Propuesta de competencias a formar a través del Proceso Docente

Gaining credentials is a primary feature of participants’ lives: their education has been a continuous process of accruing specific bundles of examinations and experiences that are thought to represent agreed competencies and skills; the beginning of their working lives are also filled with this demand. This section explores some of the ways in which participants’ credentials have been accrued by examining parents’ resources and strategies as understood by participants. In so doing, I will offer some understanding of what credentials mean and offer to participants, and the relationship between credentials and meritocracy, privilege, disadvantage, ethnicity, ability and hard work. These themes will also be used to reflect on the way in which ECA count as a type of ‘experience based’ credential and the impact this has on participants’ experiences of the application process. Themes will be explored through participants’ retrospective accounts of their parents’ role and relationship to their education and motivation to succeed, and participants’ claimed work ethic. Furthermore, through participants’ talk, we will see that as well as evidence of parents’ strategic deployment of resources to accrue the best education possible for their children, participants also draw on discourses of meritocracy and the concept of hard work as they narrate their educational journey.

Parenting and child rearing practices in the UK are a major area in which matters of class distinction and reproduction occur, with access to – and the

acquisition of – formal learning being the example par excellence. Despite the UK having an education system that is framed by ideals of equality and standardisation – such as the national curriculum and national standards for teaching and examination – it is distinctly stratified, rendering untenable claims that it is a purely meritocratic system (Ball, 1990). The issue of relative privilege is pertinent here in providing an analysis of participants’ experiences, because labels such as ‘middle class’ do not accurately reflect the range of socio-economic circumstances in which participants in this study find themselves. Devine (2005) and Power et al (2003) argue that the middle class is a wide-ranging group, and the lower ends are in a relatively precarious position, especially when their middle-class status is a result of relative prosperity from occupations in small business and private sectors, which are sensitive to the vagaries of the market. This compares with middle-class occupations in the professions and other public sector roles which have been relatively stable, until recent government public spending cuts have put this section of the middle class into what Lauren Berlant (2011) describes as a situation of precarity. For example, although I have categorised participants – and indeed, participants have categorised themselves – as middle-class, in reality this covers a wide range of parental occupations and incomes which were subject to change over a period of their children’s schooling. Therefore, parents’ ability to devote economic resources to their children’s education also varied over time. This means that the reproduction of class via the route of education and into a ‘good job’ is less secure for some than it is for others. One might expect that for those whose class reproduction was undermined by less

certain economic circumstances, reliance on hard work and a meritocratic system in order to benefit from the best available state education would be necessary. However, while hard work within a framework of meritocracy was frequently claimed as the primary reason for educational success, participants report that parents made a range of interventions into their education. I will argue that participants’ claims to have worked hard and/or to have natural ability serve to support and perpetuate discourses of meritocracy and undermine an analysis of the interventions made by parents in their education owing to their relative privilege.

I understand the notion of hard work in a number of interrelated ways. For Sayer (2005a), concerns about what does or does not count as ‘hard work’ reveals that while there is most certainly an empirical reality to hard work – such as the numbers of hours and exertion spent digging a road, or reading, writing and editing an essay – there is also a moral framework that underpins the concept. The concept of hard work holds a slippery position within education: Reay (2004: 36) writes that there is ‘an academic equation in which hard work is opposed to natural talents’. In this equation, excellent results should appear near effortless. The myth of natural talent and its concomitant reward system ‘meritocracy’ rests on the ability to ‘master’ and apply areas of learning with ease and joy. The echoes of this equation are found in recent research on boys in school, which show that the myth of natural talent serves to promote a performance of masculinity that seeks to hide hard work or suffer a loss of masculine status (Francis, 1999, Connell, 1989, Jackson, 2003). In

contrast, it is argued that far from being a solely gendered concept, hard work is also classed; historically, girls have always had to perform hard work, as there was no a priori assumption that there could be a natural academic talent. Moreover, it has been argued that middle-class girls who are ‘naturally clever’ are praised, whereas those who have to work hard (i.e. those who are perceived to have less ‘natural intelligence’) are not. In this analysis, working-class girls who sustain academic success are seen to have achieved this owing to their hard work rather than their ‘natural ability’ for which they are praised (Walkerdine, 1989). The concept of hard work is therefore classed as well as gendered, which of course are just two prisms through which educational experiences can be viewed. Other marginalised groups such as the parents and children of immigrants have had to make a virtue out of the necessity for hard work in an education system that has historically been formally and informally denied them (Lopez, 2001). The concept of hard work is therefore used to describe a set of behaviours that have an empirical dimension as well as serving a particular discourse about the relationship between status, ability, resources and meritocracy. Using the data from participants, the next section will argue that parents’ understanding of the education system and the labour market is underpinned by discourses of hard work and meritocracy, but that these discourses are contradicted and undermined by further understandings of the system as stratified. Discussion and conclusions on these contradictions will argue that privileged parents (through their children’s recollections) and their children amplify the importance of hard work, in a bid to make good the

inherent contradiction of operating in an education system that is underpinned by discourses of meritocracy but fractured by privilege and inequalities.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FAMILY, AND FAMILIES’ AND