Dealing with Diversity: Middle-class Family Households and the Issue of ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Schools in Amsterdam

Abstract

The urban middle classes often celebrate the diversity of their neighbourhood. As soon as they have children, however, the desire to display symbolic capital may conflict with the need to reproduce cultural capital through the educational system. In the ethnically diverse Amsterdam schooling context, in which parents have free school choice and school access is not determined by fees, the socio-spatial strategies of school choice could be expected to differ from particularly the UK context. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with white middle-class parents in Amsterdam, this study argues that ethnic diversity is a major concern when they are seeing primary schools for their children, but that middle-class fractions have different socio-spatial strategies for managing it. It is argued that, despite differences in terms of housing market and school policies, the strategies of the Amsterdam middle classes are very similar to other contexts, suggesting homologies of class between national contexts.