Schooling,space and social justice

Abstract

The representational space of teachers and children in schools has changed beyond all recognition. Drawing on the idea that the school is a socio-spatial landscape, a highly significant institutional space with which children engage, we can understand forms of educational inequality as consequences of spatial production. This article contributes to the emerging literature suggesting that the spatial dimension of education is increasingly important in analysing the re/production of individual identities and social inequalities. Putting space at the centre of the article provides a further tool in which to analyse the possibilities for change in terms of educational social justice for all children. Using spatial theory, this article examines the overlapping relationships of spatial production, including: spatial practices of teaching and learning; representational space in terms of policy discourse; and spatial representations in terms of the daily experiences of school life. The particular emphasis is to examine the stories of people’s schooling experiences in order to investigate how schools shape, have shaped, and are shaped by the ‘structures’ and ‘landscapes’ of the education process, as well as by the social practices and interactions of participants. With a particular focus on Gypsy/Traveller experiences of school, this article examines the situation of children from these communities and their unique relationship with the schooling system and education more widely.

Introduction

The aim of this article is to examine the schooling process from a spatial perspective in order to enhance our understanding of educational inequalities. It outlines how space can provide us with an additional analytical tool in which to consider people’s schooling experiences, working from the premise that the issues that face many children in the schooling system relate to the ‘spatial’ organisation of the school environment. Moving beyond some of the traditional terrains of enquiry, including class, race and gender, the study of space has become an increasingly interesting area of investigation, particularly among social scientists. Theories of space and place are becoming reconceptualised in order to help make sense of the power relations implicit within the modern capitalist world in which we live as social beings. Educational enquiry has begun to embrace this ‘spatial turn’ and this article sits within this emerging field.

By drawing on work within spatial theory, particularly Lefebvre’s (1991) spatial trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived space, the idea is to deploy an alternative conceptual tool in order to examine the lives of individuals and their identities. Both the real (perceived) and imagined (conceived) landscape organises how individuals operate and can shape their identities therein. At the same time, their experiences and interactions with others in a location (lived), also plays a major role in normalising and supporting certain behaviours. This in turn influences who they become, how they behave, how they think and what they achieve in the places they inhabit.

Focusing on the educational inequality and marginalisation of Gypsy/Traveller children in the UK schooling system the key concern expressed here relates to how educational spaces in/exclude such children. Data draws on three focus group discussions, a number of one-to-one semi-structured/unstructured interviews, and participant observations in two primary schools. The first focus group comprised of a group of four teachers from a school that had recently accepted three Roma pupils. The second consisted of two (English Romany Heritage) Gypsy/Traveller parents and two support workers from a home-schooling project set up, although not exclusively, to support Gypsy/Traveller children who had experienced problems with mainstream schooling. The third involved four young girls of English Romany Gypsy heritage who attend an alternative education centre. A total of 23 further one-to-one interviews were carried out with head teachers (2), classroom teachers (6), teacher educators (2), trainee teachers (2), members of the Traveller Education Support Service (TESS) (3 from London, 2 from the Midlands), an outreach worker (1), English Romany Heritage parents (3) and young (English Romany Heritage) people (2) from the Gypsy/Traveller community. Each of these interviews lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours, and respondents were encouraged to tell their stories in an informal setting based on their experiences of schooling and education more widely. In order to observe and work with individuals in the socio-spatial environment of the school, further data was collected in the form of two short ethnographic studies in two primary schools with Gypsy/Traveller children on roll. Both of these schools were mainstream primary schools and, for the purposes of anonymity, I have changed their names; they will be referred to as Oak Tree Primary (with Irish Travellers on roll) and Green Acre Primary (with English Romany on roll). Further data was drawn from my previous 7 years’ experience as a primary school teacher, and 5 years as an initial teacher educator.

It should be noted that interview data relates mainly to those individuals from English Romany heritage, while the teacher focus groups relates to Roma Gypsies, and one of the ethnographic studies relates to Irish Traveller communities. It is important to note that each community is different and thus it is problematic to define these communities as a single whole. However, in this article I do refer to these groups as Gypsy/Travellers and use this term to allude to a commonality across the groups; a commonality, albeit complex, based on a deep-rooted belief in ‘nomadism’ and in particular a belief in and need for ‘mobility’.

Understanding ‘space’ and ‘place’

Space is now more and more seen as having been under-theorised and marginalised in relation to the modernist emphasis on time and history. (Edwards and Usher, 2000: 36)

In order to clarify the critical terminology within spatial theory it is necessary briefly to discuss the broad distinction between the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’. According to Thacker, the problem of writing about space lies with the distinction between place ‘as a static sense of location’ and space as a ‘sense of movement, of history, of becoming’ (2009: 13); where ‘space is out there and dynamic, place is in here and static’ (Gulson, 2008: 155). For many who have articulated a distinction between space and place (such as Bachelard, 1958; Heidegger, 1951, English translation, 1971; Seamon, 1979; Tuan, 1977) their starting point has been to look at the home as the first familiar place everyone can associate themself with. There is a general consensus in this work that the home is a particular kind of place that frames our understanding of how we go on to think about the wider spaces outside it. For Heidegger, the key distinction between space and place relates to the idea of ‘dwelling’; to dwell signifies the ‘manner in which we humans are on earth’ (Heidegger, 1951: 147). Spaces such as buildings are seen to obtain their being, or ‘placeness’, not just from the location but also from the experiences and interactions of those dwelling in them. Like Heidegger, Bachelard recognises this natural instinct for human animals to inhabit a space and, through existing and engaging with it, make it a place. Bachelard also relates to the idea that ‘all inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of the home’ (1958: 4–5). However, he is keener to focus on the more micro level of inhabiting a place, and focuses his attention on how inhabited spaces are turned into pleasurable places by the individuals that socialise within them. He bases his work more specifically on breaking down a house from one place in which we dwell, as Heidegger would see it, into a series of separate places including the variety of designated rooms in a house and even down to specific corners of particular rooms and specific furniture, and so on. He indicates that such places offer individuals a sense of security, and in them individuals can be themselves. Likewise, Seamon (1979) suggests that the home is seen as a place of rest away from the public domain (public places and mental spaces) of our daily lives, and somewhere where most of us have relative autonomy over what goes on.

For Cresswell such accounts of the home provide us with the idea that ‘home acts as the metaphor for place in general’ (2004: 24). Tuan (1977) also puts the home at the centre of his understanding of place, but is more interested in the importance of the emotional attachment and value individuals bestow on their homes. Cresswell uses this work and notes: ‘When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way … it becomes a place’ Cresswell (2004: 10). Tuan suggests that the importance of place is based on our experiences and in particular how we experience space via our senses. Like others mentioned here, Tuan agrees that from this attachment to our homes we can then begin to think about how ‘undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (Tuan, 1977: 6) in the same way we do with our homes. Thus for Tuan it is the sense of belonging which individuals feel about a space that establishes it as a place, a comfortable place where individuals feel ‘at home’. Therefore, understanding and making sense of how a place, like home, becomes meaningful to us, allows us to frame our engagement in other spaces where we seek to afford similar feelings of ‘place-ness’. According to Tuan:

From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa. (Tuan, 1977)

So for contributors like Tuan it is space that is movement, while place is pause whereby ‘each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (1977: 6). Here I believe that Tuan is beginning to discuss the relationship with place and space by understanding these terms as interrelated. Although he would perhaps disagree, I suggest that he is in fact moving away from privileging place over space. What he is representing here, I would argue, is that place is also movement, and thus it has the potential to become as transformative as space. The power within the spatial needs to be analysed more carefully in relation to how socio-spatial relations (re)construct places and identities through it, as Cresswell notes:

 … place does not have meanings that are natural and obvious but ones that are created by some people with more power than others to define what is and is not appropriate. (Cresswell, 2004: 27)

For those who privilege space over place there is a concern about power, which constitutes and is constituted through space and place, which interact to embody and re-produce certain social relations that are often exclusionary in nature for certain people. McDowell is very clear in suggesting this and states:

Places are made through power relations, which construct the rules, which define boundaries. These boundaries are both social and spatial—they define who belongs to a place and who may be excluded. (McDowell, 1999: 4)

It is important to emphasise here that it is place where discourses are reconstituted to produce social identities, as Cresswell (1996: 15) notes: ‘Place can play a role in the maintenance of all ideologies and the power relations they support’. Place is the practice bestowed in a certain geographical location in space that reconstitutes ideological structures and is thus responsible for the construction of power-relations and the subsequent spatial positioning of individuals in place. So by examining these ideological structures within the concepts of space and place we can understand more readily how places of practice become the embodiment of more wider ideological structures and vice versa. For Lefebvre it was by investigating what goes on in ‘space itself’, and in particular our geographical or socio-spatial imaginations and not just the ‘physical things in space’ (1991: 89), that we can begin to analyse social relationships, to expose the power relations embedded within contemporary society:

We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life. (Lefebvre, 1991: 6)

Spatial reconfiguration and the school

Lefebvre (1991), refers to three dimensions of space: the physical, the mental and the social; or, as he puts it, the perceived, the conceived and the lived. Perceived (social practice) or real space is the physical dimension of the place we find ourselves in, the taken for granted world we live in; an element of this space is how it shapes our bodies to interact with it, how we use our hands, where we stand, where we sit and so on. Conceived space (representations of space), or mental space, is the imagined dimension, the abstract, what we understand that place is; it is conceptualised space, discursively constructed via signs, codes, images and symbols. Lived space (spaces of representation) is the social, where we interact and relate with each other; it is space as lived through its associated images and symbols and thus a mixture of the perceived and conceived where everything is played out and comes together as a whole to reinforce meaning to that place.

At the conceived dimension of space Lefebvre refers to the term ‘spatial codes’ that construct a certain reality of the space, which is then reconstituted in place via the perceived and lived dimensions that constitute normalised and accepted behaviour in that place. He suggested that:

The very survival of capitalism … was built upon the creation of an increasingly embracing, instrumental and socially mystified spatiality, hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion and ideology. (Lefebvre, 1991: 50)

Similarly Soja (1989, 1996), in developing Lefebvre’s work, uses the term ‘spatial veil’ in order to illustrate how certain modes of thinking and activity become obscured over time and place, in order to perpetuate a dominant way of operating and thinking. By seeing ‘spatiality’ in terms of space, time and social being we can begin to ‘reveal’ the hidden power relations ‘behind the spatial veil’ (Soja, 1989: 50). As Soja puts it:

 … the demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era. (Soja, 1989: 61)

(Sibley 1995) Geographies of Exclusion London Routledge uses the concept of ‘socio-spatial boundaries’ to capture a similar terrain. He argues such boundaries are set up to construct ‘moral landscapes’ in which to ‘purify’ and govern space in order to exclude certain communities from certain places. He suggests that:

For some, the built environment is to be maintained and reproduced in its existing form if it embodies social values which individuals or groups have both the power and capacity to retain. For others, the built environment constitutes a landscape of domination … the routines of daily life, most people are not conscious of domination and the socio-spatial system is reproduced with little challenge. (Sibley, 1995: 76)

These ‘socio-spatial boundaries’, ‘spatial codes’ or ‘spatial veils’, whatever we want to call them, are arguably little different from the various uses of the concept of social structures under another name. These structures are ideological constructs that could be class based, patriarchal or racial in nature (or a complex synergy of all three). They create and construct certain hegemonic discourses and particular power relations that have produced representations of (a) space; establishing certain truths about a space or place, and thus negated other ways of understanding that place.

Drawing on these ideas we can see how social institutions, such as schools, embody and perpetuate a certain belief system, or ‘hegemonic discourse’ that is ‘literally inscribed in the landscape’ via the structures of educational policy and ideology as well as individual agency (Valentine, 2001: 5). In following this line of thinking, schools are socially produced representations of spaces for teaching and learning. Certain ‘representations’ about what schooling looks like in practice and what should go on in schools have been historically, economically and politically established. Increasingly, contemporary educational policy, ideology, discourse and individual agency work together, to produce what goes on:

School buildings … far from being the innocent backdrop to pedagogy were recast as central to the administration of the school population, providing the fabric of a disciplinary technology that, through the spectre of unremitting inspection and surveillance, enabled it to be normalised and classified on a day-to-day basis. (Gulson and Symes, 2007: 8)

In the context of contemporary schooling with a focus on school improvement, standards and performance, all associated with the marketisation and privatisation of education, I argue that the ‘objective’ of schooling, or the representations of (school) space, has become focused around the performance and accountability of teachers and children. Thus many schools have become spatially organised around the teaching and learning of particular bodies of knowledge and testing that knowledge, above and beyond anything else. The spatial imagination of educational policy has become increasingly focused and organised around shaping particular practices that facilitate this activity and understanding what school is about. As Ball and Youdell suggest:

Targets, accountability, competition and choice, leadership, entrepreneurism, performance related pay and privatisation articulate new ways of thinking about what teachers do, what they value and what their purposes are (Ball and Youdell, 2009: 79).

Consequently the representational ‘codes’ of the school environment have changed to reflect dominant discourses around ‘managerialism, efficiency, effectiveness, accountability and performativity’ which have changed the ‘representational space’ of teachers and children in schools … almost beyond recognition’ (Turner-Bisset, 2007: 193). These dominant discourses act as the ‘spatial veils’ that have produced many schools as places that focus on the achievement of tests and thus hides and obscures any other thinking about anything else that education and schooling could offer children.

It is by using a spatial lens that I suggest that individuals, and schools, can go some way in adapting their behaviour to create a more conducive environment for children and young people. It is thus important to note that a focus on tests may not be the case for all schools, although possibly for the majority. Observations from the two case study schools, which I illustrate below, perhaps provides examples of how some schools are operating differently and are not entirely test focused. As Lefebvre suggests, space is not fixed, and it is via the lived space that individuals can ‘change and appropriate’ (1991: 39). Soja also sees spaces as fluid and suggests that individuals operating in these places and spaces have the potential to unravel the spatial veils and transform themselves and the spaces in which they operate. According to Massey:

 … space is equally lively and equally challenging, and that, far from it being dead and fixed, the very enormity of its challenges has meant that the strategies for taming it have been many, varied and persistent. (Massey, 2005: 14)

In line with this thinking, the lived spaces of schools provide individuals, including teachers, staff and learners, with the potential to operate differently. By creating their own unique educational ethos, although often very difficult, the suggestion is that schools can establish the socio-spatial conditions necessary to develop practices that enable Gypsy/Traveller children to develop a sense of belonging to the schools that they attend; as somewhere where they feel included and safe.

In turning attention to some of the empirical data, the final section of this article attempts to illustrate the mismatch between the spatial environment of Gypsy/Traveller communities and the distinctive spatial orientations of the school. It thus highlights why Gypsy/Traveller culture per se is often at odds with the expectations of the current schooling system. What follows is initially an examination of Gypsy/Traveller culture and subsequently, an examination of the representations of school space.

Gypsy/Traveller culture

The language of the school and the language of the site are different. (Midlands TESS Teacher)

One of the key factors associated with the poor achievement of Gypsy/Traveller children relates to their prolonged absenteeism from school and sporadic attendance pattern. Regular school attendance is seen as important in order for children to stay on track and reach required levels by the end of each year. It is understood that those with a sporadic attendance pattern are unable to keep up with work that has already been covered and thus unable to reach their full potential (DFE, 2013).

The head teacher from Green Acre Primary school confirmed that absenteeism among children from these communities at her school was high due to their expected presence at both family and cultural events. She told me that the children in her school ‘travel quite frequently in order to attend funerals, and celebrate births and marriages as family events are very significant to the Traveller community’. The head teacher at Oak Tree Primary School concurred and noted that ‘family and culture take precedent over education’. This was further confirmed by all of the TESS teachers I spoke with, one noting that ‘If somebody in the family is very ill the whole family will go and that’s very much part and parcel of it’ (Midlands TESS Teacher). A TESS teacher from London told me that

 … if somebody in the family had to go to the dentist then the whole family take the day off to go and that’s why you won’t be in school and that’s the way it goes, because that is the key family issue of the moment.

Children would also often be absent due to their involvement in annual cultural events, including: Stow Horse Fair, Ecclestone Fair, Epsom Derby, Appleby Horse Fair, and Cambridge Fair. Such events were seen as crucial to the cultural survival of Gypsy/Traveller communities. For the four Gypsy/Traveller girls I spoke with during the focus group, it was clear that attending such events was important to them as a way of meeting with other Gypsy/Travellers. They told me that they ‘go to Cambridge, Stow and Ecclestone fair’, with one of the girls noting that ‘Ecclestone’s me favourite fair because it’s quiet, everything’s there that you need … all the girls and boys are there and they’ve got little stalls’. They also told me that during these fairs they are pretty much free to wander around on their own as everyone is from the community. This was very exciting for these girls, who were otherwise unable to leave their sites without being chaperoned by older brothers or sisters.

The head teacher at Oak Tree noted a further issue that affected attendance at school, related to the economic status of the father and the need to travel for work. She told me that ‘there were fewer children attending the school during the summer term, as their families tended to travel either back to Ireland or work in Spain’. This was reinforced by a Midlands TESS teacher:

Their attendance figures are not going to be good because Travellers travel and, even the ones that are settled on to sites, at some point in the year they will travel to find work elsewhere because you can’t just keep working the same area.

The priority placed on community and cultural events, and the need to move to find work, over school attendance demonstrates a lower priority afforded to the schooling process. One TESS worker from the London area told me:

Education has not been a main priority. When you didn’t have a site and you were on the road all the time, the first thing you’re worried about is where you were going to stay for the night, the second thing, or probably alongside the first, is how you’re going to earn your money for that day, because … it was very much a day to day existence and very very low on your list … was well should we get the children into school if we’re here for a couple of days.

The presumptions of a settled schooling process mean that ‘living in and for the moment’ present various kinds of difficulties for schools. One of the Midlands TESS teachers went on to say that:

Schools are fighting against things that are in-built over many, many, many, many, years; you can’t change things overnight, and school systems are not flexible enough to accommodate that I think.

So at the conceived level, Gypsy/Traveller communities internalise different representations of reality than those of others from a more settled background. For example, Education and schooling for settled communities becomes focused on a particular educational trajectory that involves consistent attendance at school, and usually the same school. Due to a sporadic school attendance pattern, many children from Gypsy/Traveller communities do not necessarily become familiar with the representations of (school) space and thus the representational space within schools. Thus, they often fail to build an attachment to the school so it remains a strange ‘space’.

Consequently, part of the problem with how schooling is experienced by Gypsy/Traveller children is related to the adoption by schools of a particular spatial-orientation that is often at odds with the experiences and representations of their lifestyle. Gypsy/Traveller sites are open and informal spaces. At the perceived dimension of the Gypsy/Traveller site, caravans and mobile homes are organised to facilitate free movement of children and adults. As such children are used to a certain amount of freedom on their sites, where all families know each other and are constantly in and out of each other’s ‘homes’:

We don’t have door bells they are useless to us, anybody that comes to us can open the door ‘are you home’; that’s how people come in, we don’t make appointments to visit each other. (Parent)

Another parent told me:

We’re always in each other’s places; either I’ve got 15 children screaming or she’s got them all in one running over the place – it’s dead nice. I think all travellers are like that though, on any site. They all look out for each other’s kids. (Parent)

So, at the conceived dimension of the site, children’s agency is structured by the socio-spatial ‘codes’ of their site, which becomes conceptualised and thus normalised as open and communal; a place to support each other and mix with all ages. In relation to ‘lived space’, children of all ages are always outside playing, interacting with younger and older children alike (as well as adults). One parent I spoke with told me that:

Our kids are never in, they are never ever in … 99 per cent of the travelling children are always outside busying themselves … They spend most of the time outside doing something … they would rather be outside. (Parent)

Gypsy/Traveller children are also expected to look after each other, with older siblings being awarded early adult status by their parents. It is the responsibility of these older siblings to look after and keep an eye on the younger members of their family. During my focus group with the four young women, they were very clear of their responsibilities towards their younger siblings:

Break times he’d [older brother] come and find me … Have my planner in the morning time, see what lessons I’ve got and then at break times he’d come in and get me … At dinner, I’d be in the canteen he’d come and sit with me.

I’m the older sister, I’ve got to watch her.

I’ve had responsibility from a young age … I come back from college, I’ve got to go home and clean up and then put the food on, pick the kids up from school time that comes, wash the dishes and it’s bed time.

In the settled community, such responsibility placed on the shoulders of young children is often viewed negatively. During the teachers’ focus group discussion, following the recent addition of three Roma children on roll, I was told about the responsibility of the 10-year-old over his younger siblings:

Every morning you’d see the three of them walking to school, when they did not live very far, and obviously that breaks all the rules … four year olds without an adult … But clearly culturally it is seen as acceptable to them. So that’s caused a bit of a hazard when they have gone off and run away and gone up on the bus to [new address]. But they have got that incredible sense of each other haven’t they. Yes. (Focus Group – Teachers)

For such children, granted early adult status in their communities, the institutional space of a primary school, where their freedom of movement is restricted, can become a place that is often at odds with the spatial representations of their own communities. Many primary schools have separate playgrounds for KS1 (5–7-year-olds) and KS2 (7–11-year-olds) children, and so older siblings find it difficult to ‘check up’ on their younger siblings. One parent told me that she did not know her older boy was not allowed to check up on his younger sister at lunch break and noted that:

 … it’s good duty to do that, he is big brother … I didn’t know that wasn’t allowed in schools … If it was assembly, I’d accept that and understand, but in their free time of a lunch break and it is his choice if he wants to check up on his sister. (Parent)

This parent was very well aware of the spatial restrictions school placed on her children, and it is clear from the following how she has herself conceptualised the ‘structured’ space of the school:

 … if you spoke to a lot of Gypsy mums or Gypsy parents I should say, what is the most thing they hate about school, they will answer we don’t like the idea that a teacher is trying to train our children as if they were a dog to go to the loo three times a day … they’re not animals, everybody’s bladder and kidney function works differently, you can’t train all these children to visit the loo at a one given time because it suits you better. (Parent)

During the focus group discussion with parents there was much talk about the formality of the school, summed up here by two quotes:

Schools unfortunately are too formal, gone are the day when you can just pop into the office and grab a quick word … I don’t believe that once a term meeting with the teacher for 10 minutes is anywhere enough.

Schools are everything about the system and the school is formal.

It is clear that schooling for many of these parents is a ‘structured’ space that organises their children in a certain way, which goes against the spatial-orientations of their homeplace. Gypsy/Traveller parents are also often suspicious that schooling is likely to ‘inculcate youngsters with values and social behaviours that are incompatible with traditional Gypsy life’ (Levinson and Sparkes, 2005: 752). This concern about assimilation reflects parental fears around what goes on within the lived space of the school that incorporates interactions and engagement with others in the school. I was made aware of this during the focus group discussion with the young people who talked about how their parents were concerned with what they are ‘picking up’ from non-traveller children in schools. This ranged from the use of different language to ideas relating to particular norms and values of Gypsy/Traveller lifestyles. For example, one girl told me that she would call her mother ‘mum’ instead of ‘mam’ and her mother would say ‘What did you call me? You’ve been in that school too long’. Another girl noted that her parents preferred there to be other travellers in the school ‘so you don’t forget who you are when mixing with your own’. A particular concern from parents was that if their children, particularly the girls, were mixing with non-travellers they may get involved with non-traveller boys ‘and that’s why they don’t want to send you to big [secondary] school’ (Focus Group). There was also a fear that children would ‘start getting cheeky and use filth and bad words and your parents don’t like that’ (Focus Group):

In high school, you know, the non-travellers in there, like the girls, they don’t care if they talk dirty things in front of the boys and things like that. And when we first went in, it was shameful … You’re quite shocked to hear what they are saying. (Focus Group – College)

These parental concerns around assimilation often result in many children from these communities being withdrawn from school after primary education and prevented from carrying on to secondary school. Those that do go on to secondary school are often further marginalised by a system generally at odds with the spatial orientations and understanding of their communities. The next section examines how a school system that focuses on targets and the achievement of tests offers further challenges for these children.

The marketisation of education

 … working with the children in their classrooms, you see the world through their eyes and you see how irrelevant everything actually is that you do in a classroom … It really makes you question what is important. (London TESS teacher)

Neo-liberal developments in the UK over recent decades have produced a school system based on the performance of teachers and children and a focus on achievement and results (see Ball 1999, 2008; Chitty, 1997; Gerwitz et al., 1995). Current educational policy and the demands of the schools’ inspection system based on the delivery of a National Curriculum and its associated strategies and testing regimes have changed the purpose of schooling and educational practice (Ball and Youdell, 2009). According to Dadds (2001: 44) schools are constrained by a ‘standards’ agenda where ‘teachers have been increasingly driven, pedagogically, by the political pressure to raise prescribed standards. This has led to a narrowing of creative teaching and to a greater emphasis on didactic approaches.’ She suggests that many teachers are forced to focus on results and coverage at the expense of real learning where children are engaged in dialogue and enquiry. A quote from a TESS teacher provides an example of how the landscape of teaching and learning has changed:

School should be about thinking that every child is special, and some children are more special in terms of their support; but there are many young teachers today that are not seeing children in this way and are only interested in levels and results. (London TESS teacher)

A particular difficulty expressed by many of the teachers I spoke with concerned the implementation of the Primary National Strategies for Numeracy (NNS) (DfEE, 1999) and Literacy (NLS) (DfEE, 1998), and subsequently the Primary National Strategy (PNS) (DfES, 2006). Schools in England were compelled to spend an hour on literacy and an hour on numeracy each morning of each day, following a prescribed format. The introduction of these strategies increased the profile of these subjects and re-organised how mathematics and literacy were taught. Some suggested that this was not all ‘bad news’, especially in relation to the NNS, which encouraged teachers to facilitate more whole class and group discussions (still dominant in classrooms today). However, others were not so accepting of such prescribed strategies, as this teacher demonstrates:

 … there was a certain freedom in terms of what you were doing with your teaching time, now its all taken up with literacy hour which has become more than an hour because its mostly done in the morning and you’ve got more than two hours of teaching time in the morning but only literacy and numeracy is done so that’s a whole morning eaten up … its more structured.

As Dadds notes:

 … when the teacher has an hour sliced into prescribed bites in this way, a tight syllabus decreed, whole-class and group teaching mandated, and practices such as group reading defined in a uniform way, little room is left to manoeuvre or experiment. (Dadds, 2001: 45)

One of the teachers I spoke to argued that reconciling the demands of the National Curriculum and its associated strategies was the most difficult and frustrating aspect of their work ‘because it’s just not relevant, it’s very difficult’. Another claimed that even if teachers resisted these demands and established more autonomy and creativity in the classroom, at the end of the day many of them ‘become sucked into the pressures of achievement levels and targets’ and end up just teaching stuff that gets tested. This was concurred by one of the London TESS teachers:

Most teachers … are constrained by delivering the curriculum … When you are caught up in it teachers become really quite obsessive with figures and get wrapped up in that whole territorial bit and get frantic.

Therefore, although not all, many teachers feel constrained with what they teach, and pressured to deliver content that may come up in tests. Some teachers may then find it difficult to spend time motivating and inspiring children or allowing them to work collaboratively in order to consolidate their learning, practice their new learnt skills or to re-visit previous learning they may have missed due to absences: ‘It’s all about getting through the yearly plans and making sure all the work is covered for that year and then testing that knowledge’ (Teacher).

These constraints of the curriculum and emphasis on government targets have therefore influenced the representations of space and thus the spatial practices of many schools, particularly around behaviour and grouping children. Teachers spend much of their time keeping children quiet, controlling their bodies, focusing them on certain kinds of work, and tracking their achievements against certain targets. I was reminded how teachers increasingly control children’s space and time in schools, as noted here in my Oak Tree field notes:

It has struck me today just how controlled the children are in schools – adults have clearly got the power and exercise this power by telling children to be quiet, to face the front and listen; to not talk amongst themselves, and to stay at their desks – rewards are provided to demonstrate to everyone what good behaviour looks like which then reinforces the need for all children to behave and get on with their work at their desks with minimum talk.

I become very conscious of the disciplinary expectations of working in a school again; and it is X [Teaching Assistant] that reminds me of this, she continues to ‘shush’ the children whilst I am discussing something with them ‘Show some respect when the teacher is talking’ she would often say; this despite my encouragement for children’s comments and pleased with their eagerness to talk and get involved in the discussion, some being very excited by the subject matter. Having her in the room makes me feel I have to keep the children under control in order to show her I know what I am doing as a teacher.

With this focus on results, many schools may target resources away from children who really need them to the ‘ideal’ learners in the school who just need a little more focused input, in smaller groups, to reach the expected requirements of the National Curriculum and pass the tests. These programmes are known as ‘Springboard’, or more colloquially, booster lessons (DfEE, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), and were introduced in England alongside the national strategies in the late 1990s. This provides us with an example of how ‘representations of space’ relates to ‘representational space’; that is moving children out of a classroom to somewhere else in the school in small groups:

I have noticed lots of children working in small groups outside their classrooms as I walk round the school and remember the head teacher talking about targeting specific children to ensure they reach expected levels and beyond. (Field Notes, Oak Tree Primary)

A quote from the Head Teacher at Oak Tree perhaps highlights further this spatial organisation within the lived space of schools in order to target resources to maximise achievement in tests for certain children:

In the past my natural inclination would be to look at the bottom end and think they’re the ones to boost up. But even today I’ve been having a conversation with my deputy. We’ve got quite a few children who are performing at 4a [expected SATs grade for children aged 11], which I mean is brilliant, but we’re looking how we can boost those into a 5 because we know our target is 40 per cent level 5’s … So we’ve got a club running after school for that group of children.

Whereas once teachers had a certain amount of autonomy as ‘experts’ in the processes of how children learn and what needed to be taught, this autonomy has been gradually eroded and replaced by greater controls over pedagogy and the curriculum to accommodate a testing culture. The following quote illustrates the lack of autonomy teachers and the tensions teachers face:

 … the pressure teachers are under that you have to teach something in a certain way, never mind where the child is … to get them to achieve a good level at SAT’s … they [teachers] are just expected to get kids to an expected level and not actually have any say or belief in education. (London TESS teacher)

All of the teachers and professionals I spoke to were very well aware of the demands of the curriculum, tests and targets, and understood that such materials are major hurdles for many children taught in schools today, particularly children from Gypsy/Traveller communities:

The National Curriculum is irrelevant to these children including the NLS and NNS. I tried to teach from the documentation, but the children were disinterested. They become restless and in one case a boy threw a chair across the room out of frustration with his work. I found a lot of my time was spent on behaviour management issues. (Trainee Teacher)

Such sentiments express the dilemmas and tensions many teachers face, working in a performative space that focuses on results and the expectation to deliver a curriculum focused on material deemed important by other agencies. The representations of school space (mental/conceived) are dominated by discourses around performativity and accountability. Spatial practice (physical space) and representational space (social/lived) consists of symbolic structures that attempt to co-produce these representations of space that in turn produce certain attitudes conducive to the regimes of a performativity-based culture. The application of Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad exposes the power relations bought about by the neo-liberal agenda. Thus ideas, ideologies, practices around the schooling process, and the focus on achievements and testing regimes have become normalised, while the tensions teachers face on the ground in delivering the National Curriculum, and associated strategies that restrict them, become clearer.

In line with Massey’s (2005) work on the potential of the sociality in spaces to change things, space is not simply fixed but fluid. The potential for schools to move away from the priorities of teaching certain bodies of knowledge and teaching to test, to a more progressive understanding of teaching and learning, in order to accommodate children from Gypsy/Traveller communities, becomes a possible reality.

An example of how such initiatives, via the lived space of the school, can influence a different way of dong things is noted in my field notes from Green Acre Primary. Pedagogical practice facilitated in this school was seen to support all children, but the Gypsy/Traveller pupils in particular:

Teachers work very hard to keep things practical and continually focus on basic skills and PSHE (social skills). Visual learning, drama, PE, creativity, figure strongly in this school – teachers work hard to build strong relationships with the children and think about the learning that is taking place through play and talking. Teachers ensure that everything is very visual, talk slowly, clear facial expressions, modelling expected behaviour, going into role and completing work themselves alongside the children (Field Notes, Green Acre Primary School).

Teachers at this school were also very creative with the National Curriculum; children were taught on a ‘topic basis’, where all lessons were interconnected, as one of the teachers in the school told me:

 … this whole idea of juniors has become sort of like new secondary school, where you do all this individual subject teaching … it’s all very disparate, doesn’t link up, doesn’t make a great deal of sense to the children … I think topics is a very logical way for children to learn. (Teacher)

The teacher educator I spoke with also exemplified this belief in the importance of topic-based teaching:

What works is a topic-based education where every subject is linked to one topic or theme. This makes more sense to the children as everything is linked and transitions between subjects are smooth. (Teacher Educator)

These sentiments were echoed by a number of interviewees. They suggested that all children, and particularly Gypsy/Traveller children, benefited from ‘real-life’ topics or projects that involved a more holistic way of learning knowledge and skills. This is summed up by one interviewee:

 … they enjoyed inclusion in real life projects, which the head was extremely good at organizing and things that involved them as part of the community … things like um deciding that we may like to build a little school farm on the plot of land at the back … um … so digging up the foundations for a base for a chicken shed and mixing up the concrete and making the chicken wire – building all the joints to build a wooden frame … any real life projects like that and using real skills that they could make sense of and relate directly to an experience out of school. (ITT Lecturer)

Through adopting a particular ‘representational space’ and the subsequent social practices to support different children, the social interactions and attitudes of the people working in schools can produce the landscape that supports and accommodates Gypsy/Traveller children, as this quote indicates:

It’s the attitude of the head and how we address the needs of all children within our community … If you’ve got a head who’s ‘well this is going to affect my figures and this is going to do this’, it’s not going to work. Whereas … I’ve got a head teacher, he’s got a cheery word for everybody, he’s made a point of going out and talking to the parents, because they won’t come in so he goes out to the van and talks to them through the window of the transit, and he’s done that from day one. And he’s made himself accessible to them when they need it. (Midlands TESS Teacher)

Concluding thoughts

Like any social space, the school environment is a socially produced space. Everything that goes on in a school is produced by a variety of interconnected processes, including government policy, discourse and ideology, as well as by the agency of everyone who engages and is connected with the life of the school. Due to a focus on performativity, attendance, targets and test results, many schools may simply be organised around the teaching and learning of particular bodies of knowledge and testing that knowledge. The result is the need for children to regularly attend a school, and for their progress to be constantly tracked to ensure they remain on target to achieve well in tests. Educational practice in many schools is increasingly organised around achieving good test results and the measuring and tracking of children’s performance in certain subjects (English and mathematics in particular). This raises social justice issues on the conception and delivery of education, since the way many schools are organised to facilitate good test results could disadvantage certain children, especially if they struggle to adapt to a school environment and fail to reach expected yearly targets. Children from Gypsy/Traveller communities are one such example where the schooling process may be understood as marginalising them. With their lived experiences structurally different from the settled majority, with less priority placed on schooling by their communities, the schooling process many not sit comfortably with the reality of their everyday existence or belief systems. Thus, the cultural and political aims of schooling perpetuate a certain hegemonic discourse, in line with a particular mindset that is often exclusionary in nature.

This article has attempted to examine the educational marginalisation of Gypsy/Traveller children from a spatial perspective in order to highlight how they may find schooling challenging in terms of achieving the best from their schooling experience. By drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial trilogy, in particular, the article highlights how perceived (spatial practice), conceived (representations of space), and lived (representational space) spaces work together to expose the power relations implicit in institutional spaces, as well as spaces more widely. Thus, space is not simply a ‘container’, or ‘neutral medium’, for social action to take place, but is also a ‘vehicle’ for the establishment and reproduction of social life itself. Once we understand the organisation of space in terms of a ‘social product’, where social relations are both founded and dependent on ‘space’, we can see it as integral to the constitution of the wider social framework and its relationship with power. This is to see space also as the embodiment of certain social values and norms associated with a particular hegemonic view.

With schooling being mainly focused around test results, the representations of school space sets up a particular ideological understanding that emphasises particular spatial practices which facilitate the tracking and measurement of children against certain criteria in order that they remain on ‘track’ to achieve well in tests. Drawing on these ideas we can see how social institutions, such as schools, embody and perpetuate a certain belief system, or ‘hegemonic discourse’ that is literally imprinted in the environment via the structures of educational policy and ideology as well as individual agency. What goes on in schools is created at the political, economical and ideological level, and played out at the local level by individual schools and their staff. Educational practice is thus socio-spatially produced and normalised. Such discourses (re)produce and (re)enforce certain types of activities, attitudes and behaviours, which ultimately excludes other ways of thinking about or doing things in school. These include what types of knowledge is important and therefore what should be taught in schools, as well as the construction of certain ‘pupil’ and ‘teacher’ identities. Those who do not ‘fit’ this identity may be marginalised and thus spatially excluded. Equally, by adopting a lifestyle that prevents children from attending school on a regular basis, one that focuses more attention on family and cultural events as well the importance of community responsibilities, it becomes clearer how children from Gypsy/Traveller communities often find it difficult to engage appropriately with the schooling process. On the one hand they face pressure from schools to attend regularly and do well in tests, and on the other from members of their community, who often fear the assimilation of their children within school.

However, this article makes it clear that when Gypsy/Traveller children are accepted and accommodated at the micro level of a school they do become part of the ideological make-up, or geographical consciousness of all who occupy and relate in the life of that school (representational space). This facilitates the development of positive relationships between schools and these communities, and ultimately practices that seek to sustain their inclusion. However, although individuals in schools may be in a position to improve the schooling situation for many Gypsy/Traveller children, there is a still a long way to go before these communities are accepted by the wider spaces of society as a whole, and thus afforded equality.