistribute resources to neighbourhoods, including schools, families and other public services located in those neighbourhoods, to help improve educational outcomes. Over time these later compensatory educational policies and interventions have become known as area-based initiatives (ABIs). The paper categorises and documents these important initiatives and provides evidence of impact. The key finding is that although there have been improvements in attainments, there continues to be an enduring link between disadvantage and educational outcomes. In an attempt to conceptualise why this is the case, the paper uses Fraser’s ideas of redistribution and recognition. The analysis suggests that the vast majority of ABIs have focused on meso level ameliorative redistribution that have provided limited resources for dealing with the impacts of structural economic disadvantage on young people’s engagement with education. In addition ABIs appear to have almost completely disregarded fine grained geodemographic research that recognises that educational outcomes are more closely linked to the particular socio-cultural makeup of poor urban neighbourhoods rather than to economic scarcity per se. It is precisely a positive focus on this socio-cultural diversity that Fraser argues underpins a politics of recognition – a focus that the schooling system and educational policy more generally has historically failed to fully acknowledge and act upon. The paper then suggests practical ways in which educational ABIs might be informed by a politics of recognition, recognising all the while a continued need for a wider redistribution of economic resources to aid this recognition