British Educational Research Journal Vol. 31, No. 5, October 2005, pp.

589604

Social justice and school improvement: improving the quality of schooling in the poorest neighbourhoods
Ruth Lupton*
Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Social justice in education demands, at the very least, that all students should have access to the same quality of educational processes, even if their outcomes turn out to be unequal. Yet schools in the poorest neighbourhoods are consistently adjudged to provide a lower quality of education than those in more advantaged areas. Based on a qualitative study of four such schools, this article explores links between the contexts in which they were operating and the quality of education provided. It concludes that high-poverty contexts exert downward pressures on quality, and that consistently high levels of quality in schools in the poorest neighbourhoods need to be assured by policy measures that alter their context or, through greater funding, improve their organisational capacity to respond. Social justice will not be achieved by managerialist policies that seek to improve schools by addressing the performance of managers and staff, without a recognition of the context in which this performance takes place.

Introduction Social justice in education demands, at the very minimum, that all students should have access to schools of the same quality. I use the term quality here to refer to school processes, such as the standard of teaching, rather than aggregate student test results, with which it is sometimes associated, and suggest that even if students from disadvantaged backgrounds are not to be offered better schools, in an attempt to reverse their disadvantage, a concern with social justice requires that they should at least have the same quality of education as their more advantaged peers. This claim would probably go uncontested in most quarters, and indeed there is a long history of policy interventions designed in one or another to equalise educational quality, going back to the Educational Priority Areas and comprehensive movement of the 1960s (Benn & Simon, 1970; Halsey, 1972; Benn & Chitty, 2004). However, all the evidence suggests that in England, even within the state sector,
*Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL, UK. Email: r.lupton@ioe.ac.uk ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/05/050589-16 # 2005 British Educational Research Association DOI: 10.1080/01411920500240759

590 R. Lupton equality of educational provision is still far from a reality. Schools serving socioeconomically disadvantaged areas are, in general, of a lower quality than others. In 1998, the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) found that five times as many secondary schools in worst neighbourhoods were in special measures (i.e. they were adjudged by the Office for Standards in Education [Ofsted] to be failing or likely to fail to give pupils an acceptable standard of education) than was typically the case (SEU, 1998). Ofsted (2001) found that high levels of FSM (free school meals) eligibility were associated with worse inspection grades not just for academic standards but for quality of education (teaching and the curriculum); climate and ethos; and management and efficiency. My own analysis (Lupton, 2004a) shows that these relationships hold, albeit less strongly, when school quality is correlated with area deprivation scores. These data need some qualification. First, Ofsteds judgements, in themselves, are not entirely unproblematic. A minority are not measures of the quality of school processes at all, but of outcomes, such as attainment and attendance, and the inclusion of these muddies the water when the objective is to identify process differences. Second, the headline data obscures evidence of good performance in disadvantaged areas. Schools in the poorest neighbourhoods tend to do better on certain aspects, notably pupil welfare and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, than other schools (Lupton, 2004a), and Ofsteds own analysis (2001), while pointing to the overall problem in disadvantaged areas, still shows that five out of six high FSM schools are not deemed to need substantial improvement in their quality of education, climate, or management and efficiency. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is a systematic deficit in quality precisely in the areas where a high-quality education is needed most. The New Labour governments response to this problem has been both generic and particular. Schools in high-poverty neighbourhoods are expected to benefit from generic policies, such as reforms of the teaching profession, changes to the inspection regime, standardisation of certain good practices (e.g. numeracy and literacy teaching) and the local development and dissemination of others. They have also been targeted by specific policies aimed at disadvantaged areas or at schools with very low attainment. Under New Labours first Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, these targeted policies emphasised the governments intolerance of failure, and seemed to put the blame fairly and squarely on school management and staff. Failing schools were named and shamed, threatened with closure under the Fresh Start initiative, and subjected to more frequent inspection. More latterly, schools have been offered more support. Revisions to the school funding system in 2003 took more systematic account of needs arising from deprivation, and high-poverty schools have also benefited from additional funding from the Excellence in Cities programme and from regeneration programmes such as the New Deal for Communities and Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. In 2001, the government launched its Schools in Challenging Circumstances initiative, incorporating extra funds along with additional inspection visits, support from specialist recruitment managers, and trainee headship posts.

Social justice and school improvement 591 In this article, I argue that these more recent developments, while welcome, are not nearly sufficient to address the quality problem in schools in disadvantaged areas. They cannot wholly succeed because, while more supportive in nature, they are still founded upon the belief that quality differences between schools are primarily the responsibility of the schools themselves, and can thus be tackled by initiatives at the school level. In launching Schools in Challenging Circumstances, the government set out an analysis of the problem that was still dominated by references to the poor practice of heads and teachers (Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2001, p. 49) and the need for access to good practice and advice (p. 50) and support to schools to turn themselves around (p. 51). While appearing to recognise the additional challenges for staff in disadvantaged areas, it nevertheless persists with a managerialist agenda that assumes that the quality problem resides in those staff, and the solution in better management, better training and better monitoring. Though moving in the right direction, policies for tackling school quality in poor areas are still formed and debated within the constraints of a managerialist paradigm and informed by the largely context-blind school effectiveness movement (Slee et al., 1998; Thrupp, 1999; Gewirtz, 2002; Thrupp & Willmott, 2003). There must, of course, be an element of truth in the managerial approach. No doubt there are staff who are incompetent, lazy, ill informed, unsuited to the work, badly managed or unwilling or unable to put in place effective practices and keep up with the latest professional developments. However, unless we are to believe that it is just coincidence that so many of these incompetent staff are gathered in the same institutions, we must also look at the context in which practice is developed and implemented. Numerous studies from Britain and abroad have demonstrated that a disadvantaged context affects practice (Metz, 1990; Brown et al., 1996; Bishops Conference, 1997; Gewirtz, 1998; Johnson, 1999; Clark et al., 1999; Davies, 2000; Ofsted, 2000), with staff in high-poverty schools engaged in daily firefighting, dealing responsively with immediate crises in order to maintain an ordered learning environment and having less time, space and energy for reflection and improvement planning. Martin Thrupps (1999) study of four New Zealand schools paints the picture in greatest detail, showing the myriad small ways in which disadvantaged contexts impact on school organisation and practice: extra minutes here and there being spent on minor discipline and welfare issues and on negotiating with pupils, parents and other organisations; a greater emphasis on classroom control at the expense of challenging pedagogy; more difficulty planning and financing extracurricular activities and engaging parents; more time spent on distributing and collecting equipment, and so on. If these contextual effects are indeed in place, is it not inevitable that they will impact on what we measure as school quality, and on the strategies that will be need to drive up quality? In this article, I aim to make a direct link between evidence of the impact of context on school practice and the policy agenda for improving schools in disadvantaged areas. I aim to show that differences in practice arising from context are directly relevant to school quality and school improvement. Because context

592 R. Lupton impacts on the time available for core teaching and learning tasks, on morale and motivation, and on the room for professional development and innovation, planning, monitoring and review, it impacts directly on measured school quality and on the possibility for schools to improve. Thus, while part of the school quality problem may well reside in the staff, a large part resides in the context. The solution may need to come either from changing the context or changing the capacity of the school organisation to work effectively in that context, not just from urging and supporting the staff towards better management and practice. Methodology The article draws on a study of four secondary schools in extremely disadvantaged areas of England. I refer to these schools as Southside Grange School, Middle Row High School, West-City High School for Girls and The Farcliffe School, although these are not their real names. The principal purpose of the original study was to examine differences in contextual impacts between schools in disadvantaged areas, and the schools were thus selected in order to represent different types of deprived area, in terms of their location, tenure and ethnic mix. However, for the purposes of this article what is of central interest is what they had in commonthe high levels of poverty in the neighbourhoods that they served. All served areas within the top 3% of most deprived wards in the country using 1991 Census data, and as Table 1 demonstrates, all had intake characteristics that reflected high levels of deprivation in the area. All had FSM levels more than twice the national average, and two, both inner-city schools, had exceptionally high FSM eligibility, in the top 5% of schools in the country. All of the schools had higher than average numbers of pupils with special educational needs (SEN), two of them twice the national average. Two schools had a majority of pupils for whom English was a second language and all had lower than average prior attainment. The schools were all non-denominational community schools, average or slightly below average in size. One, The Farcliffe School, was a secondary modern school, while the remainder were comprehensive. West-City High School for Girls was a girls school, the rest co-educational. West-City was also a specialist school (a technology college) as was Middle Row High School (a sports college). From the perspective of this article, it is important to note that the schools were not failing schools. As Table 1 shows, they had varying quality assessments by Ofsted, and varying levels of academic attainment. Some were better than others but none was regarded as a bad school. At no point does this article therefore seek to explain failure nor to position context as the sole explanation for failing schools. Its aim is to illuminate contextual impacts on quality, across a range of schools where quality varies. In each school, an initial phase of work was carried out to establish the context of the school, based on interviews with head teachers and local education authority (LEA) representatives, collection and analysis of socio-economic data, and mapping of pupil postcodes. A second phase then explored the impact of context on school

Social justice and school improvement 593

Table 1. Case study schools Southside Grange School Region Area type North-East Industrial area in semi-rural LEA Mainly White Mixed Middle Row HS Midlands Inner city West-City HSG London Inner city The Farcliffe School South-East Seaside town

Ethnic mix of area Housing type and tenure School status

Mainly Asian Victorian street terraces, mainly private Comprehensive Sports College Mixed 843 61

Mixed Medium to high rise flats, mainly Council Comprehensive Technology College Girls 892 62

Mainly White Mixed

Comprehensive

Secondary Modern Mixed 626 36

Sex No. on roll (Jan 2001) % Eligible for FSM (Jan 2001) Nat. ave.516 % with SEN (Jan 2001) Nat. ave.523 % with English as additional language (Jan 2001) Nat. ave.58 Ofsted GCSE 5 A*C 2000 Nat. ave.549

Mixed 670 37

24

48

30

44

95

56

An improving school 19

A good school 36

A good school 41

More strengths than weaknesses 3

Sources: DfES, Ofsted reports.

organisation and practice. This involved qualitative interviews with each head teacher and a sample of teaching staff (six to eight in each school), as well as teaching and support staff with specific roles in relation to attendance, behaviour or learning support. Part of each of these interviews consisted of a discussion of the notion of quality and the influences upon it, in different circumstances. Staff were particularly asked to reflect upon the 11 aspects of effective schooling identified by Sammons et al. (Sammons et al., 1995; Sammons, 1999) as emerging from school effectiveness research (summarised in Table 2), and to consider their implementation in schools in different settings. Unstructured observations were also carried out, and supporting documentation (such as attendance and prior attainment data) were collected.

594 R. Lupton
Table 2. Eleven aspects of effective schools N N N N N N N N N N N professional leadership a shared vision and goals a learning environment concentration on teaching and learning purposeful teaching high expectations positive reinforcement monitoring progress pupil rights and responsibilities home/school partnership a learning organization

Source: Sammons et al. (1995); Sammons (1999).

This article draws on the data in two ways. First, it briefly summarises what appeared to be the distinctive features of the contexts of these schools, taken as a group. Second, it assesses how these contextual features impacted on school processes and practices, and specifically on quality. The final part of the article draws conclusions for school improvement policy for the poorest neighbourhoods. Contextual factors: the unpredictable school The design of the study did not permit direct observation of similar and contrasting practices of high and low poverty schools. However, about half of the interviewees made direct comparisons with other (more advantaged) schools in which they had taught, and others referred to contrasting experiences as parents or pupils in middleclass schools. Thus, a considerable amount of data was generated about the differences between the lived contexts of these schools and those of schools in more advantaged settings. These can be summarised as follows:

N N N

First, there was a very wide range of abilities and prior attainment within the schools. In particular, there were many pupils with very low prior attainment. Second, there was evidence of widespread material poverty, which manifested itself in childrens diets and health, in lack of uniform or equipment, and in lack of parental contributions for enrichment activities. Third, and possibly most distinctively, all the schools had a charged emotional environment. The number of pupils who were anxious, traumatised, unhappy, jealous, angry or vulnerable was reported to be much greater than in schools where parents were materially well off, less stressed themselves and more able to secure a stable and comfortable environment for their children. Pupils tended to share their emotions with staff, creating a distinctive teacher/pupil relationship, not just one of educator/learner, but significant adult/child. Teachers talked about mothering, caring and social work as well as about teaching and learning. In each school, there was also a minority of children (probably no more than about 20) who had severely disturbed behaviour. These pupils were disruptive in

Social justice and school improvement 595 lessons, found it difficult to concentrate, were sometimes aggressive towards other pupils and staff, found it hard to accept rules, and struggled to get smoothly through the school day on a regular basis. A fourth issue was low attendance. The four schools had absence rates ranging between 11.3% and 13.5% of pupil half-days, compared with a national average of 8.9%. At all four, a significant proportion of absences was accounted for by a small number of persistent non-attenders or pupils who took whole weeks off at a time. Parental participation was also low, with fewer than half of parents attending consultation evenings, for example. In the two schools with predominantly white populations, staff reported that many parents were disinterested in education, and a minority were hostile to the school. A more positive orientation from parents was reported in the schools in ethnically mixed areas. These issues, together, added up to an unpredictable working environment, quite apart from the unpredictability caused by pupil mobility and fluctuating numbers, which has been well documented elsewhere (Dobson et al., 2002). Incidents could erupt at any time, such that neither lessons nor free time could be relied upon to go according to plan. The idea of unpredictability possibly captures the distinctiveness of the environment of the schools better than any other.

The identification of these factors is not intended to suggest that there is an exactly replicated pattern of difficulties faced by all schools in areas with a certain poverty level. Far from it. The level to which the issues raised here impacted on school practice most certainly differed from school to school, depending on the particularities of their contexts. The Farcliffe School, for example, faced particular issues of low pupil self-esteem because of its secondary modern status and the sharply differentiated selective system of schooling in the area, and high levels of emotional difficulties because of the high number of childrens care homes in the area. Middle Row High School had particular issues with long-term absences because of extended family visits to Pakistan. Southside Grange School had a particular group of pupils with extremely challenging behaviour, partly because it served an extremely unpopular and semi-abandoned neighbourhood populated largely by families with very low choice, partly because of its position in the school market (formerly a secondary modern) and partly because of the lack of special school provision or effective alternative education in the LEA. Staff at both Southside Grange and The Farcliffe School (the two schools in white working-class areas) complained much more about behaviour problems and parental disengagement than did staff at Middle Row and West-City, which were in areas with a majority of ethnic minorities. For this reason, I have argued elsewhere (Lupton, 2003, 2004b) that school improvement strategies must be based on subtle appreciations of context, taking into account local social, demographic and economic factors, the school market and the institutional history. We cannot assume that schools in poor areas are the same as each other. Nevertheless, teachers accounts suggest that they have some common contextual features that are not experienced by schools facing lower levels of disadvantage. The remainder of this

596 R. Lupton article focuses on ways in which these features appeared to impact on the quality of the school, as evidenced by field observations and the teachers own accounts. Impacts on quality Difficulties in staff recruitment and retention A first difficulty was the deterrent effect of this environment on staff recruitment. It goes without saying that schools that do not have qualified or experienced staff will struggle to deliver a high quality of education. One school in the study, The Farcliffe School, had what could only be described as a staffing crisis. Half the staff, including some acting subject heads, were unqualified. There were insufficient staff to fill Head of Year positions, and many staff teaching subjects in which they were not specialist. The head teacher described her staffing strategy as get them in and shuffle them around, such was the difficulty of finding anyone qualified to work in the school at all. Staff turnover was extremely high. Ten staff out of a total complement of fewer than 50 left in the term before fieldwork was conducted for this study. The particularly serious situation in this school was a result not just of the direct pressures of the socio-economic environment, but of the schools perceived underperformance, consistently low position in the school league tables, and constant criticism in the local media. It was not a high-status organisation in which to work, nor one where potential staff could see themselves easily succeeding. External criticism had led to several changes of head teacher and senior management in quick succession. There were few established systems or senior staff to provide a settled and supportive organisational environment for newcomers or less experienced teachers. The other three schools had greater organisational stability. All three head teachers had been in post for more than five years. They had steered the schools out of situations of public criticism and falling pupil numbers and restored their reputations and the confidence and morale of their staff. According to governors and staff, the schools reputations for good leadership and organisational stability enabled them to attract staff who might have been deterred from joining more unstable organisations. These schools were all fully staffed with teachers of the appropriate level. However, in all cases, the staffing situation was insecure. There were few applicants for posts, often only one, and it was never certain that a member of staff who left could be suitably replaced. All the head teachers expressed anxiety over future staffing, and were all engaged in identifying and nurturing promising students or teaching assistants with a view to bringing them on to the staff in the future. The London school, West-City, recruited all its staff via an agency. Most new staff were overseas teachers, many of whom did not intend to stay for more than a year or two. Head teachers acknowledged that because the pool of good staff wanting to work in high-poverty schools was insufficiently large, their current good fortune in recruitment was only achieved at the expense of other schools. They worried that the tables might very easily turn.

Social justice and school improvement 597 That recruitment problems are an impediment to quality is well known to policy makers. The Schools in Challenging Circumstances initiative has a recruitment component. The London Challenge programme, designed to improve London secondary education, includes an initiative to recruit top graduates, and a professional qualification which gives recognition to the particular demands of working in the capitals schools. Staffing problems, however, were not the only impediment to quality that this study revealed. In fact, I would argue that a focus on recruitment and retention difficulties, important though they are, is probably leading policy makers to neglect the importance of what happens once staff are in the school, and the way in which the quality of what they do is affected by the context in which they are working. Pressures on teacher performance One such school process issue is that teaching staff underperform. By their own admission, they do not always teach as well as they can. Reflecting on the 11 aspects of effective schools (Table 2), teachers commonly admitted to failures of quality. Most often, they mentioned the difficulty of maintaining high expectations when these were frequently disappointed, and difficulties in consistently maintaining a learning environment, concentrating on teaching and learning, and teaching purposefully. Even teachers who were regarded by management as very good teachers noted that there were lessons where their own standards were not met. In one sense, the problem arose from the additional demands that were placed on teacher time within the classroom. Pupilteacher contact time was diverted from teaching and learning activities in a variety of directions: counselling pupils, giving out and collecting equipment, dealing with major behavioural problems, and reinforcing school rules and classroom order in the face of myriad minor distractions:
your teachers cannot focus purely on high quality teaching and learning because theyre focusing so much on other things. The number of times that youre trying to deal with a [emotionally disturbed child] in the class, and youre trying to keep that kid on board and youre trying to avoid a major confrontation, youre trying to avoid problems for other ones. It makes it harder. (Head teacher, Southside Grange School)

Time was not the only issue. These situations could be emotionally stressful for teachers, creating personal and professional vulnerability and calling on high-level interpersonal skills in situations where to do or say the wrong thing could result in loss of control or respect from the whole group. Having the confidence to negotiate such situations, minimise disruption and concentrate on teaching and learning was not easy, especially for newer teachers or those transferring from less challenging settings. Quality inevitably suffered:
I dont consider myself a poor teacher but the first term I taught here, God, it was awful. I must have taught half a dozen lessons that I was pleased with, certainly no more. It was awful. Forced into a conflict situation where you have to either prevail or be trodden underfoot, and I hate that. Its not easy to give a good lesson here, however good the teacher is. (Class Teacher, The Farcliffe School)

598 R. Lupton One response was to find activities that occupied the pupils, regardless of the level of learning going on. A good lesson could come to be seen as one in which most of the pupils had been on task for most of the time. In this sense, teachers expectations of themselves and their classes were lowered. The problems were most acute in lower ability classes, which tended to contain the most disaffected learners and suffer greater disruption. These were precisely those classes where teachers expectations were already worn down by the persistently low attainment, where:
You can find yourself thinking theyre never going to learn, whats the point. (Class Teacher, Middle Row High School)

In these classes, worksheets and copying exercises were more frequently used. Subject content was simplified and discussion was limited. As much other research has found (see Hallam [2002] for a review), teaching for groups with many lower ability pupils tended to be insufficiently challenging. The point is, however, that these low expectations were not an inherent failing of poor teachersthey were a learned response to low attainment and to the challenge of classroom management. Several teachers mentioned that it was only occasional opportunities to see the standard of work in other schools, for example at inter-school events, that made them aware of the extent to which their own expectations had dropped. In an ideal world, we would hope that this problem would be addressed outside the classroom, with teachers using their non-contact time to reflect on their practice, research and develop innovative teaching methods, and prepare challenging learning tasks. However, in these high-poverty schools, non-contact time tended to be diverted into pupil welfare issues rather than being spent on teaching and learning activities such as evaluation, planning, researching resources or marking. This kind of diversion did not involve large chunks of time spent on any one incident. Rather, a few minutes were diverted here and there, repeatedly. Small chunks of non-contact time were spent on direct pupil contact (for example, seeing pupils who had misbehaved in previous lessons), on following up behavioural incidents by filling in paperwork or liaising with other staff, parents or other agencies, or even on letting off steam after conflictual lessons.
Oh you spend a lot of time I spend a lot of time doing paperwork, filling in IEPs [individual education plans], filling in reports, I spend, as a tutor, maybe 15 minutes Ive got to read through these reports I get from other teachers when they come to me. In a lesson, I could spend maybe 510 minutes filling in a report for a child. Its a lot of time wasted isnt it? Thats another big issue I do think were moving forward but we do spend a lot of time. And we also spend a lot of time in the eveningfive past three to half past three, other teachers talking about it, the problems that we have. That also takes 25 minutes out of my time because Im second in department so I cant walk away, so if five people come to me, they never talk to me about, like, the price of fish, they talk to me about little Jimmys done this or little Bobbys done that or whatever. You can be there 25 minutes, and people might say well thats good, youre conversing, but its always bad stuff, its never good stuff. (Class Teacher, Southside Grange School)

The persistent diversion of teaching time into pastoral activities helps to explain why quality scores on pupil welfare can be high in high-poverty schools while scores on

Social justice and school improvement 599 other aspects of schooling may be low. Staff in these schools tended to say that, among the 11 aspects of effective schools, positive reinforcement and a shared vision and goals possibly came more naturally than they might in other environments. It was easy to offer positive reinforcement, because so many pupils had low self-esteem and responded well to recognition of their achievements, however small, and there was a strong sense of staff pulling together in the face of shared problems with pupils and external criticism. Some aspects of school quality might be upwardly affected by this particular environment. However, this data suggests that if high-poverty schools are to attain a consistently high focus on highquality teaching and learning, they need more genuine non-contact time, and hence more teachers, and they also need more adults in every classroom, to enable a focus on teaching and learning as well as on behaviour control. Pressures on management performance A further problem was that senior management time was also taken up with pupil welfare issues, more so than in schools with lower poverty levels. Day-to-day incident management created a high and unpredictable workload. The head teacher at The Farcliffe School compared her daily work with her experience in more advantaged schools. At The Farcliffe, she was doing things I havent done in 20 years: pupil counselling, staff support and involvement in daily discipline or welfare issues. At Southside Grange, the head teachers typical day involved supervising the pupils entering and leaving the school, standing in the corridor between lessons, doing back-up behaviour patrol, dealing with several disciplinary incidents or counselling children with emotional outbursts, in addition to his other work. My own interviews with him were disrupted on three occasions: once when he had to coax a pupil down from the roof of the nearby town hall; once when he had to chase a group of former pupils off the school site; and once when he had to deal with a Year 8 pupil who had blown his top in a lesson and come to the head crying, knowing he could talk to him and find some space to cool down. Between such incidents, head teachers are expected to concentrate on financial management and long-term planning for school improvement! In a more predictable way, senior management time was also diverted to activities that would not be needed to the same extent in schools in more affluent neighbourhoods: managing additional non-teaching staff such as attendance workers; bidding for and monitoring projects funded from specific funding streams; dealing with serious behaviour incidents or in some cases routinely patrolling the school; liaising with other agencies. As an example of the amount of time being diverted, one deputy head at Middle Row High School estimated that she spent between half a day and one day per week on attendance issues, including managing the home/school liaison worker, administering the rewards system, and liaising with the LEAs education welfare officer over extreme cases. Despite these extra demands, none of the schools had more than the standard number of senior managers: one head and two deputies. It is hard to see how a standard amount of time could be devoted to strategic planning for school improvement.

600 R. Lupton Inadequate resources for complex problems Thus far, the picture I have painted is of a trade-off in time between teaching, management and pupil welfare activities, with a negative effect on the quality of teaching and management. This is above all a problem of inadequate resources. But it is not only in the trade-off between different school processes that the inadequacy of resources in high-poverty schools is revealed, but in the individual processes and activities themselves. Given the complexity of the demands on these schools, standard resources for teaching and standard resources for pastoral care are insufficient in themselves, even disallowing for the fact that they need to be traded off against one another. To illustrate this, it is necessary to take a number of specific examples of school processes. Here, I have chosen examples which are specifically identified in the Ofsted inspection framework. In other words, they make up part of the matrix upon which quality is assessed. The first is the use of homework. One might argue that there is no reason why homework should not be used in a high-poverty school to consolidate and progress learning and to provide opportunities for monitoring of pupil progress, just as it is in a low-poverty school. But using homework effectively takes longer in a school where many of the children struggle with basic literacy and where they do not have support with homework at home, than it does in a school where pupils expect to take work home, are supported to do it, and have good basic skills. Homework tasks may need to be more carefully designed and differentiated. More guidance may need to be given. It may take longer to mark the work and give feedback, since knowledge of subject may be obscured by problems of writing and presentation. Simply collecting the homework and setting up an expectation that it will be done will demand persistence, reinforcement through the discipline process (with its attendant paperwork), and possibly support in the provision of homework facilities and supervision. All of these are possible, but time-consuming. A trade-off situation is created in which the importance of homework needs to be assessed against the importance of other activities. Ofsted also assesses schools on the contribution of parents to pupils learning at school and at homethe homeschool partnership that emerges as one of the features of effective schools in school effectiveness research. Evidently, the task of ensuring that parents contribute to pupils learning at home and school is both quantitatively and qualitatively different in schools where most parents are motivated and knowledgeable enough to contribute than it is where many parents have not had favourable experiences of school, are not familiar with the British school system, or are not convinced of the value of the education their children are getting. In the former, homeschool agreements, sending information home, and arranging consultation evenings and other liaison opportunities may be sufficient. In the latter, many more parents may need to be contacted individually and offered more support or persuasion in order to achieve the same result. Two of the four schools in this study had appointed part-time homeschool liaison workers to try to address this, and funded them from core school budgets. These workers were

Social justice and school improvement 601 making home visits to parents, organising parents groups and educational visits, and even helping parents to liaise with social welfare agencies. As a third example, Ofsted assesses schools on the effectiveness of strategies for teaching literacy skills. Teaching literacy skills is obviously a bigger task where most pupils do not have English as a first language, and in areas where low literacy is widespread in the general adult population, than it is in areas where most pupils already have well-developed literacy skills. At Middle Row High School, a senior teacher involved in language support estimated that about two-thirds of the pupils would benefit from some support with English. However, the amount of additional funding for literacy support does not meet the additional need. In all the schools, staff complained of a lack of appropriate books and worksheets for pupils with low literacy. Not all the teachers interviewed were confident of their ability to create appropriate resources for pupils at the very early stages of learning English, or with very limited reading and writing skills when they entered secondary school. They saw this as a specialist job for which their general teacher training had not equipped them. None of the schools was able to do more than withdraw small numbers of pupils for extra tuition and provide an extra focus on literacy at the expense of other subjects in Year 7. This was effective up to a point, but teachers reported that literacy problems still prevented significant numbers of pupils from fully accessing the rest of the curriculum, with implications for lesson planning and marking in other subjects. It is hard to see how in these circumstances strategies for teaching literacy could be judged as being as effective as in circumstances where resources were better aligned to demand. Downward pressures on quality arise, therefore, not just through the underperformance of staff and the need to make trade-offs between teaching, management and pastoral care, but because resources for individual aspects of schooling are simply too low relative to demand. Discussion: is high quality impossible? In the light of these contextual pressures, should we conclude that high quality is unattainable in schools in high-poverty areas? Evidently not, since many schools in such areas are assessed as offering a high-quality education. Despite their difficulties, none of the schools in this study was adjudged to be failing. And staff themselves, when asked to comment on whether a high-quality education could be achieved in these circumstances, unanimously agreed that it could. They even believed that their ability to produce some aspects of quality was enhanced by their context, a judgement that is supported by Ofsted data. However, they also thought that certain key elementscreating a learning environment, focusing on teaching and learning, maintaining high expectations, teaching purposefully, and developing an effective homeschool partnership, although doable, were harder. Again this is supported by Ofsted data. What emerges from the study is not the impossibility of delivering a high-quality education in these settings, but the difficulty of doing so, and the fragility of the situation. Managers and staff described themselves as running to

602 R. Lupton stand still, constantly under pressure and constantly trading competing objectives. High levels of energy, commitment and resilience were needed in addition to high levels of professional expertise. This work was carried out in an environment of external pressure which threatened organisational stability and, at the extreme, viability, if sufficient staff could not be recruited. Quality could be achieved, but not consistently assured. Once contextual pressures are recognised, it becomes evident that quality will not be consistently achieved in these circumstances by improvement measures which concentrate solely on upskilling and motivating staff, since there is a limit to which better management, monitoring and training can secure good practice in the face of systemic constraints. Two other kinds of intervention spring to mind. One is to change the context. Schools cannot change their physical location, but in some circumstances they would receive more balanced intakes were they not operating in highly differentiated school markets in which the least advantaged pupils are funnelled towards the least popular schools while more advantaged parents choose to send their children elsewhere. High-poverty schools would also face fewer organisational pressures under an accountability regime based on a broader notion of educational success than raw test scores, under which they are likely to fail, and an inspection system designed only to support improvements in quality, not to name and shame schools that are failing. Ironically, attempts to raise quality through managerial measures are currently being thwarted by the same managerialist regime which provides their logic. A second necessary type of intervention, and one which is probably more likely in the current political climate, is to provide the resources for the different organisational designs that would enable higher quality to be consistently delivered in high-poverty circumstances, for example, smaller teaching groups, more teachers in the classroom, more non-contact time for front-line staff, a higher ratio of managers to staff, and substantially more investment in learning support, language teaching, pupil welfare or parental liaison roles. These resources need to be consistently provided as part of the core funding of schools, in recognition of the different jobs that they are doing, not as additional funding streams that have to be applied for and monitored. Accepting that the unpredictability of the school day in these schools is, in a sense, entirely unpredictable given their contexts, should lead to providing the organisational resources that would enable their staff to respond to it better. In this light, it is clear that current measures fall well short of the unequal distribution of resources that will be needed if equal quality is to be achieved. I conclude, however, not with specific policy recommendations but by returning to the broader critique of current school improvement policies raised at the beginning of this article and that the data from the four schools has served to support. Lack of adequate resources is not only a problem in its own right: it is a symptom of the wider problem that quality differences between schools are currently conceptualised by policy makers only within a decontextualised and managerialist frame. They are seen as arising from the desituated practices of managers and staff, and thus capable of change by internal managerial interventions. This position is

Social justice and school improvement 603 hard to sustain by anyone who has worked for any length of time in disadvantaged schools such as those described here. Context does not entirely explain quality but it is profoundly important. A concern with social justice demands school improvement strategies that are based on an understanding of the critical importance of what goes on outside the school for the quality of education that is delivered within it. Only once this is appreciated are more promising policies likely to follow. References
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