Fear and Education: Inequality and the mask of school segregation in England

Fear and education: Inequality and the mask of school segregation in England
7 July 2023 Festival of Education, Wellington College, Home Counties, England
Keynote speech by Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford.
Professor Dorling is a member of the editorial board of the Oxford Review of Education and a patron of the campaign group Comprehensive Future.

Outline of this lecture:
Rather as people now sometimes wear masks because they think it will reduce their chances of getting an infection, parents’ choices about schools in England are often guided by their beliefs about how school choice might protect their individual child.

Although masks can have a protective effect, no one is quite sure what that effect is and how it changes over time. Similarly with schools, paying for a home in a good school catchment area, or paying a school directly for access to it, or paying for a private tutor, may not now be as advantageous as many parents believe – even though for some it may make all the difference.

However, these choices could well have altered life chances much more in the past than they do now, just as wearing a mask during a conventional influenza pandemic (which comes and goes quickly) may have been highly effective in the past.

School choices – public / private / independent/ grammar / Tatler-recommended-comprehensive / bog-standard – are as contentious as debates about masks and illness. In a society that has become as economically unequal as Britain, you might think that surely the benefits of securing a head start for your child are greater than they used to be. But in this talk, Professor Dorling suggests that this may not be the case.

He also touches on further education, and on schools serving the most disadvantaged communities, too, and what problems most and least affect them. He asks why the English – in contrast to the rest of Europe, and Scotland – still exclude so many pupils, so often, each year, from our normal schools. Why do we, almost alone in Europe, demand our children wear uniforms? Are we odd Europeans who are becoming progressively more unusual?

He also discusses the privatisation of higher education and asks how big the overseas undergraduate and postgraduate fees bubble can grow. Prior to 2023 the housing price bubble grew far larger than many of us believed possible. Could the same happen with university fees?

In this talk, Professor Dorling refers to three of his recent books:
Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Finntopia: what we can learn from the world's happiest country (co-authored with Annika Koljonen)

Shattered Nation: Inequality, and the geography of a failing state (forthcoming).