Gentrification, Education and Exclusionary Displacement in East London

Abstract

In this article we draw on Peter Marcuse's discussion of different types of displacement using evidence from a recent study we conducted in East London to argue that there is clear evidence of ‘exclusionary displacement’ and ‘displacement pressure’ in terms of education and specifically the choice of schooling. We show how the incoming middle classes in the Victoria Park area of inner East London have displaced not only existing poor residents but also many of the less affluent middle class from the favoured state schools in the area by adopting some schools and avoiding others. The preferred schools are often praised to the heavens whilst the shunned schools are similarly disparaged and deemed unacceptable. We suggest that it is this middle‐class dichotomization of schooling which accounts for the kind of educational displacement we have observed. The main form that this takes is direct exclusionary displacement when middle‐class pressure on favoured schools leads to local people being unable to get their children into them — normally because of ‘distance from school’ selection criteria.

Middle‐Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions

“…Finally, several scholars, most notably in Europe, have emphasized how middle‐class families can leverage residential choices to their advantage in the urban educational market (Butler, Hamnett, and Ramsden ; Gramberg ; Hamnett and Butler ). In their study of one East London neighborhood, for example, Butler, Hamnett, and Ramsden () found that new middle‐class residents made strategic housing decisions that would enable their children to enroll in the school of their choice. In light of a student assignment policy that privileged proximate families, these parents' actions displaced existing poor and less affluent middle‐class students from highly favored schools in the area.…”

Re-working encounter: the role of reflexivity in managing difference

“…In densely populated neighbourhoods, the frameworks of space use are transgressed via practices of racial and class privilege embodied in the occupation of space under conditions of gentrification (Butler, Hamnett, & Ramsden, 2013;Drew, 2011;Garbin & Millington, 2012;Jackson & Benson, 2014;Wilson & Grammenos, 2005). The experience of difference is marked by everyday grievances often centred on the breaching of expected codes of conduct.…”

Class analysis for whom?

“…We were not criticizing a career's worth of work (cf. Butler, Hamnett, and Ramsden 2013). The resort to writing about inequality elsewhere is important though, since it helps to further demonstrate the problematic ways in which class and inequality are treated in both their 2008 paper and recent rebuttal.…”