A typology of schools across the four nations of the United Kingdom: Class, race and geography

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the hierarchical field of schools across the United Kingdom during the transition to university and suggest that there are five socially distinct clusters of schools. Our five-cluster typology of UK schools is composed of an established group of elite private and state schools, schools for the white rural and suburban middle class, schools serving the (post-)industrial and predominantly white working class in small towns, multi-racial middle and working-class schools and super-diverse state schools of the precarious working class. To produce this typology, we used Higher Education Statistics Authority data to create aggregate pseudo-school populations from university students who would have been in their final year of school or college between 2014/15 and 2017/18. Unlike previous analyses of UK school segregation that focus on Free School Meals, we use actual parental social class data to enable more granular analysis of class and occupation. We use principal components analysis, followed by clustering techniques, to examine how institutional inequalities between schools intersect with uneven geographies of class and race across the United Kingdom. We suggest that there are more complex hierarchies that move beyond historical binary perspectives on schooling as selective/comprehensive, private/state, working/middle class. Our findings suggest two major contributions to how we understand inequalities and hierarchies between schools. First, we find a more complex, geographically varied and socially and ethnically distinctive multipartite system of schooling across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Second, viewed from a geographical perspective, our findings suggest there is a spatial division of schooling across the United Kingdom. Our typology combines an institutional lens on the school system with a geographical understanding of how local geographies of race and class shape schools and colleges in ways that transcend as well as reinforce national or regional boundaries.