Revisiting ‘The Zombie Stalking English Schools’: The Continuing Failure to Recognise and Nurture Working Class Potential in English Education

Since I wrote ‘the zombie stalking English schools’ in 2006, we now have many more rich accounts of the way class is lived in English classrooms. Still, mainstream understandings of the way class works in education, both in academia and beyond, are largely filtered through the lens of socio-economic and FSM categorisations, and large quantitative data sets, focusing on exam results and the class attainment gap. Through case studies of working class young people’s educational experiences in academy schools, this paper endeavours to bring class to life by examining what success and failure means for the working classes, both individually and collectively. In doing so, it tries to develop a more animated yet nuanced conceptualisation of the relationship between the working classes and the educational system, one that recognises historical specificities, policy orthodoxies, and the wider social and economic climate in an austerity-ridden England that is riven with feelings of resentment, discontent and distrust of ‘others’.