Schooling and Social Identity: Learning to Act your Age in Contemporary Britain 1137388307, 9781137388308

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Schooling and Social Identity Learning to Act your Age in Contemporary Britain Patrick Alexander

Schooling and Social Identity

Patrick Alexander

Schooling and Social Identity Learning to Act your Age in Contemporary Britain

Patrick Alexander School of Education Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-38830-8    ISBN 978-1-137-38831-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. Firstly, I would like to thank the students and staff of Lakefield School for their patience and generosity in allowing me to share in their lives during 2007–2008. Many of the students mentioned in these pages will now be established in jobs and having children of their own as they navigate new imaginings of age as adults. For them, 2007 might now seem like a lifetime away. Likewise, the ‘young’ teachers described here are probably imagining themselves as no longer quite so young anymore. In both cases, I am honoured to have been able to capture a small part of the process and hope that my imaginings of their lives, as described here, are not too distant from their own imaginings of growing up or growing older as it happened at that time. This research is dedicated to them. The final product is of course a long way from those fieldnotes scribbled in now-distant classrooms, and for guiding me successfully from one to the other I must first thank David Mills and John Coleman. Their patience, support, wisdom and occasional stern words were absolutely crucial to the success of this research. I cannot thank them enough for helping me to stay the course. I must also thank Geoffrey Walford, Richard Pring and Anne Watson for their input at different stages of developing this text, and for all their constructive comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Mette Berg and Peggy Froerer for their insightful and valuable inputs. For their support and camaraderie, I v

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would like to thank my colleagues and contemporaries in the Department of Education and at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. I would also like to thank my friends (above all, the inimitable Roger Norum), inspiring former students and colleagues at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford—particularly Peter Mitchell. I would also like to thank for their insights members of the Anthropology of Childhood and Youth Special Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association, colleagues at the Royal Anthropological Institute, fellow scholars of the US-UK Fulbright Commission, colleagues at New York University (particularly Pedro Noguera) and Teachers College, Columbia University (particularly Hervé Varenne). I cannot overstate my thanks to my colleagues and fellow researchers in the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University, who have been instrumental in supporting the completion of this monograph. Countless great ideas, critical insights and words of support have emerged through conversations with colleagues and friends at Oxford Brookes. In particular my thanks go to Mary Wild, Gary Browning, Graham Butt, Jane Spiro, Roger Dalrymple, Susannah Wright, Nick Swarbrick, Jon Reid, David Colley, and David Aldridge for lending insight and pause for thought. I am extremely grateful for the support of the Westminster Trust sabbatical scheme, which allowed me the crucial time to complete this project. Above all, for their unswerving support, motivation, care and enthusiasm, I must thank my family and friends. In particular my mother, Patricia, has been instrumental in helping me to reach the end of this long process. I would like to thank my friends for their advice, support and sense of humour, and for always providing sanctuary from the solitary challenges of writing—not least, in the final stages, friends at Octopus. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Laura. In more ways than one she must take credit for what has emerged from this research, and I cannot thank her enough for sharing this process with me and for helping me, through the highest and lowest points, to weather the storm and come out happy on the other side. This book is dedicated to Laura, and to the wonderful shining lights in our lives, Alma and Baby James.

Contents

1 Age in Society: Framing Social Structure  1 2 The Concept of Age Imaginaries 45 3 An Archaeology of the Recent Past: Age and Schooling in Historical and Contemporary Social Context 65 4 Learning to Act Your Age in the Classroom109 5 Learning to Act Your Age in the Playground: Age and the Social Lives of Secondary School Students163 6 Learning to Act Your Age in the Staffroom: Age Imaginaries in the Lives of ‘Younger Teachers’201 Conclusions243

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R  eferences269 Index285

Introduction

Another Year Begins It is early September, and after a particularly dour and rainy summer, students and staff are returning to begin another busy, chaotic, lively chapter in the life of Lakefield School, a secondary school in the southeast of England.1 It is just past eight O’clock in the morning, and I have arrived with Sophie Leckford, the younger of the school’s two female Drama teachers (she is 26), who has agreed to give me a lift each morning during the course of the year. Sophie likes to get to school early in time to prepare for the coming day, and at this hour there is little activity in the grey expanse of the playground between the school’s two main buildings. A few students, dropped off early by parents on the way to work, or simply escaping from home early, stand solitary in the playground, looking exposed and expectant in the quiet of a space that is soon to be swelling with people. The staffroom, similarly, is quiet at this time, as most teachers are either still on their way through morning traffic or have retreated to departmental offices and classrooms to prepare for the days and weeks to come. This slightly unnerving tranquillity—the kind that can only be felt in places normally alive with noise and activity—begins  All participants and locations mentioned in this book have been de-identified.

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to slowly dissolve as the clock moves towards eight thirty. More and more students pile out of small family cars, students on bikes swerve into the site to fill the bike racks, and the local school buses, turning in slow, lazy arcs, come to a stop outside the front entrance. The staff car parks are now filled, and the school’s numerous new teachers—among them several 20-something newly qualified teachers (NQTs)—have managed to park alongside the spaces already spoken-for by the more veteran members of staff. As shiny new Clarks school shoes clobber the grit and cement of the playground, and tea is poured into well-handled, coveted mugs in the staffroom, a din of people share the stories behind new hairstyles and summer suntans. At eight forty-five the bell rings for registration, and this final, liminal moment of end-of-summer is brought abruptly to an end. Another year begins. For all students at Lakefield, this Autumn term, like every other Autumn term, will mark the beginning of a new stage in their progression through the structural hierarchy of the school. Regardless of their individual competencies and experiences, students entering into each new year group will face new academic expectations, new aspects of the assessment regime, and new institutional and social statuses as they make their way, involuntarily, up the school’s rigid structure of age-grades. Now as Year 11, last year’s Year 10 are currently at the top of the hierarchy of students in compulsory education at Lakefield, while new Year 12 students, only six weeks removed from the regimens of Year 11, are experiencing their first days in school out of uniform and in the markedly different setting of the sixth form. Year 7s, for their part, are new to the school’s system of age classification and accordingly must readjust to their place at the bottom of the hierarchy, far removed as they now are from the primary school playgrounds where they recently held primacy. Among the staff, Lakefield’s NQTs are beginning their professional lives as teachers, and must start to engage in the varying age-related interactions that shape relationships both with students in different year groups and with other teachers. Each of these transitions involves learning to ‘act’ one’s age through the mediation of what I term age imaginaries—the concept that I develop in this book in order to consider how young people and adults alike experience age as an aspect of social identity at school. The institutional

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structure, ethos and formal practices of the school provide a certain uniformity to this process: they are part of the ‘rigid age hierarchy’ that carves up imaginings of age into a taxonomy that suggests order and predictability (Pilcher 1995: 33). But age-based transitions are also experienced and articulated by a multiplicity of actively engaged individuals, across a range of contexts, in a variety of different ways that do not always map neatly onto the dominant taxonomy of age categories. In the first week of term, in the midst of these transitions—some explicit, uniform and institutionalised; some more nuanced, contested, shifting and complex—I began to explore how imaginings of age are negotiated as part of everyday life at Lakefield School.

An Outline of the Book This book provides a new and critical approach to contemporary debates about the nature of age as an aspect of social identity, and its relationship to experiences of schooling. This is also an ethnographic account that provides a window into real life at school in England. I investigate how age is negotiated as an aspect of social identity for students and staff at Lakefield, but the broader aim of this book is also to shine a critical light on the nature of age as an aspect of social identity in the context of contemporary British society. In so doing, I would also like to raise some important and potentially controversial questions for the future of formal schooling (its structure and ideological objectives) and also about changing intergenerational relations, the blurring of age boundaries and the democratisation of child-adult relations in twentyfirst-century Britain. While these questions are specific to England, they have resonance for many other societies that have developed systems of mass education based, in various ways, on age-based structures of social organisation. Age represents one of the most fundamentally taken-for-granted and paradoxical categories through which we give our lives structure and meaning. On one hand, we are complicit in the construction of rather rigid ideas about the qualities ought to make up an individual’s identity relative to age—from physical, psychological and intellectual develop-

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ment, through to social and sexual relations, to rights and responsibilities, through to consumption habits, dispositions and tastes. At the same time, we are also aware of the often chaotic, haphazard and uneven ways in which age is experienced relative to these ideal qualities. To complicate matters further, age remains a dynamic aspect of self-making: we are constantly ageing, and as a consequence, we are compelled to make sense of this process by re-constituting how we imagine age as an aspect of who we are, in relation to others and in the broader context of society. And if this wasn’t complicated enough, the dynamic nature of age also means that what it means to be a certain age is also in flux: older generations might struggle to see themselves in the young, and the young may struggle to understand why older people don’t understand them. This also speaks to the importance of age as an idiom that gives order not only to ideas of social structure but also to notions of how culture is transmitted or reproduced over time (Akinnaso 1992; Ingold 2017). Age is therefore profoundly social in its manifestation, and deeply personal in its experience. In the busy, ongoing reconciliation of our own ideals and lived experiences of age—of what it means to be a child, to grow up, to become an adult and to grow old—it is easy to overlook the very nature of the social processes through which this reconciliation takes place. Adding to scholarly debate about how age is imagined socially is particularly important in a time when the lived experiences of age and social identity—the changing nature of what it means to be a child, to grow up, to become adult—are seemingly even more dynamic and open to reconfiguration than they have been in the past. In Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century, popular and political discourse reflects deep anxiety about the nature of age in flux. Recently, these fears have been evidenced in public outcry about everything from the ‘troubling’ youth at the centre of the London riots in 2011, through to the media clamour in 2013 over the transformation of child-icon-turned-sex-object, Miley Cyrus, through to concern that modern teenagers might actually be too well-behaved (Parker-Pope 2012), to more recent concerns about screen time (Greenfield 2014) and knife crime (Younge 2018), to the celebration and/or condemnation of youth climate activism (Nevett 2019). Since 2016, the much-derided term ‘adulting’ has been associated in popular discourse with Millennials struggling to get to grips with the

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presumed demands and obligations of adult life. The volatility of age categories is an enduring popular concern: whatever the zeitgeist, falteringly we raise well-worn concerns about the sanctity of childhood, about the threat and precariousness of youth, about the illusory stability of adulthood, and about the looming crisis of an ageing population that refuses to conform to established definitions of being ‘old’. In spite of these concerns, the concept of age often eludes detailed critique as a category of self-making and social organisation, even in contexts like schools where age is of primary social importance. In this book, I intend to go some way towards redressing this important and timely imbalance. To do this, I raise questions about the interface between schooling and age in the complex process of constructing social identity. This involves exploring how age is imagined in the institutional structures of schooling and in the discourses that pervade mass state education, specifically in relation to notions of cognitive and psychological development, in the construction of ideas about young people as citizens and consumers, and in negotiating the (fading) ideology of unquestionable adult authority and control. I investigate these themes at the institutional level and at the level of discourse, and through vignettes from the ethnography that describe the everyday relationships between students and teachers at Lakefield School. I also consider the social relationships between young people in relation to age. Is it OK, for example, for a Year 11 boy to go out with a girl in Year 9? If not, why not? Should younger students naturally respect older students? How do students ‘play’ with age in virtual online spaces where they can perform any age they choose? Exploring these kinds of questions helps to reveal how age is figured as an aspect of social identity in the everyday lives of young people. The book then moves on to consider age in the lives of teachers—particularly, the experiences of chronologically younger teachers ‘growing up’ while simultaneously playing the role of adults in their lives at school. In each case, I use these descriptions to reflect on the changing nature of social interactions between adults and young people in contemporary British society. Each vignette adds to the narrative of what daily life is like in an English secondary school. This ethnography is not intended to be generalisable beyond its immediate research context, but

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there are important aspects of the story of Lakefield that resonate with experiences of secondary schooling across the UK, and with wider discourses of age that permeate social life both inside and outside schools. Given the almost universal presence of hierarchical taxonomies of age in the English state education system (i.e. almost all state secondary schools in England at the time of writing are organised primarily according to age), it is not difficult to imagine the beginning-of-year scene described above taking place in many secondary schools across the country, for many thousands of students and teachers, term after term, and year after year, in the ongoing construction of a shared imagining about how age works as part of social identity. The book intends, then, to make two contributions to our understanding of the relationship between schooling, social identity and age. Firstly, I provide an ethnographic account of social life in an English secondary school in which the primary focus is ‘age’ as an aspect of self-making for both students and staff. As we shall see in Chap. 1, the history of school ethnography is littered with examples of ethnographic narrative where age looms large, but when it comes to social analysis, age remains in the background in studies that focus on other important intersectional themes like gender, class, race, or ethnicity. Even in studies that ostensibly focus on age—those that explore childhood and youth—age often remains subsumed under other categories of analysis. Following Thorne (2004), I argue that foregrounding age as the focus of analysis offers a new way to consider its significance in relation to schooling, social identity, and modernity. Secondly, in terms of theory, I put forward the idea of age imaginaries as a new framework for conceptualising ‘age’. Age imaginaries is the term that I use to describe the multiple discourses, practices and processes of meaning-making that combine to shape notions of individual and collective age-based identity. Within the idea of age imaginaries, I incorporate notions of narrative, performance and negotiation as a means of creating a meaningful language for talking about age as an aspect of social life at Lakefield. It is important to note that this account might be described as an ethnography of the recent past: the ethnography took place in 2007–2008 and documents life as it was for young people in this moment. What is valuable about this kind of approach is that it reveals, in retrospect, what

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is enduring about the experience of age in schools, and what has changed. Each chapter includes a section dedicated to reflecting on recent change: clearly, there have been some significant technological, economic, geopolitical and sociological shifts in the years since 2008 which have important implications for young people. Principle among these changes are the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath; and the mass popularisation of social media and smartphone technologies. And yet in spite of these shifts, many qualities of the experience of being socialised into age-based identities at school endure as they have for more than a century—a fact which on its own is worthy of close interrogation. While each chapter presents its own set of findings, there are common themes running through the study: these are synthesised in the conclusion. The central argument of the book, as the reader may have ascertained by now, is that ‘age’ is a vitally important aspect of self-making in English secondary education and in the broader context of contemporary British society. This on its own is a finding that represents something of a cliché about social science research: it is an observation borne from careful investigation that also confirms what we know from common sense: of course age is important in schools. However, it is the seemingly self-evident nature of this ‘fact’ of social life that is in need of disentanglement. At Lakefield, age imaginaries are shifting and contested, and students and staff negotiate multiple, concurrent and sometimes contradictory imaginings of age within (and at times beyond) the constraints imposed by dominant taxonomies of known age imaginaries. This is achieved through the relational negotiation of age imaginaries, often framed in terms of ideas about respect, trust, responsibility, discipline, authority and control. Gender and class (and consumption-based proxies for class) emerge as key aspects of how age is negotiated. I argue that the concept of age imaginaries is a valuable starting point for understanding age as a complex aspect of social identity in school because it highlights the simultaneous and corroborative nature of structural forces and individual agency in the self-making processes taking place. It highlights the concurrent, occasionally discordant, but not necessarily mutually exclusive nature of the multiple age imaginaries that individuals construct together through self-making at school.

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In order to consider the different aspects of age imaginaries as they are negotiated within the context of Lakefield School, this book is organised into six chapters. Chapter 1 of the book provides a review of relevant literature and a brief history of ideas that serve to organise contemporary notions of age. The first part of Chap. 1 outlines the various different traditions of research into age, socialisation and social identity. This includes a discussion of how age is framed in chronological and developmental terms, and in relation to cognition and physiology. I then move on to consider sociological and psychological reckonings of age before exploring how formal state education has influenced the social construction of age. I highlight class, gender and consumption as key factors influencing how age is constructed as an aspect of social identity within the context of education. The main aim of Chap. 1 is to suggest that age remains an organising concept at the heart of the modern project, reified, reproduced, and occasionally resisted through experiences of mass schooling. Chapter 2 outlines the conceptual framework of age imaginaries  in response to the arguments put forward in Chap. 1. The remainder of the book is divided into narrative chapters of ethnography. In the first part of each chapter, I begin by presenting the broader topic in question, drawing on a range of examples from across the literature and from popular discourse in order to set the stage. I then ground the discussion by referring to specific ethnographic vignettes that describe relevant aspects of social life at Lakefield School. In this way, Chap. 3 begins by looking at how age is constructed in the structure and discourse of secondary education as a whole. I then go on to explore age imaginaries as they emerge in the institutional structure and ethos at Lakefield, looking particularly at tension between traditional understandings of adult authority and more recent child-centred notions of agency and the democratisation of child-adult relations. Chapter 4 considers how age is constructed both in approaches to curriculum and in classroom practice. This includes a discussion of discipline and adult authority, as well as the discursive and embodied negotiation of age imaginaries through the content and delivery of school curricula. I then go on to consider how age imaginaries are physically embodied in the classroom at Lakefield, before moving on to consider students’ and teachers’ narratives about age as an aspect of their daily interactions in lessons. Chapter 4 also explores discourses of age as they emerge (and are

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contested) in the content and delivery of the curriculum, focusing on Year 7 and Year 11 (pupils aged approximately 11–16). The latter part of the chapter explores the question of why ‘school sucks’ (as one Lakefield student put it) for so many young people—why many young people dislike going to school, and how this relates to issues of authority, discipline, age, class and gender. In Chap. 5, I explore the social significance of age in the informal interactions between students in schools. In so doing, I explore broader questions about ‘generationing’ (Alanen and Mayall 2001) and the long-term impact of experiences of school on how individuals perceive their social relations with others in relation to age (their contemporaries and those younger and older than them), and on their perceptions of progression through the life course. In the context of Lakefield, I analyse how age is negotiated in the informal social relations between students, both across and within different year groups. Again, class, media consumption and gender emerge as sub-­themes in this chapter. Chapter 6 moves on to consider age imaginaries in the lives of adults, exploring the changing nature of transitions into adulthood, the production and consumption of ‘youth’ culture among adults, and the changing nature of intergenerational social relations. I focus specifically on how questions of age impact the lives of younger teachers in relation to notions of professional identity and their relations with students and other staff. I consider the case of ‘younger teachers’ at Lakefield, focusing on how they negotiate age both with students and with other members of staff as well. I conclude by reiterating the central argument of the book: experiences of formal education have a significant and enduring impact on how individuals construct notions of age as an aspect of social identity. Crucially, however, the lived experience of negotiating age through schooling is not as linear or straightforward as it appears in the structure of the education system and in the rest of society. On the contrary, age imaginaries are shifting and contested, and students and staff negotiate multiple, concurrent and sometimes contradictory imaginings of age on a daily basis. This is achieved through the relational negotiation of age imaginaries, often framed in terms of ideas about respect, trust, responsibility, authority and control. Gender and class emerge as key aspects of how age is negotiated in this way, and consumption often serves as a vehicle for articulating issues of age and identity. I argue that

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the concept of age imaginaries is a valuable starting point for understanding ‘age’ as a complex aspect of social identity because it highlights the simultaneity of structural forces and social agency in the self-making processes taking place. In so doing, this concept also offers a critique of ‘agency’ as an aspect of the experiences of young people and adults at school. In this way, age imaginaries allow for a critical exploration of the relational negotiation of age between students and staff in school contexts while also giving due attention to the material, virtual, spatial, nonhuman components in this process (Hadfield-Hill and Christensen 2019). The ultimate point of this book is to argue that a linear imagining of age endures as an often-unchallenged ‘grand narrative’ of modernity and as an organising concept of profound importance for modern society. A linear, developmental imagining of age underpins the very notions of learning and transmission that we use to organise our thinking about how culture itself is produced and reproduced. Nowhere is this more evident that in the dominant framing of mass education through schooling as described in this book. Given current conditions of uncertainty and change, and taking into consideration the recent lived experiences of young people, I argue that we need to rethink our approach to conceptualising age within the context of education and, indeed, in wider society as well. This leads us to questions about the structure and content of formal education. In a complex social world where age categories are increasingly in flux, what is the future of an education system, and a model of cultural transmission, based on fixed ideas of age hierarchy, where one generation lives in the shadow of the last? Free from a rigid taxonomy of age hierarchy, what alternative mode of education might flourish in schools? These are questions of sum importance for educators and pupils alike.

 n Overview of the Research Process A and an Introduction to Lakefield School Before unravelling the various intellectual threads that have influenced current thinking about age, identity and schooling, it will be worth saying a few words about the nature of the research project that this book

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draws upon. In brief, my ethnography of Lakefield School involved research conducted over the course of one academic year. I spent most of my time following a reduced version of the normal schedule for a teaching assistant, which was equivalent to four lessons a day out of five. In lessons I therefore acted, occasionally, as an informal helper, providing academic support to students when necessary, but avoiding involvement in the enforcement of any of the disciplinary rules of the school. In most lessons, this afforded me ample time to sit at the back of the classroom and observe the social interactions taking place around me. Most of my time in lessons was spent with two Year 7 classes, one Year 9 class, two Year 10 classes and two Year 11 classes. Time outside of lessons was divided between the staffroom, other staff areas and communal social spaces for students, where I particularly spent time with Year 12 and 13 students (pupils aged roughly 16–18). As the year progressed, I also participated in a range of extra-curricular activities (particularly the school’s guitar club), a number of school trips and other social events outside of the confines of the normal school day.

 egotiating Age Imaginaries in School N Ethnography Patrick: Is age an important thing that defines who you are? Keisha: Yeah, I mean in a way, like even in this project, like even only last year I would have needed parental consent, whereas now I’m considered mature enough to make my own decisions about whether or not I take part and sign the form myself.

As the quote from Keisha (a Lakefield student in Year 13) suggests, the ways in which imagined notions of age are given social, legal and ethical meaning are important aspects of how ethnography is figured, particularly in social contexts like schools where age plays an important role in social status. Spindler and Spindler are right in asserting that the ethnography of schooling is in essence the same as ethnography anywhere else, in so much as it is about understanding the cultural and social worlds of a particular community of people (2000: 248). But at

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the same time, school contexts present a number of particular issues for ethnographers. School ethnography is complicated because it must take into consideration not only issues of power and authority in the structure of everyday school life, but in the relationship between researchers and students as well—even when (or, perhaps, particularly when) the underlying aim of the research is to advocate for the rights of marginalised children or young people (Yon 2003: 413). Whether researchers are in a position of power, in subordinate positions in relation to participants or in the frequent and uncomfortable position betwixt and between (embodying the high social status of ‘adult’ and the low social status of fumbling ethnographer), questions about notions of age in school are inextricably tied in this way to questions about how researchers attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ between the adult world of staff and the world of students by inhabiting an unusual position between these categories (Pollard 1987). An ethnographic study of age imaginaries in a school would therefore be incomplete without exploring the ways in which imaginings of age are negotiated in the research process itself. The theoretical questions of the ethnography are in important ways entangled with the practice of conducting the research. As such, questions of methodology—in particular, questions of the significance of age in the positioning of the researcher—also play a part in framing the findings that emerge in the different chapters that follow.

Lakefield School Let us now turn our attention to the site of the ethnography. The activities described in this book took place between 2007 and 2008 at Lakefield School, a comprehensive (state) secondary school located in a small market town in the southeast of England. The school is home to approximately 1000 students aged 11 to 18 and roughly 60 members of staff. Lakefield is located on one site just outside of the town, tucked in between areas of both significant affluence and marked social disadvantage. As a result, the students represent a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds and experiences. Many students come from families that have remained

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in the area of the school for generations, with parents and sometimes grandparents having attended Lakefield as well. Other students, often living further a-field and from more affluent families, have less established histories with the area. Families at a nearby military base and families from local traveller communities also send their children to the school, adding further to the mix. In terms of ethnicity, the school is predominantly white British, with only a small number of Black British, Black African and Asian students in attendance. The staff is also predominantly white. As a school, Lakefield prides itself on a sense of community and mutual respect, crystallised in the school’s vision statement: At Lakefield students will find an ordered community that treats them with respect, where bullying is not tolerated and where they will grow in confidence and be trusted with more responsibility as they become young adults. Young adults equipped to succeed making a real and positive difference in a demanding and changing world.

It is possible from this statement to see how ideas of age are deeply engrained in the school’s image of itself, but the institutional significance of age can also be seen in the mundane details of how the school is organised, as I describe in Chap. 2. Lakefield is organised formally into age-­classes of Year Groups (Years 7 to 13), pastoral tutor groups (of up to 30 students, but diminishing in size as one moves up the school) and according to the Key Stages of the English National Curriculum. This is divided into Key Stage 3 for Years 7–9; Key Stage 4, focused mainly on General Certificate of Secondary Education (or GCSE) qualifications for Years 10–11; and Key Stage 5 (focused mainly on A-Levels), or, latterly, ‘sixth form’. Students are streamed loosely according to ability at Key Stage 3, and academic classes in Years 10–11 are also organised according to ability. There are no classes or tutor groups that incorporate students from different year groups. School uniform is worn by students in Years 7 to 11, while students in Years 12 and 13 are permitted to wear their own clothes. Break and lesson times are the same for all students in Years 7–13; the sixth form, however, is part of a consortium that includes another local school and the local sixth form college, meaning that sixth form students have lessons on a

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number of different sites in the area and accordingly have greater independence to organise their own schedules. In terms of student involvement in the running of the school, Lakefield encourages a system of ‘Student Voice’ whereby students can actively put forward opinions and suggestions to the staff (see Chap. 3). This commitment to student participation is balanced against a rigid and systematically enforced discipline structure known officially as the ‘Ladder of Consequences’. It would not be accurate to suggest that class was a discrete or easily recognisable marker of identity for many of the students in the school— not least because social class was frequently articulated by proxy through practices of consumption and through discourses about different kinds of ‘youths’ (see, in particular, Chaps. 4, 5 and 6). However, class nevertheless had an important role to play in terms of the discourses of age in which students were willing, able or expected to acquiesce. There is of course a long tradition of research related to social class and educational failure (in which imaginings of age, I argue, are an implicit factor) in English secondary schools (Dolby et al. 2004). Age imaginaries and social class are certainly inter-related aspects of life at Lakefield School, but they are often acted out in shifting and unpredictable ways. The class divide is not discrete (teachers are not always ‘posh’, but the school can be; students are not always ‘common’, but sometimes they are seen to be), but there is nevertheless a connection between the kinds of activities and attitudes that are considered ‘appropriate’ behaviour for certain students and an awareness of the kinds of age imaginaries that are associated with classed identities (being ‘posh’ or ‘common’, or both). While I explore this in more detail in Chaps. 4 and 5, and in the concluding remarks of the book, for the time being it will be enough to recognise that class is a significant aspect of the lives of students at Lakefield, but one that is particularly difficult to pin down. The staff at Lakefield, while predominantly white British and from what we might loosely term ‘middle-class’ backgrounds, represent a broad range of chronological ages. Some of the oldest teachers in the staff, now reaching retirement age (known to some as the ‘almost-retireds’), have taught at the school since the late 1970s. A large proportion of the teachers in positions of power within the management team hail from a

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younger generation (in their mid- to late-40s at the time of the ethnography) who began teaching at Lakefield in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Another generation of teachers, several of whom began teaching at the school as NQTs in the middle of the 2000s (and known to some as the ‘younger teachers’) represent the younger end of the chronological age spectrum. The majority of teaching staff are aged between 35 and 55, but the youngest full-time member of staff, Sara, celebrated her 23rd birthday during the research. A number of the PGCE interns (trainee teachers studying for the Postgraduate Certificate in Education) in the school were younger still at 21 and 22. We will return to these differences in more detail in Chap. 6. The school itself has been around in various forms since the 1820s and has existed on its current site since the 1950s. The site consists primarily of a number of functional one- and two-storey buildings which surround a central tarmac playground. A large grassy field, used for Physical Education (PE) (and for socialising during break time in the summer terms), marks the boundary of the school site to the left of the main entrance. Outside of the rough quadrangle made by the main school buildings lies another L-shaped building that houses the Maths and Science departments, the school hall and the cafeteria. The other buildings of the school include the gym, the newer music blocks and Stepping Stones—the latter a more secluded group of temporary ‘terrapin’ porta-­ cabin buildings set aside for a small number of students with ‘behavioural difficulties’. The main buildings are functional brickwork, corrugated iron, yawning metal framed windows and bleached linoleum. Aged, faded green curtains limp next to pockets of late-arriving innovation— DVD players, interactive whiteboards and colourful, well-presented displays of students’ work. Some classrooms reflect the dedication of individual teachers, students and/or departments and are organised, colourful and welcoming; others are testament to years of institutional neglect. The desks are pen-scarred, but clean, and chips in the freshly painted brown classroom doors reveal the long history of industrial-shade colour-schemes that the school has endured. The rubber banisters on the stairs are shiny and palm-worn. Behind the science block, next to the bright new music rooms, there is a thick carpet of long-dead cigarette ends. The visible signs of wear and tear, juxtaposed with the brand-new facilities, speak of the multitude of lives that have passed through the

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space of the school during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, on their way into the present and off into the future. Like all schools of its kind, Lakefield is steeped in temporality. Before we enter Lakefield and explore this temporality in the lives of its inhabitants, however, let us return to the literature in order to better situate age as the focus of inquiry.

References Akinnaso, F. (1992). Schooling, Language and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 68–109. Alanen, L., & Mayall, B. (Eds.). (2001). Conceptualizing Child-Adult Relations. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G., & Willis, P. (Eds.). (2004). Learning to Labor in New Times. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Greenfield, S. (2014). Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains. New York: Random House. Hadfield-Hill, S., & Christensen, P. (2019). ‘I’m big, you’re small. I’m right, you’re wrong’: The Multiple P/politics of ‘being young’ in New Sustainable Communities. Social & Cultural Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/146493 65.2019.1645198. Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology of/as Education. London: Routledge. Nevett, C. (2019, August 28). Greta Thunberg: Why Are Young Climate Activists Facing So Much Hate? Retrieved September 23, 2019, from https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-49291464. Parker-Pope, T. (2012, February 2). The Kids Are More than Alright. New York Times Blog. Retrieved September 23, 2019, from https://well.blogs.nytimes. com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-than-all-right/?_r=0. Pilcher, J. (1995). Age & Generation in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollard, A. (1987). Studying Children’s Perspectives: A Collaborative Approach. In G. Walford (Ed.), Doing Sociology of Education. London: Falmer Press. Spindler, G. D., & Spindler, L. (2000). Fifty Years of Anthropology and Education 1950–2000: A Spindler Anthology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Thorne, B. (2004). Theorizing Age and Other Differences. Childhood, 11(4), 403–408.

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Yon, D. (2003). Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 411–429. Younge, G. (2018, June 21). Beyond the Blade: The Radical Lessons of a Year Reporting on Knife Crime. The Guardian. Retrieved September 23, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/jun/21/radicallessons-knife-crime-beyond-the-blade.

1 Age in Society: Framing Social Structure

Introduction: Blurred Lines What does the pop star Miley Cyrus have in common with William Shakespeare? This is only sort of a joke. Picture, if you will, a young, peroxide-blonde pop starlet, onstage in front of millions of children and young people, dressed in skimpy hot pants and surrounded by giant teddy bears, tongue hanging out, twerking1 up against a man almost two decades her senior, singing a song with explicit, misogynist sexual content, entitled Blurred Lines. This is the iconic scene from American singer Miley Cyrus’s 2013 Video Music Awards performance alongside singer Robin Thicke, the content of which sent the global media into paroxysms of salacious anxiety about the declining moral values of modern children and youth, and the sexualisation of young women. Cyrus’ performance was particularly scandalous because she had formerly portrayed the quintessentially innocent children’s TV character Hannah Montana and was seen as a role model for pre-teen girls worldwide. Her 2013 performance and subsequent sexualised reincarnations as an adult pop icon  A particular kind of suggestive dance popular among young people in 2013 and originally associated with ‘bounce’ hip hop from the Southern United States. 1

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have wrecked this image of innocence, arousing much popular outcry and hand-wringing, not least among the parents of her current and former fans. Now picture Jacques, wistfully lamenting in As You Like It that ‘all the world’s a stage’ upon which we transition from ‘infant’ to ‘schoolboy’, ‘lover’, ‘soldier’, ‘justice’, ‘pantaloon’ and finally to ‘second childishness… and oblivion’ in our journeys through life. Each of these rather incongruous texts have served as weathervanes for popular anxiety about age. The latter has invited centuries of readers to ponder the cruel inevitability of the linear ageing process. While the former is now already gathering dust in the public consciousness, the case of Miley Cyrus more recently provoked millions, in contrast, because of what it suggests about the precariousness and changing significance of age categories. Specifically, Cyrus and Thicke laid bare the ‘troubled’ sanctity of childhood and the implications that this has for the increasingly blurred lines of contemporary adulthood. The yawning centuries between these texts are littered with examples from popular discourse of our preoccupation either with the inevitable nature of the life course, or the prospect that age categories—and particularly childhood and youth—are inevitably not what they ‘used to be’. This is evidenced as much in the popular impact of the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Durkheim, Piaget, Erisken, Hall, and Freud as it is public and political outcry about delinquent child criminals on the streets of Victorian London, ‘penny dreadful’ magazines, mods and rockers of 1960s Britain (Cohen 1972), 1990s gangsta rap (Springhall 1998), ‘hoodies’, paedophilia, the negative impact of new digital technologies on contemporary children’s brains (Greenfield 2014) or the more recent moral panic about knife crime. The tension between inevitable structure and the inevitable decay of structure is of profound importance to recent social constructions of age as an aspect of the human condition. Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man is an all-too-common starting point for historical reflections on the seemingly eternal nature of age and the life course, experienced through discrete stages (see, e.g. James 2004). Whatever the veracity of the ages that Shakespeare presents, we are broadly familiar with contemplating our social, intellectual, moral, spiritual and psychic development alongside the growth and decay of our bodies in this kind of way. It seems reasonable to presume that a temporal reckoning of the person, alongside the institution of some system of

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organisation that makes this temporal reckoning socially meaningful, is a relatively common (if not necessarily universal) human practice. Age, in its many manifestations, can be related to shifting social status and shifts in standing and power within a society, often enacted through ritual activity and performance, and crystallised in relation to age grades, age sets and generations (Van Gennep 1960; Mannheim 1952 [1923]). Reproducing these transitions through age-related statuses provides a framework for other forms of social and cultural reproduction. Indeed, conceptions of age underpin in a profound way how we make sense of how culture ‘works’ over time—how it is transmitted, produced and reproduced from one generation to the next. As Ingold has suggested (2017), a ‘genealogical’ model pervades how we think about learning as the process through which culture is inscribed, and culture is in this sense inherently ‘aged’ because age categories often shape how one’s education into culture is enacted. Nowhere is this more evident than in schools. In a genealogical framing, knowledge is in its essence a matter of transferring skills, values, beliefs, morality, rights and obligations from one older group to a younger one. However, it is not the case that all people everywhere imagine and make sense of age (or culture, or time, or how knowledge ‘transfers’, for that matter) in the same genealogical terms—even if many Western scientists and social scientists have done so for more than a century. On the contrary, cross-cultural comparisons highlight a rich diversity of ways to configure age (and, therefore, culture), each the product of making human existence meaningful within a given social and cultural context. The fact that culture, as a process, remains dynamic and prone to change also means that the categories used to define age are also likely to shift within cultural contexts (Anderson-Levitt 2012). And yet, as in the case with Miley Cyrus’ and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines performance, the troubling of age categories can in turn lead to widespread social outcry because, somewhat ironically, this inevitable process of shift also implies the decay of seemingly foundational and unshakeable social structures.2  Cyrus was formerly an icon of ideal childhood in her guise as innocent US TV character Hanna Montana, and in part, this highly sexualized performance caused consternation because viewers felt that she had ‘desecrated’ their memories of childhood and blurred the line between her childhood and adult public personas. 2

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It is the aim of this book to better understand the above tension as it relates to schooling in contemporary British society. With this in mind, it is important to begin this chapter by interrogating the recent origins of Western ideas about age, beginning with a few big questions: Why is it that we think about and make sense of age and the ageing process in the way that we do? What are the recent historical, philosophical and sociological premises for the way that we think about age in Western societies? How might we start to think about age differently? In Part I, I begin to explore these questions by untangling a few of the intellectual threads that combine to give structure to contemporary Western notions of ‘age’ as an aspect of human social life, starting with the proposition that age acts as an organising concept of sum importance to the project of modernity. I briefly examine how different scientific, political, sociological, psychological and philosophical traditions coalesced during the twentieth century to cement a particularly linear notion of how age figures as an aspect of the human condition. This narrative is linked to changing social constructions of the concept of childhood in Western society; to patterns of mass consumption; and, crucially, to the encroachment of the modern nation-state and its disciplinary institutions (Foucault 1977) into the lives of children and young people. An important part of this encroachment—mass education—is given its own due in the following chapter. In Part II, I continue by reviewing sociological and anthropological thinking about age, with particular reference to childhood, youth and education. This review sets the scene for the concept of age imaginaries that I elaborate in Chap. 2.

Part I: The Modern Age Defining ‘Age’ as a Term of Analysis It is important to start by noting that ‘age’ is a sphere of social inquiry claimed by diverse and sometimes disparate traditions across the social sciences, not to mention its various interpretations across medicine, the biological sciences, experimental psychology—and the list goes on. As a result, age has been understood from a range of epistemological and

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t­heoretical perspectives. What each has in common, however, is the notion that our present linear, chronological framing of age is an inevitable feature of human life, as much in our biology as in our forms of social organisation. The current dominant notion of linear age is, I argue, the grandest of all narratives: it serves as the trellis against which to train the many vines of human life that flourish under the guise of modernity. Taking age as an a priori starting point for inquiry across diverse disciplines has helped to cement the normality of the age categories against which modern society is organised—from physical and cognitive development, to moral and intellectual growth, to civic responsibility and legal culpability. Age is at the heart of modern personhood, literally from the moment of conception. It is the very centrality of age to the project of modernity that makes its interrogation as an organising concept for social life seem unnecessary, or even facile. Within the social sciences, age is employed in multiple ways, often by proxy, as a backdrop for making sense of other aspects of social life. The quiet ubiquity of age as a backdrop in social science research in this sense means that it is particularly difficult to pin down as a discrete field of study. Indeed, it is perhaps better to see ‘age’ currently existing at the crossroads of multiple fields of inquiry, rather than as a field in its own right. This is made even more apparent by the fact that studies dealing with ‘age’ frequently focus on one particular stage or time of life, in terms of childhood, youth, adolescence, adulthood, old age and so on, rather than dealing with ‘age’ more broadly defined. More often than not, purported studies of age are in fact studies of ageing. This also means that there exist fewer theoretical accounts that present a coherent and critical picture of age as a broader continuum, particularly in terms of its significance as a marker of identity or self-making (Hockey and James 2003; Pilcher 1995; Thorne 2004). As Pilcher suggests, ‘theorizing on age…is underdeveloped and limited, in that there is no one overarching theory. Rather, there is a somewhat heterogeneous bundle of theories, each with a variety of concerns, strengths and weaknesses’ (1995: 16). More recently, renewed interest in age as a broad field of inquiry has ­signalled a shift towards more holistic considerations of how age ‘works’ in society (Cote 2000; Furlong 2009; Thorne 2004). However, there remains scant research that takes as its focus age broadly defined. This is

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telling of the taxonomic power that age-based categories impose on the study of age itself, and of the potentially homogenising effect that age-­ related categories can have on the carving out of different imaginings of age within specific disciplines. Or to put it another way, the existence of discrete fields of inquiry into stages of life itself reinforces the logic of linear age as a means of understanding human experience. The division of age-related fields of study into different temporal, theoretical and disciplinary niches also means that studies of age, more broadly defined, are made unusual by their inability to adhere to particular, specific age/stage-­ based areas of inquiry. One is obliged to transgress the disciplinary boundaries of studies into childhood, youth and adulthood in order to look critically at age. Age itself, then, is a concept that does not immediately lend itself to dexterous analytic use, because it encompasses so many different aspects of human experience. It is therefore crucial that I make clear from the outset what exactly I am referring to when I talk about age in the analysis that follows. In order to do this, it will be useful to present an overview, if not an exhaustive account, of how age has been framed in different ways as a field of inquiry in the social sciences in recent years. So that we can make sense of this conceptual landscape, I will start by painting in the broad strokes. It will then be possible to focus on the particular ideas of ‘age’ to be used in more detail in the context of this research.

 efining ‘Age’: A Question of Biology? Nerve Endings, D and Nerves Ending Let us begin by stating the biological conditions of age—the cognitive, neurological and physiological conditions that we make socially meaningful through the idiom of ‘age’. There is much to be gained in our understanding of the social processes of imagining age from embracing the overlap between the factors, both social and biological, that make up the ‘aged’ person (Thorne 2004; James et al. 1998). Indeed, age is a multidimensional process in which the physical is inextricably tied to the social. This demands a healthy approach to what we might term bio-­ sociology. Age is of course related to the development and decline of the human body, and to the concomitant developments in cognition that

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this involves. On a very fundamental level, we can say that age is about the development, death, rejuvenation and ultimate decline of cells. At the level of neurology, we can even argue that brain plasticity or the way our brain changes as we age is ultimately what makes us human. It is what sets homo sapiens apart from our evolutionary predecessors. So age, on a foundational level, is about nerve endings, and nerves ending. There are certain patterns of growth and development of cells that we associate with different stages of physiological and cognitive development, and these are linked to the social categories that we use to articulate ideas of age. Of course, there is an extent to which as social beings we are profoundly anchored to these physiological and cognitive processes. Infancy, in this sense, may be defined by the acquisition of basic motor skills and linguistic and social competencies, while childhood may see the development of these competencies alongside psychological, social, cultural, and physical development. Adolescence can be defined by the onset of puberty and the development of hormonal changes and reproductive capacities, and by neurological change through which the number of nerve endings in the prefrontal cortex of the brain is drastically reduced (a process known as ‘synaptic pruning’) (Casey et al. 2008). Some would argue that this neurological process is what leads to reasoned ‘adult’ thinking, rather than the ‘storm and stress’ (Hall 1904) of the adolescent brain. Below I present a counter-argument. For decades, it has been the orthodoxy to presume that the slow process of biological decline begins at some point towards the end of this adolescent transformation, initiating the slow journey, eventually, towards senescence and ultimately death—what Shakespeare might refer to as ‘second childhood, and oblivion’. That is the story of age in a nutshell. While more recent research refutes this long-­ held claim (Boldrini et  al. 2018), instead suggesting that our neurons remain remarkably vivacious throughout the human lifespan, in the popular imagination, biological age is experienced very much like a mountain, with human life the arduous process of ascent, apex and precarious descent to the Other Side. Biological processes of age are facts of life that in most cases cannot be avoided, and which limit the flexibility of how we imagine age socially. An adult cannot physically be a baby, and an infant lacks the cognitive, social and physical skills of the adult. A child cannot physically be an

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adult (although even this seemingly clear distinction involves a blurred line); and it is difficult for the fully grown adult to convincingly take the place of a still-developing child (although such distinctions are more frequently made based on folk interpretations of the body than on any measure of biological change). Accepting the relative inevitability of certain biological processes, however, is not the same as suggesting that age is rigidly tethered to these processes. Of course, each of the transformations described above takes place in an idiosyncratic way within each individual human body, meaning that there are few certainties or straightforward cut-off points within the realm of physical or chronological age. What is more, a biological understanding of age presents the roadmap of human physiological and cognitive development, but it does not provide an inviolate idiom for giving meaning to these processes. Foucault (1981 [1976]) has famously argued that through modernity our bodies have been socialised into seemingly natural indexes of sex, sexuality and gender. So too does ‘age’, in its many guises, work as a taxonomic mapping of the body which in its totality can be nothing if not ‘natural’ to the human condition. And yet one does not need to look far for rich evidence that challenges the fixity of our own age categories. What in the Western biomedical model is seen as the total innocence and ignorance of childhood, for example, in other cultures is seen as an abundance of knowing. Among the Beng in The Ivory Coast, West Africa, a child’s inability to speak one language, for example, is taken to mean that she can speak all languages and can converse with beings beyond the mortal realm, coming miraculously as she has from that place (Gottlieb 2004; Montgomery 2009a). Adolescence, similarly, only becomes adolescence as we know it (with all its multiple meanings and caveats) when we identify it as such (Mead 1928). Just as many have critiqued the capacity of recent advances in neuroscience to inform our understanding of social behaviour (Johnson et al. 2009), learning or psychological dispositions, so too is it possible to suggest that the biological model of understanding age is just one version of the story. This is the case not least when we consider non-Western constructions of the self that are not so closely tied to the individual human body as it is imagined in the scientific biological tradition (and as I discuss in more detail below) (Carsten 2004; Vivieros de Castro 2004). The unavoidable physical, cellular realities of age can be interpreted

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through a wide range of social, cultural and historical lenses, from Shakespeare to Cyrus, and in so doing it is also possible to challenge some of the enduring connections that are often made between the physiology of age and the social constitution of age as an aspect of a person’s life. Nowhere is this embodied notion of age more evident than in the assumptions about learning, cognition and socialisation made in schools, and in the concurrent disciplining of bodies through schooling.

Defining and Disciplining Age: Citizens of Tomorrow At the turn of the twentieth century—what Cunningham (2005) rightly identifies as the ‘century of the child’—conceptions of childhood in Britain were characterised by the notion of children as innocent and naïve, but also as the emotional focus of the family, and of society in general. Moreover, children and young people were increasingly the focus of state control as future citizens in need of training in moral, civic and economic terms. In this respect, the twentieth century saw the reification of age as the backdrop for modernity. As an increasing focus for emotional investment (rather than as economically productive labour), children were seen to be in need of protection, instruction and discipline, both at the hand of the family and as wards of the state. The emergence of paediatric medicine and the institution of mass education in the latter years of the nineteenth century in England meant that progress and development were increasingly measured against a universalist model of what a child should be like at a certain age. While by no means unique to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘self-help’ guides for parents increasingly relied on age-bound scientific data for their arguments (Tisdall 2017). Under the powerful influence of Piaget (1936), Freud (1949 [1923]), Erikson (1950) and others (e.g. Hall 1904), at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, age came to be defined in this way according to various, but similarly rigid, linear models of development. For Freud, age was a canvas for plotting discrete stages of psychosexual progression; for Piaget, it was instead the metre by which cognitive development could be ascertained and measured. As the backdrop to ideas about social, psychological and cognitive growth, age was in

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this way perceived as being divided into culturally universal stages of forward progression through the lifecycle. As Lesko suggests (2001), thinking about age within these fields was reflective of the broader discourses of progress and (social) evolution dominating popular, political, scientific and academic debate. Childhood and youth in particular were emerging as new areas of scientific inquiry, the overarching objective of which was to understand and regulate the social, moral, biological, psychological and pedagogical conditions by which children and young people could be socialised into ‘complete’ adult citizens (Cunningham 2005: 176; James and Prout 1997: 12). Thinking about age principally in terms of progress and/or decline— whether in psychological, social, developmental or pedagogical terms— therefore had, and continues to have, particular significance for conceptualisations of childhood, youth and adolescence as times of becoming on the way to adulthood (Qvortrup 1994), even though this is by no means a culturally universal way of making age socially meaningful. Just as the inhabitants of Britain were being presented with a more coherent, universalist imagining of national identity (Anderson 1983), so too were they starting to think about progress through the life course as something that happened in the same way for everyone, everywhere. As I explore in more detail in Chap. 2, the incursion of the state into the lives of young people through mass education allowed universalist ideas of age to become normal, with new imaginings of generation cross-cutting the broader imagined community of the modern nation-state.

Disciplining Age in the Social Sciences The study of age within the social sciences can be seen in many ways as part of the project of modernity—of establishing and reifying a coherent taxonomy by which human life is organised, and which fits neatly with the economic and political order of the time (Foucault 1977). The social science of age draws heavily on scientific explanations of physiological processes. Indeed, the sociological study of age in part owes its temporal and theoretical fragmentation to the early emergence of age as a focus for  investigation within other fields, including medicine (particularly

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paediatrics), psychology, psychoanalysis, child development and education. Scientific (and scientistic) discourses of age in each of these fields have had an important part to play in constituting the traditional linear model of the life course. Psychological discourses of age as a framework for growth and development also had a profound influence on the way in which age was figured within sociology during much of the twentieth century, and, in many cases, into the present day. As James and Prout suggest in relation to sociological concepts of childhood, The scientific construction of the ‘irrationality’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘universality’ of childhood through psychological discourses was translated directly into sociological accounts of childhood in the form of theories of socialization during the 1950s. Within structural-functionalist accounts of society the ‘individual’ was slotted into a finite number of social roles. Socialization, therefore was the mechanism whereby these social roles came to be replicated in successive generations. The theory purported to explain the ways in which children gradually acquire knowledge of these roles. However, it frequently failed to do so (1997: 12)

Of profound importance to the history of sociological research about age, then, are functionalist conceptualisations of age as a structuring force for consensus, stability and continuity within societies (Pilcher 1995). Implicit in Durkheim’s theorising of the moral importance of education is the argument that a mass system of schooling should serve as a means of regulating social norms, beliefs, practices and statuses according to age and generation (Alexander 2013). As we shall see in the next chapter, it is difficult to overstate the impact that mass education has had, in this way, on the construction of normative generational social identities (Alanen and Mayall 2001). In relation to the family, in the middle of the twentieth century, Parsons (1954) and Eisenstadt (1964) helped to cement the notion that age (in terms of the relationships between younger and older generations) was the framework through which socialisation takes place and through which social norms and cultural traditions are regularly processed, transmitted and maintained within societies. By recognising the social significance of age, represented here as a social phenomenon governed by undifferentiated, universal social rules, Parsons and Eisenstadt

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helped to establish age as a major focus of sociological inquiry. But the functionalist preoccupation with age as an aspect of social structure also served to further limit sociological understandings of age within universalistic, reified categories that did not fully recognise the power relations and inequalities between generations, or shed light on the role of individual and social agency in giving dynamic meaning to the social processes of age. A preoccupation with the structural elements of age and ageing can also be seen in the tradition of structural-functionalist research within social anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly within the British context (Kertzer and Keith 1984). Early considerations of age from British social anthropology concentrated on how age-based social structures were reproduced, principally through kinship, in order to maintain the broader structural coherence of societies (Lancy 2015; Montgomery 2009a). As Kertzer and Keith suggest, anthropological studies of age during this period focused primarily on age systems themselves—on formal age grades, age groups and age sets—rather than on the individuals in them (1984: 21). These limitations did not prevent (and indeed may have encouraged) such functionalist interpretations of age and the family from permeating mainstream political and economic discourse throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the present day. Having said this, however, a major contribution of the social sciences to the study of age has also been to further highlight the social, cultural and historical construction of ‘age’ as a social category. In the tradition of the Culture and Personality school of cultural anthropology in North America, the social and cultural contingency of childhood (and youth or adolescence) has been a theoretical premise of anthropological studies of childhood since the early twentieth century (e.g. Mead 1928; Benedict 1938). While early studies such as that of Margaret Mead (1928) were still premised on the idea of children as passive participants in processes of socialisation directed by adults (or older ‘adult’ children), their cross-­cultural approach presented a direct challenge to the universalistic claims dominant in psychology and child development at the time (James and Prout 1997: 19). While not without its own significant controversies (Jarvie 2012), Mead’s argument, for example, made the point that age could be

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imagined in ways other than those popular in American and European societies at the time. In emphasising the sexual liberation and lack of stress among her female adolescent informants in Western Samoa, Mead provided a direct rebuke to Hall’s 1904 theory of ‘Sturm und Drang’/’storm and stress’ in adolescence. Karl Mannheim’s ‘The Problem of Generations’ also represents an important early alternative to the structural-­functionalist view of age and intergenerational social relationships, because Mannheim went some way towards recognising the significance of social and historical context (and variability) in the development of generational notions of identity, belonging and difference (particularly during youth) (Mannheim 1952 [1923]; Pilcher 1994). In doing so, Mannheim instigated a trajectory of social science research that while on one hand has reinforced notions of the structural inevitability of age-­based social relations, on the other has yielded an interrogation of the ‘cultural’ traits that give meaning to generational identity (Furlong 2009). Ingold provides a clear and compelling argument as to why age remains so central, and yet so evasive of critique, as an organising concept in the social sciences and in the wider society in the age of modernity. Drawing heavily on Dewey, and focusing on the transmission of culture through education rather than on ‘age’ as such, Ingold makes the case that a ‘genealogical’ idiom has pervaded dominant understandings of how culture and society ‘work’ since the end of the nineteenth century. In crude summary, the ‘genealogical model’ describes the idea made popular in the biological sciences of the transmission of discrete information from one generation to the next, with actors across generations remaining equally discrete in the roles that they take on in this process. Just as coded genetic information is broadly assumed to pass directly from parent to child, with the child a passive recipient of this code, so too is a genealogical idiom applied to the ‘transmission’ of culture from one generation to the next, with the young as imitators of already-existing cultural knowledge cultivated and coded by elders to be handed down. Ingold succinctly argues that culture is seen within the context of modernity as a series of competencies to be mastered and reproduced through reason and ­rationality. The alternative is to experience culture and to be bound by its traditions without the self-determination and

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mastery that reason provides—or, as Ingold puts it, the difference between ‘having culture’ and being ‘had by culture’ (Ingold 2017: 14). While this crude distinction has long been discredited as a means of distinguishing ‘civilised’ from ‘primitive’ societies, the genealogical model is a persistent logic that underpins the presumed superiority of scientific reasoning as the foundation of the project of modernity. The very same framing of culture is clearly reflected in assumptions about the relative ignorance of children and young people relative to the wisdom and intelligence of adults, not least in the context of schooling. As Ingold suggests, We are convinced that children should be educated in order that they can cross from one condition to the other. To this end, the world they know from experience has to be returned to them in rationalized form, as a system of rules and principles, or what once were called rudiments. Drained of environmental variation, these rudiments are conveyed to students as if they mapped an already known continent, serving as a territorial foundation for their own ascent to reason. (Ingold 2017: 14)

The well-mapped route for the ascent to which Ingold refers (although he does not explicitly mention age as such) is progress measured against chronological age. The logic of inherited cultural knowledge can only work when organised around an age-based system that presumes a discrete divide, along genealogical lines, between neophytes and elders. It is therefore central to the project of mass education as a means of conveying abstract knowledge from those who know more, to those who know less. Of course, life in schools is never quite this simple, as I aim to show below, but such a view is characteristic of a modernist perspective on age as a monolithic and rigid, inviolate system of categorisation that underpins all aspects of social life. Underpinning a range of other taxonomies that serve to carve up and make sense of the modern world, age endures as a category rarely challenged in its obviousness because it is very difficult to think about culture itself without thinking in genealogical terms. Following Mannheim (1952[1923]), there is perhaps no grander ­narrative, no more enduring coherent logic to the modern world than the ages and stages that we are all now accustomed to travelling through.

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 art II: Critiquing Age in Studies of Childhood, P Youth, and Education Structure, Culture, and Subcultures Thus far, it is possible to see that in the first half of the twentieth century theories from the biological sciences, from psychology and from sociology, have served to reify a particularly modernist way of understanding age as part of the human experience, based on particular interpretations of scientific reasoning. Just as new public disciplinary institutions like schools and hospitals helped to establish normative ideas about how age should be trained and experienced, the disciplining of ideas about age occurred through the dividing out and reification of disciplinary knowledge on the subject. A prescriptive view of age is also reflected in popular and political discourse during this period, and in the government policies and consumer trends that have served to reassure us of the universal fixity implied by our particular linear model how structure and cultural transmission are organised around age. The second half of the twentieth century, however, saw the emergence of increasingly complex conceptualisations of age within society and within the social sciences, not least in terms of the development of a critical (if sometimes equally universalistic) Marxist sociology that questioned the dominant functionalist paradigm and highlighted the significance of the processes of power and inequality shaping young people’s lives. Published in 1960, Ariés’ Centuries of Childhood presented a convincing (if at times flawed and inaccurate) account of the historical construction of childhood and youth as social categories, and provided a new starting point for critical studies of contemporary children and young people (Ariés 1973 [1960]; Cunningham 2005). The emergence of notions of the life course (Elder 1974), also served to problematise the more rigid model of the life cycle and allowed for a more nuanced conceptualisation of how individuals experience trajectories through life dependent on social, cultural and historical context. While a dominant stream of social science research remained focused on functionalist and clinical interpretations of issues such as youth and deviance—what Griffin (1993) has

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described as part of an essentialising ‘mainstream discourse’ on youth— interpretivist approaches to the study of childhood and youth also began during this period to expand the theoretical scope of research related to age by focusing on the meanings that individuals attach to notions of age (or particular categories of age, such as youth), and on the processes by which these meanings are nurtured and articulated (Pilcher 1995: 29; Griffin 1993; Woodman and Wyn 2015). These changes in sociological thinking were in large part in response to the emergence of the teenager first as a consumer demographic in the 1950s, and as both a rebellious, countercultural phenomenon and a focus of subcultural production and consumption in the proceeding decades of the twentieth century. If in the latter stages of the twentieth century, Western societies were undergoing profound change in the transition towards late modernity (Giddens 1991), children and youth remained centre stage both as instigators of this change and as ideological wards of the future for adults to protect and to protect against. An interpretivist approach exploring asymmetries of power in the politics of aged social identity (of childhood and youth) was well suited to documenting the apparent decay of what formerly had seemed unshakeable structures based on age hierarchy. With these emerging theoretical perspectives in mind, during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, youth also became a focus of the emerging field of cultural studies (Hall and Jefferson 1993), with age, once again, serving as the backdrop for more nuanced theories of young people’s ‘subcultural’ activity as symbolic resistance to systems of power and inequality. Building on the work emerging from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, research exploring the so-called ‘subcultures’ of youth also lead sociologists to place increasing emphasis on diversity rather than universality in their descriptions of ‘youth’ and of the transitions from childhood into adulthood (see, for example, Brake 1985). This diversity was manifested above all in the consumption habits of young people (Hebdige 1979; Cohen 1972; Frith 1978; McRobbie 1991). Indeed, consumption has been a pervasive, almost ubiquitous feature of sociological explorations of youth culture since its emergence as a field of study in the mid-twentieth century (for an early example, see Abrams 1959). This is of course tied to the invention in the 1950s of the ‘teenager’ as a

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demographic, when consumers in the teen years started to represent a powerful economic force to be harnessed by advertisers and marketeers. Later focuses on gender (McRobbie 1991), and race and ethnicity (Mac an Ghaill 1988; Mirza 1992; Carey 2019) have also served to further expand the vantages of ‘youth’ being put forward in the social sciences, adding to a much richer portrait of the multiple experiences that this particular imagining of age could entail. Importantly, these studies reflect a general move within sociological studies of youth towards a more complex conceptualisation of both the nature of ‘youth’ and of the ‘subcultures’ that they represent. Miles’ (2000) development of the idea of ‘youth lifestyles’ to replace references to subculture, for example, is indicative of the need for a theoretical frame that takes into account the contemporary contexts in which ‘youth’ is negotiated, in terms of recognising that ‘subcultures’ now more frequently make up part of the ‘mainstream’ of popular culture, and recognising that ‘youth’ is now imagined and negotiated on a global scale. Indeed, Griffin also invokes the metaphor of the imaginary (‘imagining new narratives of youth’) to argue that notions of contemporary ‘youth’ need to take into consideration perspectives from theories of globalisation if they are to accurately reflect the lived experiences of young people in the present (Griffin 2001). Thinking about ‘youth’ in these terms also highlights the fact that ‘youth’ is as much characterised by ‘normal’ young people as it is by the extreme, rebellious, or deviant examples more frequently encountered in youth studies of the 1980s (Miles 2000; Hollands 1995). Drawing on practice theory (Bourdieu 1991), contemporary perspectives on ‘youth’ also more readily recognise the interplay between structure and agency, rather than focusing on the predominance of one or the other (Miles 2000: 9).

The ‘New’ Sociology of Childhood Another significant move away from the universalistic and essentialising notions of age put forward in the first half of the twentieth century can be found in the emergence of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood from the late 1980s onwards—a field that echoes the broader concerns emerging in Western society with the rights and active voices of children (see, for

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example the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). Sociological (and anthropological) studies of childhood have in recent years served to further problematise the social categories by which age is defined (Lancy 2015; Montgomery 2009b), and studies of childhood in school settings have more explicitly grappled with the complexities of age as an aspect of children’s lives. What is more, the emergence of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood also coincides with a shift towards a more multi-­ disciplinary perspective on social life in school settings. Indeed, both the multi-disciplinary scope and the theoretical ideas at the heart of the ‘new’ sociology and anthropology of childhood have considerable utility for exploring ‘age’ more generally as an aspect of life in school. Built around the idea that childhood is a fundamentally social and historical construct, the ‘new’ sociology of childhood has sought to critique existing conceptualisations—whether in academic research or popular culture—of childhood as an innate and universal experience cloaked by innocence and/or dependence on the guardianship of supposedly socially complete adults (James and Prout 1997; Prout 2005; Jenks 1996; James et  al. 1998). Crucial to this argument is the recognition of children as active, agentic participants in the social worlds that they inhabit: like adults, children play an active role in shaping their social interactions with others, in spite of their frequent marginalisation and subordination in the wider society. James and Prout describe some of the main tenets of this view of childhood as follows: Childhood is understood as a social construction. As such it provides an interpretive frame for contextualizing the early years of human life… Childhood is a variable of social analysis. It can never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender, or ethnicity…Comparative and cross-cultural analysis reveals a variety of childhoods rather than a single and universal phenomenon. Children’s relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right…children must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. (1997: 8)

As with Ariés’ and subsequently Hendrick’s (1997) and Cunningham’s (2005) treatments of the historical construction of childhood, ‘new’ ­sociological studies of childhood have served to explore the social and

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cultural contingency of ‘childhood’ and provide empirical accounts of childhood as it is lived in various ways by children in a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts—often beyond the walled limits of ‘childhood’ more narrowly defined. Similarly, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, research in the field of psychology has also adopted a more child-­ centred approach. While it is only in relatively recent years, and in part in response to the flourishing of new approaches to the psychology, history and sociology of childhood, that the (child-centred) study of children’s lives has once again become a field of primary concern for anthropologists (Froerer 2009), the ‘new’ sociology of childhood nevertheless owes some of its theoretical and methodological approach to a historical link with social anthropology. As suggested above, a major contribution of anthropology to the study of age as a social phenomenon is the early recognition that categories such as ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’ are socially and culturally constructed. In the multi-disciplinary spirit of contemporary studies of childhood, these disciplinary traditions are in this sense now very closely aligned in many respects, and both present highly valuable, overlapping theoretical perspectives for understanding age in the context of school. One example of this kind of theoretical perspective is the four-part typology of ‘imagining’ childhood put forward by James et al. (1998). They argue that theorising about childhood can be ordered according to visions of the ‘tribal child’, the ‘minority group child’, the ‘socially constructed child’ and the ‘social-structural’ child. This typology has resonance in the context of this study because it highlights the interplay between the ‘commonality and diversity’ of children’s experiences— between the structural forces that serve to regiment and order lived experiences of childhood, and the role that children themselves play as social actors actively engaged in constructing childhood for themselves. While visions of the ‘tribal child’ emphasise difference among children according to other factors such as gender (Thorne 1993) and age, the idea of the ‘minority child’ embodies the common political struggles that children, like other minority groups, face as a result of their marginal position in society. The idea of the ‘social-structural child’ also captures elements of the dynamics of power underpinning childhood as a category of age by focusing on the structural positioning of childhood (and children) in

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relation to other social categories and social groups. The vision of the ‘socially constructed child’, on the other hand, focuses on the lives of children as they are experienced in specific social contexts and in the discourses of childhood that are brought to bear on these experiences. As James and James suggest (2001: 31), the value of this four-part typology is in the prospect of uniting all four perspectives in order to account simultaneously for structure and agency—for commonality and diversity. In ‘tacking between’ evidence of one and the other, it is possible to develop a theoretical perspective through which the complexities of childhood can be grasped.

A New ‘New Wave’ in Childhood Studies? This kind of multivalent approach has increasingly characterised anthropological and sociological studies of childhood and youth in the last two decades. Christensen et  al. (2018) go so far as to suggest an emerging ‘new wave’ of childhood studies that lends further complexity to understanding childhood at once by critiquing the nature of ‘agency’ in childhood and, drawing on Latour (2005), by incorporating a theoretical approach that recognises the importance of space, materiality and non-­ human actors in the lives of children. More recent explorations of childhood (James and Prout 2015; Wasshede 2017) provide a critique of agency as a notion hinging on a neoliberal logic of the self within which the individual human person is the locus for all action, and therefore is also the focus of all responsibility for one’s position in society. In contrast, a renewed focus on social or relational agency places instead a focus on how efficacy emerges in the reconciliation of novelty and difference between members of a community (or what Ingold might call, following the argument above, the ‘commoning’ of an educative experience). Further still, more recent research (Ryan 2012; Ursin 2011) points to a model of ‘agency’ that also takes into consideration the active role of non-­ human actors in the cultural worlds of children, young people and adults alike. Such relationships are situated spatially and temporally, with children actively shaping the temporal and spatial domains that they inhabit, in correspondence with non-human actors. Playgrounds, pets, toys,

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b­ edroom posters, social media, subcultural patterns of the consumption of things—all serve as means for reckoning age that children and young people consort with as they imagine age in their day-to-day lives. Posthuman reckonings of age in childhood allow for the exploration of broader non-human relations in the lives of children and which help to constitute imaginings and experiences of age.

Age in the Sociology of Education In terms of studies into the social worlds of schools, the second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a British sociology of education focused, on one hand, on the unveiling of structural inequalities in the English education system, and, on the other, on exploring the day-to-day of social life at school through ethnographic methods and the theoretical perspectives provided by symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1956). Under the guidance of Max Gluckman, David Hargreaves (1967) and Colin Lacey (1970) provided early accounts of everyday social life in English secondary schools that were groundbreaking in their ethnographic approach. In this respect, they helped to pave the way for a generation of ethnographically inclined sociologists of education interested, above all, in exploring issues of social class through the analysis of schooling as it happened day-to-day. Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977) serves as an iconic and well-worn example of this renewed interest in the social world of school, but numerous other examples of sociological studies of school life also emerged during the 1970s and 1980s (Corrigan 1979; Ball 1980; Hammersley and Woods 1984; Woods 1983; Walford 1986; Delamont 1976). The ‘new’ sociology of education in this sense provided a magnifying glass through which schooling could be analysed in its daily minutiae, rather than solely at the structural level. As with sociological and cultural studies of ‘youth’, age looms large in the background of the ethnographic accounts of school life during this period, but age is seldom tackled explicitly as a focus of sociological analysis. Indeed, most, if not all school ethnographies deal implicitly with issues of age, not only because schools are organised according to age, and because they serve as a staging ground for negotiating age as an aspect of

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identity, but also because ethnographers must frequently grapple with the questions of how adult researchers can develop relationships with children and young people in a way that allows them to effectively and appropriately explore the research questions that they wish to address (Pollard 1987; Walford 1987). And yet at the same time, few school ethnographies treat age as their primary concern, particularly in the context of English secondary education. This is somewhat surprising given the importance of age as an aspect of social life in school settings as suggested in the potted history above. In the case of the school ethnographies mentioned here, it is also understandable, though, given that sociologists of education were at the time more interested in pointing out other aspects of the social dynamics of schooling, not least among which were the class-based inequalities perpetuated by the so-called ‘comprehensivisation’ of the English education system. Sociologists of education and cultural theorists interested in youth culture have had a significant role to play in establishing and perpetuating particular imaginings of age in relation to schooling. From the late 1970s onwards, studies of youth culture and social life at school served to greatly expand knowledge and awareness of the everyday lives of young people, and in so doing have also recognised the active role that young people play in shaping the social contexts that they inhabit. It could reasonably be imagined that while the ‘new’ sociology of education was flourishing alongside studies of youth culture, the social worlds of schools would have also attracted attention in the sphere of British social anthropology. However, in Britain the task of unravelling the social fabric of formal education remained (and, for the most part, has remained) firmly in the hands of sociologists (Delamont and Atkinson 1980). While a few exceptions exist (e.g. Opie and Opie 1959; Driver 1979), the social world of English schools has not until more recently developed as a recognised and legitimate research context for British social anthropologists (James 1993; Evans 2007; Montgomery 2009a; Winkler-Reid 2017; Alexander 2014). In the context of this study, this historical lack of attention means that aspects of anthropological theory relevant to the study of age—exploring rites of passage, ritual and symbolism, for example—have not been brought to bear sufficiently in the context of British education until much more recently (e.g. Wulf 2010). It also suggests that disciplinary

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boundaries have served to further limit the extent to which age, as an aspect of schooling, has been able to develop as a field of study unto itself. With this in mind, Delamont and Atkinson point out that the tradition of ethnographies of education is, in contrast, much stronger in North America, but that historically there has been little cross-­fertilisation between the British and American traditions (1980). While the pioneers of the ‘new’ sociology of education were busy unravelling the nature of schooling with a particular interest in social class, North American anthropologists of education were continuing in the legacy of cultural anthropology (and the Chicago School of sociology) by focusing on the school as a site for acculturation and/or the contestation of indigenous and minority ‘cultures’ (see, for example, Jackson 1968)—what Delamont and Atkinson wryly refer to as ‘an obsession with cultural pluralism’ (1980: 146). Just as it has been argued that ethnicity and notions of cultural difference were significant in their absence as ingredients of earlier British school ethnographies, here too then it is possible to make the case that, historically, American anthropologists of education have privileged processes of cultural contestation and ‘acculturation’ above a critical analysis of the process of schooling itself (1980: 148). This is not to say, however, that there are no examples of North American school ethnography focusing on school processes and social reproduction. On the contrary, there are a number of important examples from among the wide array of American school-based ethnographic studies emerging during this period (and, as we shall see, in subsequent decades as well) that explore the potentially marginalising propensities of formal education (see, for example, Rist 1973; Ogbu 1974). Indeed, Yon points out that like the ‘new’ sociologists of education in Britain, American anthropologists of education in the late 1960s and 1970s were increasingly focused on analysis informed by Marxist and structuralist interpretations of the place of school in society (2003: 417). In turn, just as the emergence of cultural studies of education and youth in Britain heralded a more nuanced approach to the complexity of young people’s lives, so too was American anthropology of education influenced by theoretical perspectives, such as those of Bourdieu and Habermas, that emphasised the multiplicities and contradictions of life in school (Yon 2003: 421). And yet despite these points of convergence, the (real and imagined) differences in focus

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between American and European ethnographers of education, and the general lack of interest in schools among British social anthropologists, has led to the shoring up of disciplinary divides. Even with a more recent revival of interest in schooling as a site for anthropological analysis (Varenne and McDermott 1999), there is little, if any, research that explicitly focuses on age as an aspect of schooling. In relation to conceptualising age in ethnographies of education, these disciplinary rifts have served to further fragment the ways in which age is imagined by social scientists in relation to schooling. Within the American tradition of anthropology of education, as in the sociology of education, age has remained a ‘backdrop’ to ethnographies concerned with other aspects of social and cultural life in school. In this sense, the special attention paid in American school ethnographies to the ‘acquisition’ of culture has also led anthropologists to overlook the problematisation of age as a negotiated aspect of life at school (see, for example, Singleton 1974). Of course, age often emerges as an aspect of cultural difference, in so much as young people at school can be described as experiencing age in different ways according to social and cultural context or background. Similarly, age also provides the framework for ethnographic accounts of the processes by which the ‘acquisition’ of culture takes place. In the legacy of Margaret Mead (and Van Gennep 1960), historically these processes have often been couched within the terms of well-worn, linear patterns of ‘coming of age’. The nature of ‘coming of age’ itself, however, has until recently avoided critical analysis, not least with respect to the linear and irreversible quality of rites of passage and the agency of individuals as participants in these processes. Annette Hemmings, for example, recognises this as a long-standing issue in the anthropology of education, but she also points out that during the last two decades, theoretical ­developments in anthropology (and other areas of the social sciences) have served to expand the picture of ‘coming of age’ practices taking place in schools. The development of ideas of cultural (re)production in school, for instance, has helped to highlight the active role that students play in negotiating ideas of identity and age-based transitions (Hemmings 2004: 131). While these processes of cultural production are often framed in terms of resistance to the dominant middle-class values of capitalist society (e.g. Foley 1990), other contemporary ethnographic accounts represent a more complicated

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and contradictory picture of how students negotiate the ideas of identity in school, eschewing a simple Us/Them dichotomy as a means of describing school relations (e.g. Yon 2000). Where age does emerge in these accounts of schooling, criticisms have also been levelled at the notions of ‘youth’ to be found in school ethnographies (Delamont 2000). Delamont argues that, traditionally, discussions of ‘youth’ identities in the sociology of education have also placed undue attention on young, rebellious working-class white males, seen either in the guise of romantic heroes or as threats to civil society. A number of ethnographic studies from the CCCS are presented as examples of the former approach (e.g. Willis 1977; Corrigan 1979). The analogue to this rose-tinted view of the ‘lads’ is what Delamont describes as the other ‘grand narrative’ in British sociology of education: that of moral panic over under-achieving working-class males who represent an unbridled and therefore potentially destructive and misanthropic youth. In each case, it is possible to see that the study and/or representation of a particular group of young people serves to re-create an imagining of age that plays on well-established tropes about ‘youth’ as something either to protect or to protect against (Springhall 1998; Cohen 1972). This would seem to fit with Delamont’s further argument that sociology in general is uninterested in the potential spheres of social research that schools represent because they do not necessarily deal with anti-intellectual, popular aspects of culture—aspects of culture, it should be added, that are traditionally associated with stereotypical portrayals of ‘youth’. In turn, sociologists of education have focused on the anti-intellectual aspects of school, because this is what is valued in the broader context of the sociology of culture (Delamont 2000: 106). To an extent it would seem valid to question the preoccupation of sociologists of education with the ‘­rebels’ of the school world; at the same time, however, the ‘grand’ narratives of male working-class resistance that Delamont describes are certainly not the only focus for sociologists and anthropologists of education interested in the identities of young people (as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter). In any case, Delamont makes the important point that ‘normal’ aspects of school life—the lives of ‘normal’ young people—are less well-documented than the apparently more interesting lives of young rebels. This includes their experiences and

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negotiations of age as an aspect of mundane daily life in school, and it certainly relates to the seemingly obvious organisation of schools, both at the structural and discursive levels, into linear, developmental hierarchies of age. Bearing in mind the gaps in existing anthropological and sociological research on age in the context of schooling, youth studies and the sociology of youth subcultures has also been criticised for focusing too intently on a narrow vision of youth subculture (McRobbie 1991). Cohen (1997) argues, for example, that from the late 1970s until the 1990s, ‘youth’ became synonymous with a very specific (white, male) vision of young people either as a ‘problem’ and/or as a symbol of rebellion (Cohen 1997). In this sense, studies of youth culture helped to solidify a particular construction of youth, both as an aspect of the popular imagination and as an object of academic study (Griffin 1993). It is also arguable that ‘youth’ itself was a somewhat neglected element in youth studies intent on illuminating other elements of social life for young people, such as cultural (re) production, class, ethnicity, race and gender. Serving as the ‘backdrop’ for other theoretical concerns in this way means that age—here categorised as ‘youth’—has not always been given due critical attention as a contingent aspect of social life unto itself (Alexander 2014; Miles 2000). Cohen suggests that the detachment of ‘youth’ from studies of youth culture can be perceived in two ways. In studies of youth lifestyles or subcultures, it is possible to argue that analysis and interpretation became focused on the semiotic meanings of youth culture, but not on young people themselves (Cohen 1997: 195; see also Hebdige 1979). In contrast, youth studies that focus on social and cultural reproduction have been criticised for focusing, as Cohen puts it, on the ‘synchronic’ characteristics of youth and youth transitions, rather than on the ‘diachronic’ elements of young people’s lives. Or, put another way, a focus on r­eproduction at times obscures the multiplicities of the active processes of reproduction (and production) as they occur in the lived experiences of individual young people  (Woodman and Wyn 2015). By breaking down the limits of a functionalist framing of youth, cultural theorists and sociologists of the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s helped to formulate a far broader theoretical understanding of age, but they also helped to imagine a similarly powerful set of categories by which age, as a focus of sociological inquiry, could be defined and controlled as ‘youth’ (Griffin 1993; Furlong 2009).

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Consuming ‘Youth’ at School In the sphere of studies of ‘youth’ in English school settings, a number of other more recent studies have highlighted the social importance of patterns of consumption (and gender) on identity in school settings, again, with age emerging as a background theme (Nairn and Griffin 2007; Livingstone 2009; Phoenix and Frosh 2001; Sandin and McLaren 2010). The convergence of these theoretical perspectives and an interest in consumption as an aspect of young people’s lives can be seen in a number of ethnographic studies of schools. This is further evidence for the importance of including material (and virtual) markers of age in an understanding of how children and young people make sense of age in everyday life. Phoenix and Frosh, for example, have explored the role that ‘fashionable looks’ play in constructions of masculinity—that is, the process of boys becoming men—in secondary schools in London (2001). In relation to consumption of media culture in particular, Ben Rampton’s study of the exchanges between secondary school students and (sometimes) teachers considers the significance that media consumption plays in the normal routines of school life (Rampton 2006; see also Buckingham 2000). Caroline Dover has also conducted research in schools that highlights the significance of pop culture in the daily lives of students in English secondary schools (Dover 2007). Dover’s study is a valuable example of an ethnographic approach to media consumption and identity that emphasises the embedded nature of media consumption as an aspect of everyday interactions. Here age is another silent definer of identity, in that the study explicitly looks at popular culture in the lives of ‘young people’, but does not explore where these practices overlap with the adults who also inhabit the school  and other mediated spaces. It is important also to bear in mind that sociological studies of ‘youth’ in school have been criticised in this sense for continuing to emphasise the ‘youthful’ attributes of a particular group identity—from Snapchat (Handyside and Ringrose 2017) to street gangs—while underplaying the interconnectedness of these ‘younger’ groups with the social world of adults in a myriad of related contexts (Amit 2003: 241). Uncoupling experiences of ‘youth’ from chronological age represents a significant gap in our understanding of the ways in which age is figured in schools and suggests the need for a more integrative conceptual frame that accounts for negotiations of age between children, young people and

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adults in interlocking and overlapping social contexts, rather than in separate ‘cultural worlds’ (Kehily and Swann 2003). Along with Laughey (2006) and others, the above studies represent examples of an important move towards a more nuanced understanding of the social significance of consumption within the context of secondary school education in Britain. However, there still remains a gap in existing research in terms of a more critical treatment of the relationship between consumption and age in school.

 chool Ethnography in the Present: Multi-disciplinary S Perspectives There is much to be gained in our understanding of age as an aspect of life in school from exploring recent examples of school ethnography. Numerous school ethnographies have emerged from the ongoing legacy of the ‘new’ sociological study of childhood and in the anthropology of childhood (Levinson 2000), not least because schools present a key site in which childhood is imagined and enacted and because the establishment of compulsory formal education (and the increasing involvement of the state in children’s lives in general) has had a key role to play in the construction of contemporary popular ideas about childhood. To ethnographies focusing on childhood in school, we can also add an increasingly broad range of multi-disciplinary studies that explore ‘youth’, c­ onsumption and other aspects of school life, including ethnographies emerging from the American tradition of anthropology of education, from the burgeoning anthropology of education in the UK context, and from the increasingly broad range of other disciplines, such as geography (e.g. Valentine and Skelton 1998) which now hold an interest in ethnographies of schooling as well (Anderson-Levitt 2012). Alison James’ Childhood Identities (1993) provides one example of school ethnography that is particularly useful for thinking about age (and, importantly, gender) in school, in terms of her description of the significance of the body as a locus for social expression, as a marker of belonging and difference and as a means for performing age. Christensen and James’ (2001) account of how students and teachers experience time

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in school, and how the temporal framework of school helps to structure both the notions of childhood and the relationships between adults and children in school, is similarly insightful in its treatment of age as an aspect of school life. This ethnography is particularly useful in that it focuses specifically on the relationships between teachers and students (although the authors do not go into detail about the differences in these relationships between students and teachers of different ages). While age is not explicitly highlighted as a focus of study, Christensen and James’ exploration of adult control over time, and of time pressures related to the structure of the curriculum, reveal important aspects of how teachers and students become divested from one another in the process of formal education. Crucially, they also recognise, following Shilling, that the ‘macro-micro’ division within school ethnography is ‘in need of remedy’: that is, they argue that accounts of life at school should incorporate both a focus on the active participation of students and teachers in shaping the intricacies of daily school life, and on the structural forces and processes of social reproduction at play in schools (2001: 71). This confluence of ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ perspectives is also key to the conceptual frame that I wish to apply throughout this study. While some portraits of social life at school emphasise a sense of linear age-based social hierarchy, in which younger students are invariably subordinated to their elders in traditional relationships where age and physical size are commensurate with social status and power (see, for example, Simpson 2003), others instead give us an idea of the multiple ways in which students are able to actively negotiate less fixed notions of age as an aspect of how they are located in school. In her description of an English secondary school playground, Gill Valentine (1999), for example, borrows from James (1993) in order to explicitly consider the physical embodiment of age as an aspect of students’ social lives, particularly as a dimension of gender. In her account, age can be understood as an aspect of informal social space in school both in terms of the physical location of student’s bodies (notions of belonging reflected in physical space), and in terms of the significance that certain bodily forms have as markers of social identity. Valentine argues that an informal age-based social hierarchy of social identities is reinforced in school according to the meanings that are imbued in height, shape, appearance, gender and performance

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(performed gender understood, e.g. in terms of gracefulness of movement, or in sporting ability) (Valentine 1999: 261). Age is embodied in this sense through traditional markers of masculinity and ‘manhood’, including performance in the form of appearance or sporting prowess. For girls, gender and age also emerges as physical embodiments of identity  at school (see also Jackson 2006b; Karsten 2003). Boundaries of belonging and difference are plotted in terms of embodied markers of physical development towards ‘womanhood’—as well as associated consumption habits in fashion, cosmetics, and so on. Thorne’s account of ‘boys and girls’ at elementary school is valuable in connection with these studies in its focus on the profound importance of gender as an aspect of how age is experienced and imagined (1993). In particular, Thorne’s study is useful in the context of this research because he uses the metaphor of ‘play’—of dramatic performance—to make sense of how children negotiate different ideas of gender. This has a strong resonance with my own framing of performance as an aspect of age imaginaries (of which gender is an important part). Gender also emerges as a key theme in Thomson and Holland’s longitudinal study of transitions to adulthood in an English secondary school, in which they use the metaphor of the imaginary to explore the ways in which female students negotiate not only changing body types but also normative and alternative visions of what it means to ‘become’ an adult and a woman at the end of secondary school (Thomson and Holland 2002). In Gillian Evans’ description of ‘Tenter Ground’ Primary School in South London (Evans 2007), there is an absence of explicit reference to the systematic, ritualised age-based social relations between students. However, age is again present in the ethnography as a dimension of her description of educational failure, gender and class in the context of the school. Evans provides a portrait of informal social space in which peer groups are carved out according to the ability of pupils to engage in particular forms of social exchange and participation. Gender is in the foreground of this description, with the tougher ‘disruptive boys’ in Years 5/6 taking centre stage in the football area of the playground. This vision of social relations between children at Tenter Ground points to the significance of age as an aspect of social identity in a number of ways. Generally speaking, an age hierarchy is reinforced through the social significance of physical size and performance and the ability of older students to bully

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and dominate their younger counterparts. Interestingly, however (and unlike Valentine’s almost adult-free account mentioned above), age is also of significance here in terms of how students are able, through their ‘disruptive’ behaviour, to undermine the authority of the adults in the school and impose, albeit intermittently, their control over social space. In trying to come to terms with this reversal of traditional age-based social roles, the adults in the school resort to wider discourses about the ‘wild’, untamed, animalistic nature of these children (Evans 2007: 111). These are placed in contrast to their idea of what children (or ‘childhood’) should be like at school—that is, children who are engaged learners who are unquestioningly submissive to adult authority. Another recent study of note that deals with age as an aspect of school in the UK context is Donna Lanclos’ ethnography of folklore and identity in a Belfast primary school (Lanclos 2003). While the majority of the ethnography does not deal explicitly with age, Lanclos describes how the children in a number of different Belfast primary school playgrounds use ‘rude’ games and folklore as a means of stretching the boundaries of ‘childhood’ as it is traditionally defined in terms of innocence, naivety and an ignorance of the profane world of adults. Lanclos makes the highly valuable observation that children in this way lead a ‘dual life’ while at school—that is, they are actively engaged in performances of childhood innocence in front of adults, and in performances of ‘profane’ adulthood in front of other children. Balancing between these two performances of age is described as a process of ongoing negotiation (see also Jackson 2006a). This notion of age as something that can be imagined and re-imagined in school, depending on context and audience, also has a profound resonance with the perspective of age that I wish to put forward here. Other more recent ethnographies of schooling continue in the rich tradition of scholarship that reveals the complex minutiae of social life in formal education. Age remains an important backdrop, cut across by class, race and gender (see, for example, Reay et al. 2010, 2011). Stahl (2015), for example, provides a rich account of schooling, exploring the intersection between neoliberal logics of aspiration and working-class white masculinity. The temporal framing of ‘success’ in this context hinges on the negotiation of particular imaginings of age, even if age is not the explicit focus of Stahl’s study. Similarly, Dumas and Nelson

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(2016) present a compelling, ethnographically informed account of schooling that unravels the relationship between education, race and boyhood. Understanding boyhood demands an understanding of how age is imagined in childhood both by children and the important adults in their lives. Closer to the context of this book, Winkler-Reid (2017) provides a detailed account of how gender, sexuality and attractiveness coalesce in processes of self-making in a London secondary school. Again, age looms large in the background as the metre against which embodied sexuality and attractiveness is measured. Each of these ethnographic accounts presents a slightly different version of how age emerges as a thread in the social lives of students, but in each case it is an unmistakably important means for making sense of informal social life at school. In some cases, like that of Evans, age is woven into the background of her description, while class and gender are kept in tight focus, alongside consumption habits. The same is true for Stahl. For Valentine, particular aspects of age are explicitly considered, while others (the presence of adults, for example) are left to one side. Imaginings of age are in this sense established not only on the tarmac of the playground, but also in the written re-imaginings of these relationships conjured up in ethnographic accounts.

Age and Uncertainty: Is Age What It Used to Be? A final point of consideration in framing age as a locus for social analysis is the proposition that contemporary society is characterised above all by conditions of risk and uncertainty (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). If a rigid, linear reckoning of age is key to thinking about society in the modern nation-state, the political and economic conditions of neo-liberalism have also provided the context in which these categories appear increasingly anchorless. While Willis’ ‘lads’ successfully failed in school in the certain anticipation of working-class jobs, those jobs are now long-gone, replaced with zero-hour contract work in a precarious, so-called ‘gig’ economy. Similarly, those young people who excel at school and make the now-familiar transition to higher education are not guaranteed the prospects for employment or future satisfaction that have long been

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­ resented as the inevitable fruits of ‘working hard’ at school. Furlong and p Cartmel (1997) were among the early scholars of youth studies to illuminate the importance of uncertainty to the experiences of contemporary young people along these lines. It is not controversial to argue that in recent years the conditions of uncertainty identified by Furlong  and Cartmel have become ever more entrenched. Drawing on military terminology, Facer (2013) and others describe contemporary society as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA)—that is, defined by conditions which make ‘the future’ just as uncertain a prospect as is the present. To the same end, Pels (2015) suggests that the future itself is a modernist idea rather than a temporal certainty, meaning that ‘the future’ is a concept made unstable in the present. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and more recently in relation to the geopolitical uncertainties of Brexit, so-called ‘fake news’, and the rise of ‘post-truth’ populist political movements worldwide, the future that awaits young people is now defined by profound uncertainty  (Leccardi 2012). This uncertainty extends to the very ideological foundations of contemporary schooling  (Woodmand and Wyn 2015). I have written elsewhere (Alexander 2017, 2018) about the conflict that exists in schools between a stable, modernist vision of the future and of future ‘success’, produced through hard work and adherence to the hierarchies of school life, and pupils’ lived experiences of an emerging future bears little resemblance to this stable vision. In navigating their way through school ‘successfully’, pupils must somehow reconcile an adherence to a normative understanding of how ‘success’ is produced in the future (nominally, through progression to work or higher education) while also recognising that adhering to the rules of the game will not always produce this success. More profound still are ecological questions of uncertainty and risk that lie at the heart of the contemporary youth movement to counter climate crisis. Existentially, these conditions make the future ever-less certain for children and young people who are expected to inhabit it. And yet, ironically, these young people are subject to regimes of mass education that are increasingly premised on a rational-choice model of how schooling relates to future outcomes. Certainly, such conditions make starker still the incongruence between the complex reckonings of age imagined in the day-to-day lives of young people, and the more rigid reflection of age presented to them through mass education. For some, this tension can result in ambivalence: in a world so rife

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with uncertainty, what recourse to structure is possible (Alexander et al. 2019)? For others, the seeming encroachment of disorder has precipitated a call to arms—and, interestingly, this too presents a challenge to the old order of generations. Recent ecological activism on the part of school-age children, personified by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, presents a compelling counter-narrative to the idea that teenage rebellion is most likely a precursor to the wisdom of adulthood. Rather—and in contrast to the archetype of ‘Millennial’ youth as vapid, delicate, always online, and celebrity-obsessed—Thunberg represents young people who have reclaimed the foresight and maturity normally the preserve of their elders. The same youthful resistance drives the 2019 protests against extradition laws and the encroachment of Chinese state violence in Hong Kong. They are rebellious in a way very different to Miley Cyrus, with whom this chapter began, but are similar in representing a challenge to a taxonomy of age seemingly out of step with the conditions of later modernity in which this taxonomy persists. This as a topic that we return to in the conclusion of the book.

Conclusions The aim of this chapter has been to present a review of the complex history of ideas and the diverse landscape of existing research into age. Central to this history is the importance of age as a framework for organising a broad range of ideas at the core of the project of modernity. This chapter also points to the emergence of complimentary theoretical perspectives and approaches to research about age that in some cases still remain to be put together as parts of the same puzzle. Age is at once an area of great significance as a field within the social sciences and a social phenomenon that remains under-explored in and of itself. This is particularly the case because of the lack of dialogue between cognate disciplines and fields of study that, while disparate, share a common interest in aspects of ‘age’. I will continue to develop these links in the chapters that follow by considering how the sociology and anthropology of education (and particularly of schooling) deal with the question of age and social identity. When combined and interwoven, the theoretical perspectives

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and empirical data presented in these fields serve as a starting point from which to forge new ground in the study of age. It is thus possible to identify a number of conceptual threads that need to be brought together if age as an aspect of daily school life is to be better understood, as follows: (1) an account of age needs to incorporate an analysis not only of structural forces and the processes of social reproduction that these facilitate, but also the interplay between these forces and agency, or the active participation of children, young people and adults in negotiations of age on a day-to-day basis; (2) it is important that age is considered across a range of different age-based categories (i.e. childhood, youth and adulthood) so that the fixity of these categories can be problematised and the relational nature of imagining age between children, young people and adults can be recognised and better understood; (3) age can be made more visible as an aspect of social life through its interconnectedness with other categories of belonging, such as gender, class and consumption, rather than in isolation from them. I suggest, therefore, that there is a need for a conceptual framework that captures perhaps even more complexity than has been recognised thus far in the study of age. In Chap. 2, I put forward the idea of age imaginaries as a means of capturing some of this complexity.

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2 The Concept of Age Imaginaries

Introduction Perhaps the greatest challenge facing me in this attempt to better understand how age is figured as part of social life at Lakefield School has been the need for an appropriate conceptual framework  for the job. In the absence of such a framework already existing readymade, I put forward in this chapter a way of thinking about age that I believe can be used in meaningful ways to capture its complexity as a social phenomenon (Alexander 2014). Within the concept of age imaginaries, I also employ notions of performance, narrative and negotiation. It is important to note that in this regard the concepts underpinning the idea of age imaginaries are not that new: here I am simply aligning particular aspects of existing theory in new ways for the purposes of this analysis. Building on Chap. 1, here I outline the key elements of age imaginaries that I will then apply to the findings chapters that follow. A theoretical perspective particularly useful for understanding age as part of everyday social life, and an idea that is central to the  book, is the notion that age is actively and contextually ­constructed and reconstructed in fluid and shifting ways as an aspect of social identity (James and Prout 1997; Prout 2005; Hockey and James © The Author(s) 2020 P. Alexander, Schooling and Social Identity, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5_2

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2003). Theories of identity from across the social sciences have questioned and deconstructed a variety of markers of identity, notably along the wellmined intersections of national identity, race, ethnicity, sex, gender and social class. Along the same lines, and as suggested in the book thus far, age may also be considered to be socially and historically constituted. Indeed, age is arguably subject to even more explicit reconstitution than some of these other markers of identity, quite simply because it is a fundamental premise of age as a category of self-making that it must be continually reimagined as time goes by. While similarly shifting and imagined, other categories of identity such as gender, or ethnicity, or national identity, are more frequently obliged to remain anchored within the stories and performances of self and the institutional taxonomies and architectures of social control that make up everyday life. In short, in the popular imagination, qualities like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘sex’ are widely expected to remain static throughout the life course, in spite of the much more complex lived experience of such categories. Age, on the other hand, is compelled to change: it is absolutely necessary that we progress in an orderly fashion from one agebased marker of social identity to the next. Age is a constant, and constantly changing aspect of who we are. I have outlined in Chap. 1 how pervasive is this linear imagining of age as a disciplining technology of the self, and how significant is the normative quality of linear age for the broader project of modernity. In what follows I propose a way of thinking about age that allows for a consideration both of a rigid taxonomy of age and for experiences of age, mediated between people and things, that transgress and traverse the confines of this taxonomy.

Defining Age Imaginaries Age imaginaries is the term that I use to describe the multiple discourses, practices and processes of meaning-making that combine to shape notions of individual and collective age-based identity. Within the idea of age imaginaries I incorporate notions of narrative, performance and negotiation as a means of creating a meaningful language for talking about age as an aspect of social life at Lakefield. The concept of age imaginaries is

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focused on the interplay between individual and collective action and the constraints on action imposed and reproduced by individuals and collectivities, through social structure, in the enactment and articulation of ideas about age as an meaningful aspect of social and cultural life. As such, age imaginaries are articulated through practice (Bourdieu 1991) and in relation to the broader discursive contexts in which practice is made meaningful in relation to power (Foucault 1977). Age imaginaries articulate the social implications of different ways of ‘acting’ or performing and narrating age within particular social contexts or fields—of developing a sense of age as part of social, cultural and embodied capital; as part of habitus; and as part of reproducing (and/or subverting) particular kinds of relations of power. Learning to act one’s age, through age imaginaries, is a profoundly important part of navigating or negotiating one’s trajectory through the time and space of social life—through the temporal realms of the life course and through the concomitant spaces—like schools—where particular stages of the life course are enacted, made natural and reproduced for the future. From the very first moment at which a human being is imbued with personhood, it is through age imaginaries that persons are imprinted with, embody and enact the foundational age-based qualities of existence, including an engagement with the asymmetries of power that are frequently concomitant to difference based on age. Age imaginaries are constituted in the interplay between established, linear taxonomies of age and lived experiences that complicate, stretch and trouble this taxonomy. Giddens’ (1991) and Beck’s (1992) perspectives on the individualisation of identity are a useful starting point here as a means for understanding how the social, cultural and economic conditions of late modernity make it possible for identities to be figured in fragmented, self-reflexive ways that incorporate disparate markers of belonging within but also beyond traditional categories of identity such as class, race, gender and, of course, age. Without over-emphasising the fixity of so-called ‘modernist’ or ‘traditional’ approaches to identity, thinking about age in this way allows us to consider how age can be negotiated in multiple ways within but also beyond traditional age-based categories of identity. It is also important to maintain a sense of the enduring social structures that constrain and limit the extent of such ‘fragmented’,

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so-called post-modern approaches to identity, particularly for those in positions of marginality. With a negotiated, complex notion of social identity in mind, in which ‘fragmented’ or ‘liquid’ (Bauman 2000) notions of identity must be reconciled with dominant structural forces in the negotiation of self-making, Hockey and James make the link between theories of identity and age, arguing that, in the West, our age impacts very powerfully on the ways we see ourselves—and are seen by others. Indeed, here we argue that it has become one of the key bases for the production of social identity, acting as a way to order and classify the passing of time in an individual’s life…If we consider the idea that our age is integral to our sense of identity, we need to also recognise that it is also in potential tension with it…identity is itself not a unitary aspect of selfhood. More accurately we can think of it as a negotiated, unstable assemblage of ideas and perceptions within which ‘age’ competes with other imperatives such as gender, class and ethnicity. (2003: 14)

Conceptualising age in these terms allows us to consider the building blocks of age imaginaries—the objects, images, ideas and meanings with which we define who we are, and are defined, in relation to others, in terms of age—in the same fluid, complex and multi-faceted way that identity itself is negotiated and experienced. It also allows for age to be imagined interwoven with other important axes of identity, such as gender and class. Importantly, however, Hockey and James also point out that it is not enough to contrast these kinds of individual negotiations of age with the organising power of age-related social structures (2003: 14–15). Understanding the social meanings given to age is therefore not a simple matter of contrasting homogeneous institutional categories with individual articulations or subversions of these categories. In the spirit of practice theory more generally (Bourdieu 1991), it is instead at the intersection of these different navigations of age as an aspect of social life that ideas of age, or age imaginaries, can be better perceived and understood. Age imaginaries capture the shifting, to-and-fro balance between the reification and reinforcement of established notions of what it means to learn how to ‘act’ a certain age, and the active navigation of lived experiences that transcend and intertwine with these established notions.

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The influence of Foucault (1977) on this proposition about age imaginaries is, I hope, quite clear. In keeping with Foucault, I am suggesting that age serves as a technology of the self that is deeply imbedded in the broader project of modernity, and which is imprinted in the most profound sense on the body. Age imaginaries reflect the coming together of an array of discourses about age. Dominant discourses of age demand docile adherence to a hierarchy of power that is fundamentally gerontological. This docility is embodied, as I suggest in Chap. 4, through submission to physical control through schooling as a disciplinary institution, and through tacit or explicit acceptance of broader discursive norms about how bodies ‘ought to be’ in relation to age. Sex, gender and sexuality are of course important markers used to delineate how age is (and/or ‘should’ be) embodied for children and young people, in reference to adults. The notion of biopower (1978) is useful here as a means of summarising how the influence of the state becomes written into the movement and functioning of the body as a reflection of a broader idea about the ordered development, progression and ultimate decline of persons as citizens. Within the epistemic conditions of modernity, age becomes a powerful ‘regime of truth’ about who we are and who we will become, as much in our own bodies as in our actions across the life course (Ball 2013: 36). At school, bodies and age-related possibilities for action become intertwined in powerful ways. I note in Chap. 4, for example, teachers’ discussion of a particularly academic Year 7 as an ‘old head on young shoulders’—a quotidian and seemingly harmless phrase that reveals how closely we associate the presumed bodily limits of age with its enactment in social terms. This is not to say, however, that the embodied or discursive constraints placed on ideas of age by the state and in wider society are beyond reproach: of course they are not. It is in the negotiation of what counts as an ‘acceptable’, ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ enactment of age that new imaginings of age are conjured, some of which find their place in an ever-emerging orthodoxy of what counts as successfully ‘acting your age’. The magic of this process comes from wielding seemingly inchoate categories of age in order to articulate a state of continual flux. This balancing act demands imagination.

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Imaginaries of Age, Made Real In Chap. 1, I spent some considerable time exploring the complexity of ‘age’ as a category. But it is crucial that I also make clear what I mean here by ‘imaginary’. To begin with, it is important to note, as does Strauss (2006), that ‘the imaginary’ itself has been imagined in various ways, from Lacan’s psychoanalytic notion of the ‘imaginary as fantasy’ to Castoriadis’ idea that societies are inherently bounded by unifying and unitary shared ‘social imaginaries’ (Castoriadis 1987 [1975]). Strauss also makes the point that the term ‘imaginaries’ is increasingly used in anthropological writing without any further justification of what ‘imaginaries’ actually define, lessening the analytical value of ‘imaginaries’ as a conceptual tool (2006). At worst, this can mean that ‘imaginaries’ simply reproduce homogeneous, oversimplified explanations of social phenomena, in the same way that the term ‘culture’, wrongly used, serves to obscure rather than illuminate the colour and detail of what it intends to describe. To avoid this particular snare, I want to turn to Charles Taylor for a working definition of ‘the imaginary’. Taylor describes the social imaginary as, that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy…Our social imaginary at any given time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of one another, the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice. (2002: 106–107)

Without drawing too heavily on the moral aspects of Taylor’s broader argument, this suitably wide-ranging (but succinctly articulated) definition of the social imaginary as the combined, implicit, negotiated understanding of common practice in different social spheres, incorporating both lived experience and an imagined sense of how things ‘ought to go’, is a powerful starting point for thinking about age imaginaries. By also

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drawing on related ideas of the imaginary developed by Anderson (1983), among others (e.g. Marcus 1995; Castoriadis 1987 [1975]), it is possible to focus on the relationship between individual and collective social imaginaries, rather than on notions of ‘the imaginary’, which in turn place emphasis either on the individual or the social. With this in mind, the idea of ‘age imaginaries’ here deals with the common everyday practices (including those very firmly grounded in a material, embodied, objective reality) that combine to provide us not only with a sense of individual age-based identity, but also with a sense of belonging and/or positioning within broader, normative age-related categories of social organisation. Just as Anderson argues for the notion of the ‘imagined community’ as a means for understanding how ideas about national identity are developed, negotiated and sustained (1983), I argue that the notion of ‘age imaginaries’ is useful for describing the complex ways in which we make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others in relation to imagined, and imaginatively constructed, ideas of age-­ related identity. Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, age is an essential building-block of the broader imagined community that constitutes the citizenry of the nation-state. Or to put it another way, age imaginaries might be seen as one interwoven strand of Taylor’s social imaginary—as part of the ways in which people, imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations. (2002: 102)

Individuals must negotiate understandings of age as an aspect of social life in relation to their own lived experiences, but they must also do so in relation to an imagined set of broader social categories—of generation, of consumer demographic, of legal age, of age-set, of school year group, of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’, ‘adulthood’ and so on—through which age-based notions of belonging and difference are nurtured, reinforced and negotiated. Following Castoriadis’ conception of the social imaginary, this involves a process of reconciling the creative practices underpinning how age is imagined in wholly novel ways between individuals, relative to their

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own unique experiences of social life, but with the ‘ontology of determinacy’—within the social processes and structural constraints that tend to rapidly categorise the novel into what here I term the taxonomy of the known (Castoriadis 1987 [1975]). While Castoriadis does not emphasise the active role of the individual in this process, we can take from him an awareness of the ways in which the ‘creativity’—in this study manifested as the moments of alterity in which altogether new imaginings of age are conjured—is ‘covered over’ by a known taxonomy that ‘conceals from itself what it is’ (Castoriadis 1987 [1975]: 26). Or to put it another way, there is a constant interplay between taxonomies of known age imaginaries—the recognised, dominant order of institutional practices and discourses through which age is made sensible, in this case in the school—and moments of improvisation and alterity when age is imagined between staff and students in ways that move beyond these taxonomies. In order to make sense of these novel imaginings of age and articulate them within the context of the school, they must be reconciled with the existing taxonomies through which age is normally negotiated, and the result is that taxonomies of known age imaginaries exist concurrently with the novel, improvised and sometimes contradictory age imaginaries that emerge from the relational exchanges between staff and students. The idea that multiple and seemingly paradoxical imaginings of age are negotiated concurrently by staff and students is at the centre of the concept of age imaginaries. A third crucial point made by Strauss about ‘the imaginary’ is that it is most effective as an analytical tool when applied to ‘real people, not imagined people’ (2006: 19)—that is, when it is used not only as an abstract theoretical model, or as an ‘imagined’ imaginary, but as a reflection of the lived experiences of individuals within social context. Strauss’ concern is for a greater focus on psychological and cognitive approaches within anthropological approaches to ‘the imaginary’, but for my purposes the significance of concentrating on ‘people’s imaginaries’ lies in accurately representing the nuanced and imaginative ways in which age imaginaries are given meaning and negotiated relationally in the daily social practices of the participants in the ethnography. Thinking about age imaginaries in this way allows us to consider how, in the context of Lakefield, staff and students are able at once to negotiate and make sense

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of diverse and sometimes contested ideas of age in their interactions with one another, simultaneously shaping their own notions of age-based identity while also engaging with an imagined sense of how things ‘ought to be’ in terms of discourses of age. It is possible, for instance, for a Year 11 student (Sam) to justify his otherwise socially unacceptable relationship with a girl two school years below him by referring to their closeness in terms of chronological age, while at the same time suggesting that there is a sanctity to the hierarchical relationship between students in different years, in terms of ‘respect’ and ‘authority’, that ought not to be broken. When younger students do transgress the hierarchy of the year group structure in this way, Sam is able to engage with discourse about troubled contemporary ‘hooded youths’ in order to make sense of how these particular age-based categories have been undermined (for more detail on this particular example, see Chap. 5). This complex intersection of different ideas and articulations about age as an aspect of social identity emerge in this way as composite parts of a constantly shifting, negotiated and relational sense of the age imaginary. Using ‘imaginaries’ therefore allows for the creative incorporation of multiple, complementary theoretical perspectives: it allows us to be imaginative in our use of social theory. While incorporating the idea of habitus (Bourdieu 1991), for example, age imaginaries also provide a dynamic conceptual framework which emphasises the idea of continual change, rather than a habitual understanding of static relations. It is, for example, students’ ability to develop habitus, or habiti, as Miller might suggest (2009), that reflects their ever-shifting age-related status and which governs their ability to successfully navigate particular social contexts within the field of education (even, for example, between classes in an individual school day). Age imaginaries in this sense provide a more flexible conceptual frame within which change and reinvention are readily possible (indeed, necessary), and the supposed incompatibility of different understandings of age—being at once a child and experiencing the ‘adult’ world; being at once horrified, like Sam, by transgressions of the school’s age hierarchy, and also happily acquiescing in them—are made possible through the imaginative negotiation of age as an aspect of self.

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Wilful Imagining, Together The idea of imaginaries in this way also places greater emphasis on the self-conscious and self-reflexive aspects of these negotiations of age—that is, of age imagined wilfully and (if not always knowingly) by persons as an aspect of relations of power. As much as individuals draw on discourse about age and, in so doing, help to reinforce and reproduce taxonomies of known age imaginaries, so too are they engaged in the imaginative, inventive, everyday work of constantly conjuring age in response to novel circumstances. At times, these imaginings of age will provide moments where individual or collective agency can be enacted. It is important to note here that I employ the term ‘agency’ cautiously: it is not my intention here to suggest that agency is articulated through strategic or instrumental forms of action that predict and ultimately achieve an intended outcome. To an extent, such a framing of agency allows for the surreptitious incursion of a neoliberal logic of action that presumes (a) the autonomy of the individual—and, in turn, confirms that (b) it is the individual alone who is responsible for agency, and (c) that agentic participation in a given context will yield the result anticipated by the actor, often based on a rational process of choice-making (Harvey 2005; Zipin et al. 2015). Such a logic underpins broader developmental discourse about age and self-efficacy, in so much as a developmental view of age suggests that only with deliberate progress through the life course can a person come to master agency (and therefore take responsibility for her own actions). The very same logic, applied differently, underpins the celebration of children as agents in the so-called ‘new’ sociology of childhood. Instead, here I propose a slightly less coherent understanding of agency as a means to action undertaken collectively and between actors, often resulting in unexpected or unanticipated outcomes that are nevertheless evidence of the efficacy of the actors involved (Christensen et  al. 2018). Moving towards a collective or social model of agency helps to emphasise the extent to which action is embedded in broader webs of connectedness that inevitably have an influence on the outcome of actions, often in a way that is infinitely unknowable to the actors involved. Elsewhere (Alexander 2018) I have written in this vein about the analytic ­possibilities

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of a quantum framing of personhood, in the sense that persons are implicated in vast and responsive networks of interaction, across spatial and temporal realms, and that personhood, too, can therefore be considered to exist in a dispersed and distributed, dividual manner (Strathern 1988). Importantly, such a reckoning of personhood, and therefore of agency (for persons are the principle actors in question), also incorporates a posthuman perspective on the significance of non-human actors in social worlds. Christensen points to this shift towards a broader framing of agency in what she deems a ‘new wave’ of childhood studies, which in turn draws on the broader ‘material’ turn in social anthropology and on the influential work of Bruno Latour (2005). In relation to the task at hand, a broader approach to agency implies that the role of individuals in shaping age imaginaries is situated relationally, and that the active role of individuals in shaping age imaginaries is framed in terms of an interaction that rarely produces a predictable outcome. It is in this novelty, in the invention that comes with wilfully construing age imaginaries together, that makes age such a rich and complex component of social life. What is more, the conjuring of age imaginaries also involves non-­ human agents—buildings, objects, consumer products, which impose some influence on how age imaginaries are constituted. With reference to patterns of consumption, subcultural style and consumption-based proxies for gender and class in particular, recognising the role of non-human influences (from smartphones and the algorithms of social media apps, to brands of trainers, to school uniform, to favourite bands) provides a further complication to the means by which age is imagined within but also beyond taxonomies of the known.

Focusing Age Imaginaries In recognising the fluid and imaginative ways in which different aspects of daily life are threaded together to create a sense of age-based identity, then, the notion of age imaginaries allows for the analysis to proceed creatively and imaginatively in a way that reflects and echoes the innovative and resourceful practices employed by pupils and staff alike in giving meaning to age as an aspect of social life. In this sense, the use of

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i­ maginaries as a conceptual tool also allows for flexibility and creativity in terms of the incorporation of a number of complimentary conceptual terms and metaphors that are helpful to ‘think with’. Bearing this in mind, within the idea of age ‘imaginaries’ I incorporate notions of narrative, performance and negotiation as overlapping ways of creating a meaningful language for talking about age imaginaries (and therefore hopefully avoiding the snare mentioned by Strauss above). Here these notions are separated out so that they can be better understood as analytical categories in turn. It is important to recognise, however, that in the messy realities of the ethnography, each is inextricably woven into the next.

Narrative Focusing on narrative helps to illuminate how age serves as a framework for self-making through story-telling and auto/biography—as in the multiple narratives that students create to explain their trajectories towards adulthood, through the age-based structure of school (Leccardi 2012). Given that this study focuses on aspects of the temporal dimensions of self-making, it makes sense that notions of narrative and story-­telling should also be included into the theoretical landscape of age imaginaries. It is, after all, in part through story-telling and narrative that we articulate sense of who we are, not least in terms of how narratives of self or biographies are framed within discourses of age according to our trajectories through the life course. We imagine ourselves, for example, as children, in childhoods set in the past, just as we use ideas of age—of being young, of growing up, of growing old—to conjure up the imaginary adult futures that await us. Historical events, media texts (X Factor in Chap. 6) or particular rites of passage (‘Celebration Evenings’ as seen in Chap. 3) all take their place as markers or touchstones in these narratives. The stories we tell about ourselves constitute identity building (Sfard and Prusak 2005)—whether told to ourselves or to others. Importantly, the process of self-making can be precarious and problematic, often involving twists and turns as plots and characters change, develop and occasionally collide. In this way, narratives of self can be seen to involve an ongoing process of negotiation between the diverse and sometimes divergent sub-plots that make up the

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stories of our lives. What is more, multiple narratives of self, articulating multiple different imaginings of age, can exist concurrently (Bahktin 1981). I have written elsewhere (Alexander 2018) about the importance of the intersections between these narratives—for example, between the multiple narratives of present and future selves inscribed in personal statements for university. A linear imagining of the life course may subdue or make invisible the many counter-narratives or ‘what if?’ moments where individuals conjure alternative versions of themselves, either in the present or in the future, in ways different to the forward trajectory that they ultimately choose. Recognising the multiple narratives that individuals construct for themselves helps to illuminate the interactions between narratives—for example, in Sam’s multiple recounting of his relationship with a girl in Year 9, above. Because of its inherently contingent, shifting nature as an aspect of self, age is particularly susceptible to re-shaping and re-­imagination; indeed, it is an absolutely necessary aspect of imagining age that one must eventually re-imagine oneself, through narratives of self, in order to account for the passage of time and all its social manifestations. In keeping with the arguments made above, it is important to note that while narratives of self are authored by individuals, they are also constructed relationally. In the recounting of narratives of self in the chapters that follow, the ebb and flow of personal accounts are shaped by the audiences and interlocutors who listen to and add to the narrative as much as they are authored by the person speaking. People enjoy telling each other’s stories about age, and in the process new imaginings of age emerge. While some narratives of age adhere to generic or scripted structures based on known taxonomies of age (e.g. the well-worn narratives of rebellion and redemption woven by Year 11s in Chap. 4), the relational negotiation of narrative complicates these stories, offering moments for re-imagining how personal stories about age are told. For these reasons, I include the notion of narrative here as a means of articulating ideas about age imaginaries.

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Performance The significance of the dramaturgical metaphor of ‘acting’ for understanding age imaginaries is evident from the title of this monograph. Linked with notions of narrative, the idea of performance allows us to consider the ways in which individuals ‘act’ their age relative to social context and social relations (Thorne 1993). The utility of a dramaturgical metaphor for understanding age imaginaries is made apparent by the frequent references made to ‘acting’ one’s age in everyday life at school— particularly in the classroom, for example, where students are often made aware of the supposed discrepancies between their behaviour and an age-­ based ideal of how they should comport themselves (framed in terms of ‘maturity’—of ‘acting’ one’s age) in relation to younger or older students. Exploring age imaginaries through performance also allows for an analysis of the very particular roles that staff and students engage in when interacting with one another in different school contexts. Goffman’s notions of ‘back’ and ‘front’ stage (1956), for example, are useful as a starting point for understanding different imaginings of age as they take place for staff in the staffroom, or for students in the playground, compared with interactions in the classroom. Recognising that performances of age are inherently socially constituted and changeable also helps to consider how age is imagined in diverse and sometimes divergent ways, and moment-to-moment, depending on audience—whether this is done actively and self-reflexively, or not (Wulf 2010). While it may not always be the case that students or staff are knowingly engaged in the manipulation of age imaginaries within particular social contexts, there are certainly examples from the ethnography when performance of age is an actively negotiated practice. Keisha, a sixth form student, for instance, provides us with the example of acting ‘like a child’ with her parents when she wants money to spend on a night out, before changing immediately to emphasise her status as a ‘young adult’ when negotiating with them the terms of her curfew for the evening (see the concluding sections of the book). A number of young teachers, similarly, talk about their awareness of the relative performances of age that they undertake when acting out a teaching persona in the classroom, compared with how they

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‘act’ their age when in the staffroom (see Chap. 6). Butler’s influential analysis of performativity (1999) complicates a dramaturgical framing of age imaginaries by providing a language for articulating the interaction between wider discourse and the actions of individuals. Performances of sex and gender are clearly important in the negotiation of age imaginaries, and the performance of age is fundamentally an embodied practice, as suggested above. In the reconciling of taxonomies of known age imaginaries and novel articulations of age-based identity, persons are implicated both in the reproduction of the very categories that constrain their action as much as they are involved in challenging the limits of these categories. Thinking about age imagines in these terms engages with the broader framing of performativity put forward by Butler and is in keeping with Bourdieu’s framing of misrecognition—that is, the notion that in intending to fulfil an archetype of age-based performance—whether as children, young people or adults—persons may be implicated in reproducing the very asymmetries of power that are detrimental to the enactment of their own individual or collective agency.

Negotiation The idea of negotiation helps to underpin an analysis of narrative and performance by emphasising the essentially relational, socially constituted nature of how these different aspects of age are imagined in everyday social life at Lakefield. Focusing on the negotiation or mediated nature of age imaginaries between persons underlines that age is always under active construction, rather than experienced simply as the outcome of structural forces. Concentrating on the negotiated nature of social interactions is also particularly important in terms of highlighting the active participation of both students and teachers in the creative processes that define age imaginaries. Vandenbroeck (2006) has pointed out that negotiation is seen as an increasingly important aspect of how the social positioning of children and young people is conceptualised, particularly in the context of the family, where, in Western contexts, children have been seen in recent years to exert a greater degree of power and influence. While in theory the extent of students’ agency is inherently limited in

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school by the absolute authority that staff hold over them, it is nevertheless important to recognise that students play an active role in negotiating and mediating relations of power as they are enacted in the day-to-day of school life. Negotiation is also an important means of conceptualising the relational and contextual nature of how age is imagined: it describes the ongoing to-and-fro exchange of words, ideas, texts and meanings though which students and staff in school configure and re-configure imaginings of age. In the ethnographic accounts that follow, negotiation is often articulated in relation to narratives and performances of age imaginaries that focus on discipline, control, authority and respect. Some teachers demand authority, and some pupils know how to perform self-control. Some pupils demand respect, while others refuse to ‘act their age’, and some teachers struggle to reconcile a mutuality of respect with the disciplinary aspect of their professional role. Children and young people negotiate age-based relations of power with one another, and teachers, younger and older, similarly must strike a balance of authority and mutual respect mediated by age. It is therefore important to emphasise that the process of negotiation does not always result in neat compromise or a clear understanding between persons of how age should be performed. At times, negotiation may lead to confrontation; at others, age imaginaries are negotiated in a way that leads to a fleeting common ground. Throughout the ethnography, I present examples of how struggles over conflicting imaginings of age (e.g. in running arguments between staff and students in different year groups about the relative limits of age-­ based ‘appropriate’ behaviour) are tied in important ways to issues of agency, power, authority, dominance and the social reproduction of inequalities. This potential lack of coherence speaks to my point above about the collective and often unexpected qualities of agency in practice. What is more, the negotiated nature of age imaginaries resonates with a collective framing of how one learns to enact age. As explored in Chap. 1, Ingold (2017) argues convincingly for Dewey’s original use of the term ‘transmission’ to explain how learning takes place: that is, that learning occurs not in the passing of knowledge from one actor to the next but in the ‘commoning’ of this knowledge between persons, each of whom in their difference contributes to the emerging meaning of the process of learning. Ingold argues that this framing allows for a conception of

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l­earning that goes beyond a genealogical model of education and of cultural reproduction. Likewise, a negotiated framing of age imaginaries privileges the collective, momentary and ultimately always unfinished process by which learning to act one’s age takes place. Framing age imaginaries in these terms helps to illuminate the fact that imaginings of age are often incoherent, emergent in their articulation and prone to alteration, in contradistinction to the static categories to which age is expected to adhere.

Conclusions Building on the notion that age is a socially contingent aspect of social life, and on ideas of the social imaginary, the concept of age imaginaries serves to grasp the concurrence of structural forces and individual and collective agency in the negotiation of ideas about age. Using the notions of performance, narrative and negotiation, I argue that age imaginaries are articulated in the daily exchanges between students and staff in the school. It is this conceptual framework that will drive the remainder of the book. In terms of its value as a means of contributing to the existing body of research dealing with age, the usefulness of the concept of age imaginaries lies in its ability to recognise complexity. As Pilcher quite rightly suggests, age is a complex and dynamic social phenomenon, and as such, ‘a tendency to employ a range of theoretical perspectives may… be regarded as a necessary component of research on age’ (1995: 17). In order to capture how age emerges as a part of the daily lives of students and staff, I have drawn on a diverse but interconnected range of theoretical perspectives to develop the concept of age imaginaries. In this sense, I have attempted to engage imaginatively with social theory in order to recognise the complementarity between perspectives for understanding the dynamics of social life. The use of the imaginary here, in this sense, is a means to adopt a ‘magpie’ approach to social theory, without feeling unnecessarily bounded by the stance that one particular theoretical perspective adopts. The imaginary represents a creative, flexible theoretical frame, within which powerful analytical work can be done through the imaginative incorporation of different ideas, metaphors and language.

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Focusing on imaginaries as an organising concept, and within this on performance, narrative and negotiation, emphasises the creative and active ways in which students and staff are engaged in the process of negotiating ideas of age. Age imaginaries are also useful because they allow us to focus on age broadly defined, rather than age as it exists already hemmed-in by categories such as ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’. Beginning from a theoretical perspective that takes into account the multiple social, historical and political meanings imbedded in each of these categories, and of the interplay between them, allows, I argue, for a critical approach that reveals more of the complexity of age. It is my intention that the concept of age imaginaries lends greater clarity, lucidity and depth to the ethnography recounted in the chapters to follow. Before putting this concept into practice, however, it will be useful to dwell further on the historical conditions that have led to the deep ingraining of particular ideas about age in contemporary society, and nowhere more profoundly than in schools. This archaeology of ‘age’ as an organising concept for society will be the focus of the next chapter, linking historical imaginings of age with contemporary practice at Lakefield School.

References Alexander, P. (2014). Learning to Act Your Age: ‘Age imaginaries’ and Media Consumption in an English Secondary School. In D.  Buckingham, M.  J. Kehily, & S. Bragg (Eds.), Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Alexander, P. (2018). Boys from the Bronx, Men from Manhattan. In M. Paule & B. Clack (Eds.), Success in the Neoliberal Lifecycle: Alternative Perspectives on a Dominant Paradigm. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bahktin, M.  M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (M.  Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Ball, S. (2013). Foucault, Power, and Education. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. London: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage.

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Bourdieu, P. (1991). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. London: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Castoriadis, C. (1987 [1975]). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christensen, P., Hadfield Hill, S., Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (Eds.). (2018). Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments: New Urbanisms, New Citizens. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Doubleday. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hockey, J.  L., & James, A. (2003). Social Identities Across the Life Course. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology of/as Education. London: Routledge. James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leccardi, C. (2012). Young People’s Representations of the Future and the Acceleration of Time. A Generational Approach, Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung, 7(1), 59–73. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. (2009). Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective. Oxford: Berg. Pilcher, J. (1995). Age & Generation in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prout, A. (2005). The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Sfard, A., & Prusak, A. (2005). Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity. Educational Researcher, 34(4), 14–22.

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Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. University of California Press. Strauss, C. (2006). The Imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3), 322–344. Taylor, C. (2002). Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture, 14(1), 91–124. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vandenbroeck, M. (2006). Autonomous Children, Privileging Negotiation, and New Limits to Freedom. International Journal of Educational Policy, Research, & Practice, 7(1), 71–80. Wulf, C. (Ed.). (2010). Ritual and Identity: The Staging and Performing of Rituals in the Lives of Young People. London: Tufnell Press. Zipin, L., Sellar, S., Brennan, M., & Gale, T. (2015). Educating for Futures in Marginalized Regions: A Sociological Framework for Rethinking and Researching Aspirations. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Incorporating ACCESS, 47(3), 227–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.839376.

3 An Archaeology of the Recent Past: Age and Schooling in Historical and Contemporary Social Context

Introduction This chapter deals with the ways in which the structure of schooling serves to school age, that is, how the structuring of formal mass education helps to discipline and make tractable the categories of age into which social identity is apportioned. In Part I, I begin with a brief exploration of the history and sociology of schooling, framed around a seemingly simple but important question: Why do we put children and young people in schools, and why are schools organised in relation to age? This question leads me to consider how schooling as we know it has emerged, and what its social purposes may be in relation to regulating ideas about age, social organisation, social control and social reproduction (Lancy 2015). In Parts II and III, I then explore how these historical currents are reflected in the construction of age at the institutional and discursive levels in the example of Lakefield School. I would like to begin this chapter with a brief exercise in imagination. Picture yourself in any city or town in England. The sun is shining, for a change; you can smell cut lawn and the dew on tarmac, slowly warming. It is 9 am on any weekday in September. Ask yourself the question: where © The Author(s) 2020 P. Alexander, Schooling and Social Identity, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5_3

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are all the young people between the ages 11 and 16? The answer, with a very small number of exceptions, will invariably be: in secondary school. Indeed, the answer to this question is so seemingly obvious as to make the question itself facile. But it is interesting to reflect on the fact only 150 years ago it would have been almost impossible to account for the majority people aged 11–16 in any city or town in England. Some were in schools, but the nature of what happened in schools, and the way that schooling was organised varied dramatically from classroom to classroom. Some were at home; some were in work, in fields, factories, mines, in family businesses or in the streets; some were caring for other children and some were caring for their own young. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the daily activities of young people varied greatly depending on gender, geography and social class. In the present, of course, variations still exist along these lines, but since the 1870s, the state has played an increasingly important role in normalising the experience of schooling for all young people. In the present this influence extends to all ‘children’ up to the age of 18 (DfE 1996). This has occurred through the institutionalisation of a regimented, uniform, Fordist or ‘factory’ model of compulsory primary and secondary education—something that is now considered so normal and unproblematically positive in its impact it has become a right of children across the world (as enshrined in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). Children and young people in England became less important to economic productivity throughout the twentieth century, instead becoming the locus for future-gazing emotional, financial and social investment within families. In the ‘century of the child’ (Cunningham 2005), the development of children and the precious nurturing (and disciplining) of youth would become the preserve of families first, but most importantly of schools (and principally state schools). From more traditional notions of corporal discipline and age-­ anchored measures of ‘innate’ intelligence (e.g. the 11-plus examination) through to differentiated, child-centred pedagogies and Student Voice, the structure and substantive focus of schooling in this way reflects and reinforces changing social constructions of childhood and youth in the British society. However, it also reflects the tensions between co-existent but conflicting ideas about children, young people, adults and education. The structure of schooling is much unchanged from the nineteenth

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c­ entury, suggesting both the enduring power of a genealogical framing of how knowledge is produced, and a prolonged commitment to the idea that citizens of the future are forged in schools. Discourses of education are much changed from the nineteenth century, and demand that children and young people are seen as autonomous, powerful and empowered agents in control of their own learning. There is a clear incongruence between the enduring influence of age-based hierarchies, as reflected in state school organisation, and new ways of thinking about the rights and agency of children and young people, as articulated through a commitment to teaching and learning that takes as its starting point the intellectual capacities and socio-cultural context of the individual learner. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the present, going to school and progressing through year groups has come to be viewed as a normal and almost universal (if not always enjoyable) experience for school-aged children in England. In spite of its beginnings as an explicit means in part to maintain class distinctions in the British society (see the Clarendon, Taunton and Newcastle Reports of the 1860s), mass schooling is now more commonly viewed a mechanism for developing normative social values and, in theory at least, for achieving social mobility (Alexander 2017). In spite of fervent debates throughout the latter part of the twentieth century about streaming and mixed ability approaches to organising students in secondary schools (Lacey 1970), the regimenting of age-based hierarchies in larger, urban schools (i.e. ‘years’, ‘forms’ or ‘year groups’ after 1988) became without much controversy the model for the state education system. Over the years, structuring of the lives of young people through schooling has had a profound impact on how we imagine and articulate age as part of our social identities writ large. This is the case not only during youth, but throughout the life course, as we anchor a sense of self against those others in our generation who spent the ‘best years of their lives’ together at school (Woodman and Wyn 2015). Echoing Mannheim, Alanen and Mayall (2001) has described this experiencing as ‘generationing’. Returning to our exercise in imagination, it is possible to picture young people in school at 9 am on a bright September morning in England because many of us have a comparable experience of being in school. This experience sends ripples throughout our lives in terms of picturing ourselves and others within the age categories that education helps to instil

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in our constantly developing imaginings of social identity. These same categories of generation are also crystallised in patterns of consumption while young, and later in the consumption of nostalgia about formative years spent in school.

Part I  hy Do Schools Exist? Schooling and Age in Historical W and Sociological Context Let us begin, then, by interrogating the simple but important question implied above: Why do schools exist? Where did they come from, and why have we come to socialise children and young people through the historically peculiar institution of age-based mass schooling in the way that we do? One of the most arresting aspects of these questions is that they are for most people rather difficult to answer, and this might be because these questions are seldom asked of a state education system that is often presented in political and popular discourse as ahistorical or timeless—as having always existed in its current, troubled, ever-changing but ultimately familiar (and therefore seemingly essential) form. Indeed, part of the process of schooling is to experience socialisation into the normative nature of schooling as most people in England imagine it, and have experienced it. This is in part a reflection of the ways in which many facets of the modern nation-state are presented as essential, universal and ahistorical in order to reinforce a sense of their necessity for the functioning of contemporary society. As Judith Suissa suggests, We live in a time when policy makers in the USA and the UK often talk as if state education had no history…Confident statements are made in the media, in policy documents and in academic literature, about the benefits of state schooling and liberal education as if there was no need to even ask ourselves what these things mean, what values underpin them, and why they have taken on the institutional forms that they have, or to remind ourselves that things have not always been thus. (2010: xiii)

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There is not space in this book for a comprehensive overview of the history of schooling (for an excellent overview, see Gillard 2018), but in the interest of historical context, let us remind ourselves briefly of the emergence of schooling as a seemingly natural part of life for children and young people in many places around the world. The anthropologist David Lancy (2015) provides a neat, if condensed, summation of how schooling may have emerged from other more or less formalised cultural practices of learning, including apprenticeship, mimesis and ritual initiation. Lancy argues persuasively for a historical account of schooling that emphasises the role of schools as spaces for discipline and punishment leading to social control, as well as sites for other kinds of more substantive learning. He begins his review with early examples of schooling found in Mesopotamia (in the third-century BCE) and Ancient Greece, where an apprentice model of instruction centred on the turgid, onerous task of painstakingly learning under the rod of one’s masters (2015: 331). A similar preoccupation with corporal punishment and drudgery fills accounts of schooling from Renaissance Italy to Ming Dynasty China, with various structures and implements being used on the behalf of teachers to inflict pain and pedagogy on their students. Lancy’s vision is perhaps a little too bleak: students have doubtless enjoyed aspects of formal schooling for centuries, and surely not all teachers were the unflinching sadists that Lancy describes (we might note Plato’s paraphrased entreaty that we should, ‘not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each’). But this emphasis on the punitive and accumulative nature of schooling—its function as an institution through which individuals are trained both in subordination and reverence to elders and in the incremental gathering of skills and knowledge that will secure the future social status of students—is evocative in highlighting the ways in which schooling has served for much of its history principally as a means for the reproduction of culture, and of social and economic hierarchies. In this sense, Lancy also alludes to the ritual significance of schooling. Painful and arduous processes of ritual initiation regularly serve to inculcate a sense of ‘gerontocracy’ (an age-based social structure premised on deference to elders) and changing social status for young people in cultures lacking

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formal schooling. The process of schooling may serve a similar ritual process in contexts where traditional rites of passage have become less socially significant (Wulf 2010). This comparison allows us to consider how the structure of formal state education—its capacity to school individuals (to train them, to make them tractable) as citizens, not least in relation to age—is as important as the content of the lessons that make up the school day. What’s more, thinking about schooling as a pre-eminent context for rituals of gerontocracy highlights that historically schooling has not been linked in an unproblematic way with the well-being of individual children and young people, but also with benefits to kin and society that may in fact be deleterious to the interests of young people. In a Hobbesian imagining of children, schools have developed as the harness for an otherwise unbridled human tendency for youthful chaos. This is an enduring theme in the sociology of education, in relation to the social function of schooling as a site principally for establishing social cohesion, conformity and a stable sense of social norms, values and beliefs (Alexander 2013). Lancy is right to point out, for example, and drawing on Anderson-Levitt (2012), that only in very recent years has it been considered necessary that schooling be interesting to students (and initially even this idea was driven more by the desire to cultivate attentive students than it was to appeal to students’ well-being or happiness) (Anderson-Levitt 2012: 82). Along with the slow change in perceptions of childhood in the West, through which the child became the emotional focus for the family and the incubator for the economic, social and political survival of the nation-­ state, it was only in the twentieth century that schooling and educational policy started to take on approaches that reflect a commitment to kinder, more progressive child-centred discourses about learning. In outlining these broad trends within the history of schooling, Lancy emphasises the tension that exists at the heart of contemporary mass education: in countries like England, schools have become places that privilege the position of the child or young person as an agentic student (what he defines as evidence of a kind of ‘neontocracy’), while at the same time they demand obedience and discipline under the total control of adults (the ‘gerontocracy’ of societies structured on age-based hierarchy) (2015: 333). This tension in turn leads to resistance among young people to these controls, as they reconcile their position of privilege with their position of

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s­ ubordination (resistance is a theme that we shall return to in more detail in Chaps. 4 and 5). This awkward tension—of at once privileging youth and seniority—is important to understanding the complex and contested nature of age imaginaries in contemporary schooling. In the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century schools in England, we return, then, to the tension between schooling as an institutional process focused increasingly on the positive development and well-­ being of children and young people, but one that is also dictated by adults and with the intention of schooling individuals to the shifting civic and economic demands of the nation-state. The emergence of this tension has much to do with the slow and complex process of establishing a stratified, age-based system of compulsory state education in the United Kingdom. In the wake of the 1870 Elementary Education Act, children and young people were obliged to attend school between 5 and 11 years—although initially attendance at school was irregular, particularly for many working-­ class children still engaged in paid agricultural or industrial labour (the seasonal nature of the former being the rationale for the ‘summer holiday’ that continues, rather improbably, as part of the school year in the present). Schools took various forms, with many smaller rural schools placing children of varying ages together in lessons—a practice that would continue until further measures of standardisation were implemented in the 1920s. Subsequent legislation—the Elementary Education Acts of 1880 and 1881 and the Education Board Act of 1899—served as early attempts to further regiment and universalise the nature of state educational provision, and also raised the compulsory schooling age to 12. The motivation for instituting universal ‘elementary’ education came from the various and sometimes conflicting interests of reformists and politicians aiming to nurture a populace at once in tune with the emerging democratic ideals of the time, imbued with the values of a humanist, liberal approach to education, and also equipped with the basic proletarian skills necessary to provide for a dynamic, exploding industrial economy. Inspired by neo-­ classical economics and notions of democratic citizenship, a principle of meritocracy underpinned equal access to education. At the same time, education policy at the end of the nineteenth century was explicit in its concern with developing educational provision fitting for the class of pupil attending state schools. Needless to say, the nascent education

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s­ ystem rarely managed to succeed in nurturing all (or even any) of these ideal outcomes, not least because it was overlaid with an enduring and explicit commitment to maintaining distinctions of class in the British society (Williams 1961: 142; Gillard 2011). With this in mind, most state-funded schools leaned towards preparing pupils with minimal skills for future labour rather than providing a liberal education geared towards a more enlightened and egalitarian society. If schools were therefore focused on entrenching rather than retreating from class division, they were also designed as disciplinary institutions that would celebrate the taxonomies of their age and reinforce a linear sense of deferential progression through youth to employability in adulthood. Wells (2015: 94) presents a clear argument, drawing on Foucault, for the emergence of mass schooling as a means of state control during this period. The coming together of the system of mass schooling in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincides, argues Well, with a shift from moral technologies focused explicitly on religious instruction to secular institutions in which morality becomes linked to citizenship in the modern nation-state. Schools in this way become the locus for creating ‘good’ citizens, and civic rights and responsibilities are clearly mapped against ideas of age that become enshrined in the structure of the education system. With this shift in mind, Gillard (2011) comprehensively maps the development of mass education in the years following the turn of the century. In 1902, the Balfour Act signalled an awareness in Britain that the nation’s public education system lagged behind others in Europe and the United States, and that schools should better equip the masses for future economic productivity. The act introduced local education authorities and secondary education within state provision, but in reality very few working-class students would make the transition from elementary school into one of the increasingly wide range of other schools on offer. It was not until the 1918 Education Act (The Fisher Act) that the school leaving age would be extended to 14, with young people required to remain in some form of ‘continuation’ schooling for around 300 hours per year. These new age limits were not really implemented until 1921, however, because of a lack of government spending and regulation in education after World War I. Even in the early 1920s it was difficult to ensure that all students of school age would actually be attending

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c­ ompulsory education, even though the 1918 act also banned children under 12 years old from working and restricted the hours of work for those over 12. The school leaving age was extended again in 1936 to 15, but this change was not fully implemented until 1947. It is interesting to note in the language of the 1921 Education Act the influence of thinkers such as Dewey on the transformative, democratic nature of education, beyond its power for preparing the future workforce and/or as a structure for social control through discipline and rote learning. The post-war years were in this sense characterised by an emancipatory discourse that encouraged children to be themselves as learners, free from excessive discipline or regimentation. And yet in practice the 1921 act also includes early indications of the state’s inclination towards organising schools by conflating academic ability with age. In the case of elementary schools, the act required ‘practical instruction suitable to the ages, abilities, and requirements of the children’, and ‘courses of advanced instruction for the older or more intelligent children’ up to the age of 14 (Gillard 2011). The act also indicates the increasing preoccupation of the state with regulating and recording the behaviour and development of children, which in turn suggest the heavy and continued influence on schooling of developmental psychology. As suggested in Chap. 1, the orthodoxy of the age-and-stage model of development had (and continues to have) a profound influence on the age-based structuring of schooling in this way. Psychological theories of intelligence from influential figures such as Alfred Binet and Cyril Burt, pioneers in the development of practical ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ tests, suggested that it was not beneficial for learning if students from different ages were grouped together in school. It is worth noting, as does Gillard (2018), that age ‘difference’ is a relatively arbitrary distinction in this case, given the variation of up to almost one year in chronological age between students in any given English school year group in the present. Cyril Burt’s notion of innate intelligence (IQ) would serve as an early and enduring alternative means of classifying children and young people into distinct educational contexts in ways that, while in theory representing differences in ‘innate’ intelligence, would also reflect differences in class background and age (Chitty 2007). As these kinds of developmental arguments became popular in political and academic discourse, and their measures were fixed at

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specific chronological ages (notably 11 years old), the seemingly inviolate link between intelligence, learning and chronological age was established. It is interesting to note that the viability of the increasingly rigid age-­ based structure of state education remains relatively uncontested in formal discussions related to schooling during this period. In 1926, for example, Hadow’s report entitled The Education of the Adolescent (1926) argued for the distinction between primary and secondary education for all children at age 10–11 because it was around the age of 10 that mental capacities would begin to vary less with age. This point was made even more explicitly, drawing on contemporary psychological research on intelligence and development, in his later report on Primary Education in 1931: Older children differ far more widely in intellectual capacity than younger children. It would, therefore, seem that while at the infant stage children may be grouped together without much regard to varying degrees of mental endowment, by the age of ten pupils in a single age group should be classified in several sections, though there is not the same need for elaborate gradations before the age of eleven as after that age…While the evidence indicates that, in general, there are no sudden breaks in the intellectual and emotional development of young children, nevertheless the period between the ages of seven and eleven displays features which render it desirable that it should be treated as a distinct stage in education. (Hadow 1931: 137)

While Hadow and his colleagues were clear to highlight the limitations of an age-based intelligence test at a particular chronological age, and while they argued against the hereditary (and class-based) nature of intelligence and in favour of a more progressive, age non-specific, child-­ centred approach to primary teaching and learning, the net impact of policy at the time was to further entrench a notion of schooling anchored in chronological age. It is important to note, for example, that the 1931 report also cements a notion of ‘normal’ intellectual development based on the correlation between ‘mental’ age and chronological age: Those children whose mental age is below half their chronological age, e.g. in the case of children of the chronological age of ten, those whose mental

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age is below five. These we propose to call ‘mentally defective’ children… those whose mental age lies between five and seven…these we propose to call ‘more retarded’ children. (1931: 141)

Hadow’s 1933 report on organising children in schools was also progressive in outlook, suggesting that ‘the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’ (1933: 122). With this principle in mind, the report suggested there was value in the vertical organisation of pupils in primary education (i.e. not according to age), but this approach was considered only to ‘work’ at small scale and in rural schools. Ultimately the focus on primary schools as the site for sorting and selecting students for different paths into secondary education via the 11+ examination meant that schools were compelled to organise students into age-based year groups wherever school size made this feasible (Galton et al. 1980: 36). Gillard (2018) points out that similar calls for age non-specific organisation of schools were made in the Spens Report in 1938  in relation to secondary education. Spens argued for an early version of comprehensive education not based on streaming linked to age-based measures of intelligence, but on individual assessments of ability. However, the idea of mixing children and young people of different ages and class backgrounds was altogether too subversive to be included in their final recommendations. It was the Butler Act of 1944 that would have the most striking influence on the relationship between age and schooling in twentieth-century Britain. Through the introduction of a tripartite system of grammar schools, secondary modern and (a relatively small number of ) technical schools at the secondary level, the act ensured continued (and differentiated) participation in education until 15, with forms of provision until 18. This in part builds on the logic, outlined in the Hadow Report of 1931 (1931: 141), that disparities between mental age and chronological age (and which reflect innate intelligence) grow exponentially during primary education, necessitating different forms of schools to account for this difference in the secondary phase. The implications for the division of young people according to class and future vocation based on such reckonings of ‘innate’ intelligence should not be overlooked. Early

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attempts to extend participation until 18 were abandoned because of a lack of funds in the post-war period, as with the Balfour Act in 1918. In simplifying and centralising the education system, the Butler Act helped to create a more coherent imagining of secondary education in particular, with an age-based system of school organisation reinforced through enduring forms of measuring intelligence that were tied to chronological age and position in school years. The 11+ examination became even more influential in its power to shape the educational trajectories of individuals, and this in turn obliged schools to stream and group students in age-­ based collectivities that would be sensible to the tripartite system. Primary schools came under increasing pressure to stream their students in order to increase the number of children going to grammar school—results that would be recorded in the kinds of publicly accessible league tables so familiar in England today (Galton et al. 1980: 37–38). In the latter half of the twentieth century, the notion of innate intelligence came under serious critique, as did the idea of streaming young people into different types of schools, depending on a measure of ability at 11 years of age. A renewed interest in mixed ability education (alongside the internal streaming and setting of schooling) led to the widespread (it not total) abandonment of the 11+ examination and the process of comprehensivisation in secondary education during the 1960s (Hargreaves 1967). Such policy shifts were in principle about democratising mass education and offering the same opportunities for all: comprehensivisation was intended to remove class barriers to educational success and promote meritocracy. And yet in the same move, even more emphasis was placed on the age-based limits in which a pupil’s merits could be measured. Given these changes, it is arresting to note the lack of impact that this change had on the age-based structure of schooling. The Plowden Report in 1967, for example, argued that evidence from European and North American models, where it is normal for students to re-take a year of schooling if unsuccessful in assessments, suggested that few ever managed to catch up. As a result, the report remarked of primary schools that ‘children are better with their friends in their own age group, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary’ (Plowden 1967: 285). The same model would continue to be applied generally at the secondary level, not least because of a continued commitment to ­year-group-­anchored

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forms of assessment on a national scale (O-Levels, A-Levels and later GCSEs (General Certificate in Secondary Education)). Unlike systems of mass schooling in continental Europe and North America, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it became the rare exception rather than the rule that individual pupils would not progress regularly through year groups. Half a century later after the Plowden Report, research from the Education Endowment Foundation (2018) repeated the message in clear terms: holding children back from their ‘natural’ progression through the year groups has demonstrable negative impacts on academic and social progress, and is costly to schools. Given how deeply ingrained is the agebased approach to schooling in England, it is perhaps no great surprise that those exceptional students required to ‘repeat a year’ experience stigma, low self-esteem, and the taboo of transgressing the age-based order of school and, by extraction, wider society. During the second half of the twentieth century, the school leaving age was extended to 16 in 1964, a change that came into effect in 1972. An increasingly large number of young people would remain in secondary education until 18 in the latter 25 years of the twentieth century, but it would take another 40 years before the compulsory school leaving age would be extended again, most recently to 18 for those born on or after September 1, 1997. In the interim, with the introduction of the National Curriculum in education system in England saw the rise of an expansive audit and assessment culture based on national league tables for National Curriculum tests, introduced in 1988, and for GCSEs and A-Levels (Ball 2013). Each serves as a further means of cementing the importance of progressing through the age hierarchy of schooling and its concomitant assessment points. What is more, success at each of these assessment points links into anticipated future moments where progress and attainment are measured, with the ultimate goal of attending university and/or entering paid employment. Those young people born in or after the school year of 1997 have been expected since 2015 to avoid being NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) by remaining in school or another form of training until their 18th birthdays. The extension of compulsory schooling and training into the later teen years suggests an interesting shift in conceptions of childhood, given that involvement in mass education and training limits access to full-time paid work and extends economic dependency on parents and guardians. This shift also demands

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that young men and women remain in educational and training contexts where they retain the status of neophytes or apprentices subject to the ultimate control of other adults. It is interesting to note that this extension of mass education emerges alongside an equally significant shift towards the recognition of rights for children, and of championing the agency of children and young people in choosing their own future trajectories. This is reflected in the emergence of ‘Student Voice’ in schools (explored in more detail below), and in policy shifts (e.g. towards apprenticeships) that purport to offer a wider range of choices for young people to make for themselves as they move out of formal education. The present, as at Lakefield in 2008, reflects this tension between a desire to reify and extend a social structure based on age on one hand, and, on the other, the need at to both champion the guardianship of children and young people while also celebrating their rights and abilities as agentic social actors. In spite of growing complexity, the anchoring of secondary school organisation in age-based year groups, then, shows no sign of losing its salience in the current educational landscape. This brief survey of the history of formal compulsory state education in England, with much gratitude to Gillard (2018), is by no means a complete picture, and it is important to emphasise the complex and constantly shifting nature of how schools have been organised over the past century and a half, beyond the broad strokes outlined above. Shifts in education policy also reflect the extent to which schooling remains an ideological battleground. Returning to the tension highlighted by Lancy above, policy and curriculum changes reflect an increasing desire to privilege the position of children and young people in schools—to make their experience of education about personal growth, critical awareness, resilience, and individual change—while at the same time ensuring that trajectories through education reinforce well-worn economic and social hierarchies. What endures throughout the historical development of this tension is an age-based structural organisation of schooling that is representative both of an ideal of meritocracy and equality of opportunity for all (a common chronological starting line in each year, as it were) and of the built-in inequities that have existed in formal state education since its inception in the nineteenth century—or, put simply, the fact that age alone does not suggest a level playing field at the beginning of any

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a­ cademic year. As suggested in Chap. 1, these are issues that have emerged in the background of sociological studies of schooling in England for more than 50 years. Beginning with Durkheim, in the first half of the twentieth-­century sociology was essentially preoccupied with how schools might more effectively engender conformity—how they might better school their pupils. Critical accounts of schooling in the last 60 years have attempted to account for the asymmetries of power that are engendered in the tension that exists in schools as institutions that are at once conservative in their reproduction of an age-based social structure, and which at the same time increasingly champion the rights and self-efficacy of children as agents of change that challenge this structure.

 art II: Age and Schooling in the Present: P Institutionalised and Discursive Imaginings of Age at Lakefield School Let us now turn our attention, at last, to the ethnographic context of this study for further evidence of these historical currents in contemporary practice. In Part II, first I look at how age imaginaries are negotiated at an institutional and discursive level at Lakefield School—for example, in the pervasive influence of the year group system as a means of reinforcing a linear, hierarchical imagining of age in Lakefield’s age-based structure. I also consider how dominant, linear discourses of age emerge in Lakefield’s ‘vision’ statement and in other official narratives of the school. I then consider how age emerges as an organising framework for everyday life at Lakefield within these institutional structures and discursive frames. Finally, in Part III, I consider initiatives in the school that implicitly challenge this hierarchical structure by providing an avenue for the active participation of all students in the school community. Students are in this sense recognised by the school as ‘human beings’ rather than as ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup 1994), engaging in more recent, progressive discourses of childhood and youth as active agents. And yet this process takes place through an organisational structure in which the agency of students is inherently limited and the authority of adults is total. Here I

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focus on the example of Student Voice at Lakefield, and then consider how the head teacher in particular articulates conflicting imaginings of age in his vision of the students and the community of the school. I conclude by arguing that while genuine attempts are made to give students agency through these initiatives, it is the hierarchical structure of year groups that ultimately comes to dominate age imaginaries at the institutional and discursive levels. Some of these aspects of life at Lakefield will doubtless seem obvious— perhaps even too obvious to mention—to any person who is familiar with the secondary school system in contemporary England. Indeed, Lakefield is very similar in its overall structure to many other comprehensive secondary schools and academies in England today, particularly in terms of the fundamental age-related categories by which the school is ordered. With the exception of a relatively small number of secondary schools in rural areas where low numbers of students necessitate the challenge of teaching and learning across age ranges (see, e.g. Wright and Osborne 2007), an age-class approach to the structuring of secondary education in Britain is now so pervasive and so intrinsically linked to the history of the development of both the state and state education as to make it a ‘naturalised’ aspect of how secondary education should be structured (Hendrick 1997). In this sense the structure of secondary education has in turn become a powerful framework for organising ideas about childhood, youth and ‘growing up’ (i.e. about age). It is what most people alive in Britain today know and remember about how school life is organised and experienced, either as students, as parents of students, as consumers of popular culture related to school and education (think Grange Hill, Waterloo Road and any number of school-based TV dramas in between) or, less frequently, as school staff. While all too familiar to many, then, it is nevertheless important that the structural and institutional aspects of Lakefield—these ‘obvious categories’ (Bloch 1998)—are put into relief here so that they may be seen afresh, and in the spirit of making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, within the context of this ethnography.

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A ‘Vision’ of Young Adults At Lakefield the idea of progress towards adulthood is at the core of what the school does. This is expressed in the school’s ‘vision’ statement, which describes the school explicitly as a vehicle for the successful nurturing of children and young people into responsible ‘young adults’: At Lakefield students will find an ordered community that treats them with respect, where bullying is not tolerated and where they will grow in confidence and be trusted with more responsibility as they become young adults: young adults equipped to succeed making a real and positive difference in a demanding and changing world.

The significance that age imaginaries play in the school’s ‘vision’ of education is immediately evident: Lakefield is an ‘ordered community’ where students are to be ‘trusted with more responsibility’ commensurate with their progress towards becoming ‘young adults’. While they are to be treated with respect as children and young people (and here we also see students as ‘active’ participants in the school), trust and responsibility are gained through the process of becoming a young adult ‘equipped’ with the kinds of skills and competencies required for the adult world. There is, of course, nothing particularly sinister about this aim: indeed, the ‘vision’ statement indicates a philosophy of education that places an emphasis on individual empowerment, mutual respect and the need for students to make a positive change in the world. But this vision is still framed by discourses of age that emphasise the importance of ‘growing up’ and becoming ‘young adults’ in order to do so. This imagining of age—the rhetoric of ‘growing up’, and becoming ‘adults’—acts in this way as a backdrop for the broader educational aims of the school, and provides a framework for the (imagined) linearity of the process of moving through the transitions of childhood and youth, towards adult life. From the outset, students at Lakefield are positioned (in the ‘vision’ statement, at least) by the ‘orientational metaphor’ of growing up—as still in the wings, waiting to perfect the characters that they will portray in the ‘centre stage’ of adult life (Pilcher 1995: 31).

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This imagining of age is also embodied in the school’s emphasis on ‘progress’, as measured by students’ success in the summative examinations that punctuated their passage through the different Key Stages of the English education system. The head teacher, Simon, was particularly interested in the different ways in which this progress could be measured and represented. As his introductory note to parents and carers suggests: The most meaningful measure of the quality of teaching and learning at a school is the amount of progress it allows and encourages students to make. Progress at [Lakefield] is exceptional. At Key Stage 3 and 4 the school is in the top three schools in the county for allowing and encouraging progress. At Key Stage 3 nationally it is in the top 4%.

The same message is conveyed in the very first paragraph of the official school profile: Results have improved for the sixth successive year. In particular, the progress that our students make in the core subjects is equal highest in the county and in the top 2% nationally in terms of adding value and making progress.

An emphasis on order and progress can also be seen if we peer behind these official narratives to look at the staff notices for the first term of the year, in which teachers were explicitly encouraged to present a coherent picture of school, along the following lines: Messages to be given to parents: • This is an inclusive/successful school • There is a vibrancy about activities in the school created by the willing enthusiasm of the students (most anyway) • There is a calm ordered school in which bullying is not tolerated • There is a real sense of community • Students exceed expectations. Value added is high at KS3 and KS4 though to a lesser extent. [excerpt from Staff Newsletter, 5-10-07]

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Again, there is certainly nothing particularly sinister about this focus within the school. After all, it is through summative assessment that the education system provides a framework for measuring the academic development of students and the standing of schools, and the staff at Lakefield are obviously concerned with guiding students to advance in their relative subjects and to gain new knowledge. Coupled with the statement above, though, it is possible to see how the notion of academic progress is closely aligned at Lakefield with the broader goals of the school in terms of nurturing young people into ‘young adults’—of allowing them to ‘progress’ through the different stages of life in school in order to become more accomplished, rounded adult individuals. These official narratives of life at Lakefield converge to present an orderly picture of how education is experienced at the school.

 ecognising Students as Active Participants R in the School Community It is important to recognise that while on one hand reinforcing a linear, hierarchical approach to imagining age in terms of progress through childhood and youth, on the other hand, the school was also engaged in a number of initiatives that recognised the active role of students in the running of the school—in theory, at least. The institutional structure of the school maintains two concurrent imaginings of age, at once supporting the idea that students are to be given more trust and responsibility as they become young adults, but also embracing the ‘liberationist’ ideal that children and young people should be actively involved in the decision-­making processes that shape their lives in school. If we return to the same introductory message for parents and carers mentioned above, this latter massage is made explicit: Welcome to Lakefield School where students achieve success through a carefully fostered community. We are proud of the well-ordered nature of our community where students are encouraged to take advantage of an exceptional range of opportunities both inside and outside of the ­classroom,

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and to contribute, [sic] actively to the running and decision making of the school [my emphasis].

The same position can also be seen in descriptions of the school’s behaviour management system, known officially as ‘The Ladder of Consequences’, which was couched in terms of active participation, mutual respect and understanding: Students should always follow the reasonable request of a member of staff delivered in a reasonable way. We believe all behaviour is learnt behaviour and our role is to model positive behaviour to create mutual respect between adult and student. Staff and students are fully aware of their responsibility within the community to create an atmosphere of respect, enabling everyone to achieve their potential.

It is revealing here that the phrase ‘adult and student’ is used in place of ‘staff and student’ or ‘teacher and student’, as this emphasises the significance of age as an aspect of the kinds of relationships encouraged in this description of Lakefield’s approach to behaviour. Rather than reinforcing ‘institutionalised separateness’ (Pilcher 1995), the message here is that the institution of the school is based on mutual exchanges, where staff (or ‘adults’) must be ‘reasonable’, and adults and students alike (‘everyone’) have an equal ‘responsibility within the community’. In theory, students are empowered with the responsibility to regulate their own behaviour. In practice, however, the discipline structure of the school was in fact predicated on the ultimate and unswerving authority of ‘adults’, not least because students had to ‘always follow the reasonable request of a member of staff’, and staff were always the arbitrators of what was deemed ‘reasonable’ in any given context. The ‘Ladder of Consequences’ was similarly inflexible in its structure and was based entirely on students responding obediently to requests from teachers for appropriate behaviour. Beyond recognising their responsibility to adhere to this system of behaviour management, there was no indication that students played an active role in defining the terms of what might officially constitute appropriate behaviour in everyday of life at Lakefield. As in the ‘vision’ of Lakefield

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above, here again we are presented with an official picture of the school that both encourages an imagining of students as agentive, empowered social actors in school, while doing so within a framework that by its very nature requires their subordination to adult control.

 he Dominance of the Year Group Structure: T Reining-in Age Imaginaries There was evidence, in this sense, of conflicting imaginings of age in the ideas underpinning Lakefield’s institutional structure. However, it was an imagining of age founded in the idea of becoming—of imagining age for children and young people as a period of accumulative development, rather than as a time of intrinsic value on its own—that dominated other institutional aspects of mundane daily life at the school. Principally this can be seen through the hierarchical organisation of year groups. At Lakefield, the year group is a defining category of identity from the very first day of Year 7 because it serves as one of the primary collective nouns by which students are institutionally recognised, and by which they are able to locate themselves within the formal hierarchy of the school. Lessons, assemblies, tutor groups, registration notices, school reports, the use of certain school spaces, sports days, fire drills and a host of other facets of school life are organised and structured at some level according to the year group. The school is divided into seven year groups, beginning with Year 7 and ending in Year 13. Students are initially grouped into year groups according to where their birthdays fall within the academic year—that is, from September to August—meaning that the chronological age of students within any given year may vary by up to slightly less than 12 months. Although the chronological age of students within a given year group will vary considerably in this sense they are seen, at least at an institutional level, as being part of a single year group category. Alternate age-based social categories (including chronological age) are in this way made less institutionally visible at Lakefield School by the homogenising force of the year group. Unlike some English secondary schools, Lakefield has no ‘house’ system or similar method of organisation by which s­ tudents

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are collectively grouped ‘vertically’ as well as ‘horizontally’ (for an example, see Walford 1986). In the absence of such a system, students at Lakefield primarily see themselves as part of a year group within which they are also part of communities in tutor groups and in academic class groups. Along with the tutor group and the classes into which students are grouped for lessons, the year group serves as an important means by which students are identified and, in turn, by which they often come to identify themselves. Following Mannheim, the year group in this sense serves as the starting point for a sense of enduring generational identity that lasts long after the final school bell rings in Year 11 or 13. Lakefield is a community, as the ‘vision’ statement suggests, but it is essentially a community divided according to age as defined by the year group. By way of a brief example, let us consider how age figures in the formal induction of Year 7 students into the school. This process was highly ritualised at Lakefield. In keeping with the institutional importance placed on the year group as a means of organising school life more generally, from the very outset Year 7s are presented with a view of both their institutional and social positions within Lakefield that is predicated on their belonging to a particular year group, and on their ability to progress successfully through the hierarchy of the school towards the educational finishing lines of either Year 11 or Year 13. At the beginning of term, Year 7s, now bereft of the markers of institutional status that defined life at the top of the hierarchy in primary school, were brought into the school a day earlier than the rest of the students. Along with the new Year 12s (they were also being inducted into a new status as sixth formers), Year 7s spent this day being inculcated into the particular structures, statuses and routines that would frame their activities as a year group. They were introduced to the Year Team of tutors (also teachers) who were to be their new first port of call for worries and concerns, before being addressed collectively as a year group in the hall by the long-standing Year Head for Year 7, Mrs. Worcester. They were also introduced to their tutor groups, which are also year group-specific and which divide up the year group for the pastoral and administrative aspects of their lives at school. Year 7 becomes fragmented into satellite groups in this way, but students are also streamed into academic classes, and these are also confined to Year 7. During breaks and other activities, the induction day allowed students

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across the year to meet one another and begin to form friendships and relationships with people from other ‘feeder’ primary schools in the area. Their immediate social networks are also in this sense established exclusively within the limits of their year group. The following day, with this ‘dry run’ of the school day completed, Year 7 was returned to school in full, raucous flow. Again they are reminded of the significance of the year group as a locus of identity because they must now establish themselves as Year 7s in the wider formal and informal age-based hierarchies that structure life at school. In the midst of this new and turbulent community, with some more wide-eyed than others, they must get down to the bewildering business of following new timetables, recognising the new institutional categories to which they belong, and making it through to the last bell at 3.10 pm.

 sing Age to Order Time and Space; Using Time U and Space to Order Age James and Prout provide valuable insights into the relationship between the institutional structuring of the education system in England and the manner in which age is imagined (as I term it) in different times of life (1997b). Foucault has also pointed out the significance of processes of schooling both as a means of disciplining time and as a way of using time to discipline ideas of childhood and ideas of the relationship between children and adults (1981 [1976]). In particular, James and Prout suggest that controlling time in childhood serves as a means of controlling time of childhood; that is, by regimenting and controlling how time is organised in the lived experience of children, it is also possible to rein in how ‘childhood’ is imagined (1997b). This is achieved by obliging the experience of childhood to succumb to the taxonomic order provided by particular temporal frames, including the age-based process of secondary schooling. Of course, this can be applied to both children and young people at school, as their description of the English education system suggests:

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Through the explicit structure of the school system, age classes operate to regulate the times for and of infancy, childhood and adolescence, through setting the ages of entry into and exit from different parts of the school system: nursery, primary and secondary schools. The somewhat ambiguous and blurred boundaries to these periods of time in an individual’s life thus become more distinct and acquire meaning through the interlocking of biological age with social status, a mechanism provided primarily through the institution of schooling. The ‘time of childhood’ therefore structures and is structured by ‘time in childhood’. (1997b: 239)

The idea of time in childhood can in the same way be applied to reining-­in imaginings of age on a micro level in schools, both in terms of the longer time scale reflected in the structure of year groups and in the minutiae of organising time during the school day (see also Christensen and James 2001). The organisation of time and space at Lakefield also supports imaginings of age which privilege adult control and firmly reinforce the hierarchy of year groups—not least in the distinctions made between those in compulsory education and those in the rarefied context of sixth form. For students in Years 7–11, time is uniformly organised according to a two-week rota of lessons divided into weeks A and B. Each day consists of five lessons lasting one hour each, with a 25-minute break after the first two periods and a one hour lunch break after the fourth. However, given that they have lessons held at other schools and at the local college, sixth formers follow a different daily schedule to the rest of the school and are expected to organise their time accordingly. In comparison to the rigid temporal structure of the school day for years 7–11, the ‘young adults’ in sixth form enjoy a relatively high level of independence to move between school sites and lessons according to their individual class schedules. Similar, and similarly varying levels of control are also imposed over students’ uses of space (this is also a theme in relation to students’ bodies in Chap. 4). Regulating uses of space according to age in this way becomes another means of reining in age imaginaries (Valentine and Skelton 1998). While the school’s different buildings are organised spatially into different academic areas—the Science block, the Maths corridor, the Arts block, and so on—during break and lunch some classrooms are

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t­ ransformed into ‘social spaces’ that are assigned exclusively to students in particular year groups. Similarly, the use of sports equipment—cricket sets in the playground and table tennis tables in the hall, for example—is organised on a daily rota according to the year group. Toilets are also formally divided according to gender and year group, the use of which is regulated by teachers and support staff during break times. The playground itself is open to all years and there are no formal restrictions on where different year groups may spend time. However, informally the playground is quite strictly divided by the students themselves according to different year groups, and into different groups within (and less frequently, across) year groups (this is discussed in more detail in Chap. 5). No students are allowed to access any area delimited by the red lines that follow the perimeter of the site—although the Ladder of Consequences is seldom if ever enforced in practice when the sixth form breaks this rule. Students between Years 7 and 11 are strictly prohibited from leaving the school site at any point during the school day. This school rule is occasionally broken, particularly by students who sneak out to a nearby pedestrian underpass to smoke cigarettes. The sixth form remains separate from the aforementioned division of students’ social space because they occupy an exclusive sixth form centre adjacent to the main playground. Other students are not allowed into this area. A hierarchy of age-related social relations is in this sense embodied at Lakefield not only in terms of the physicality of students (and staff) but also at an explicit, institutional level in terms of the different restrictions placed on physical movement within and beyond the school site according to year group. Indeed, there are some sixth form students, like John, who work in the school as lunchtime supervisors, and it is part of their role to police the movements of other students lower down the year group hierarchy. As we shall see in Chap. 5, the fact that some sixth form students in this way adopt ‘adult’ levels of control over other young people’s use of space provides further evidence of the ways in which the hierarchy of year groups serves as a framework for reining in imaginings of age. Space was also an important means for emphasising the ‘institutional separateness’ between students and staff at Lakefield (Pilcher 1995). As with departmental offices and faculty social spaces, the staffroom at Lakefield represented a uniquely ‘adult’ space. Students were not allowed

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to enter the staffroom at any time, and only on very rare occasions (and then only outside the temporal limits of a normal school day) did I see any students in the staffroom. Students would occasionally knock at the staffroom door to find teachers, but even this intrusion into this space was regarded as transgressive and taboo. Ellen, one of the Physical Education (PE) teachers, summed up this feeling one afternoon in the Autumn term by rolling her eyes at the sound of a knock on the staffroom door, saying, ‘Really, that’s not on! Don’t they know that this is our space?’ This sentiment seemed to confirm the sanctity of the staffroom as a ‘backstage’ context in the school (Goffman 1956). Teachers were able to engage in performances of self in this space that might be incongruous with how they ‘acted’ in other contexts in the school—not least with reference to ‘acting’ different versions of youth and adulthood (see Chap. 6 for more detail on this topic).

The Importance of Tutor Groups The organisation of students into tutor groups also helped to normalise and reinforce the age-based hierarchy of the school. Each year group at Lakefield was further divided up into tutor groups, recognised by their year group number and an amalgamation of their tutor’s initials—7GB, for example, in the case of Melanie Gibson’s Year 7 tutor group. Each morning tutor groups meet for registration—an event that also serves to reinforce imaginings of age based on the hierarchy of year groups. During registration, attendance is recorded, meaning that students ‘exist’ in the administrative system of the school primarily in relation to their location within the year group structure. Tutors then read out the register notices which are also primarily organised according to the year group. Tutors deal with other forms of administration—permission slips for school trips, organising inter-tutor charity or competitive events, and so forth— which are again focused on activities within the year group. In these ways, registration marks the first formal activity of every school day when the primacy of the year group category is reinforced. Registers, registration notices and other mundane paperwork come to represent the a­ dministrative artefacts that provide a material embodiment and a legitimating set of official records for the taxonomic order of the year group system.

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Tutor groups remain more or less intact as students progress up the age-based hierarchy of the school. While academic classes become more diversified and involve interactions with a broader range of students and staff within a particular year group, the tutor group remains an anchored, unchanging locus of belonging. The teachers assigned as tutors also normally follow their tutor group up the school from their very first days until they leave school at the end of GCSEs or move onto the sixth form. The role of tutor is normally considered to be a long-term commitment involving the guidance and support of students as they advance up the school. In this way the structure of the tutor group system encourages the development of intimate, well-established social relationships between staff and students as they get to know one another, and see one another change and transform—physiologically, intellectually and socially— across the years. Describing this kind of relationship, for instance, Sophie made the following comment about her own tutor group when writing in her research journal: My first year of teaching was my first year at Lakefield and I took on what are now my Year 9s as my new Year 7 tutor group. As I have gotten to know the group so well over the past few years I have shared (as they have) personal anecdotes about my life outside of school…I have a kind of ‘big sister’ relationship with them.

One artefact among many that reinforces the significance of the tutor group in this way as a locus of year group-based identity is the tutor photograph. Each year tutor groups are photographed with their tutors, and these are then displayed in the reception of the school and copies are taken home as a record of students’ time in their tutor group. Beyond the significance of the photograph as a simple memento, these photographs can also be seen as a means not only of locating students (and staff) in the history of the school but also of documenting their progression through the hierarchy of the school. The practice of successively photographing students’ trajectories through the year groups can also be seen as a way of anchoring imaginings of age in the process of passing in an orderly fashion ‘up’ the school—of plotting a clear, linear pathway from childhood in Year 7 through to young adulthood in Year 13. Emphasis is in these ways

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placed on the immediate community of the tutor group (these are, after all, a kind of ‘family’ portrait in their style), but tutor groups also exist as the constituent parts of the community of the year group as well. The Year Assembly is one event that helps to regularly reinforce a sense of belonging for students and staff within a particular year, while punctuating time through the term in a way that also highlights the significance of the year group. The tutor groups in a given year meet as a whole for a Year Assembly once every few weeks on Wednesday afternoons, while the whole school assembles only once or twice a term. The Year Assembly, along with other inter-tutor group activities (such as Sports Days), serves as a means of reinforcing a sense of identity and belonging both within the tutor group and across the year group by emphasising the idea of the year group as a ‘closed’ community existing within the broader community of the school.

Academic Classes, Qualifications and the Curriculum Well-ordered, linear imaginings of age can also be seen in academic groupings, in the structure of the curriculum and in the methods of summative assessment used at Lakefield. Qualifications serve as another over-­ arching influence on the way in which daily life at Lakefield is structured, and are an example of how, in schools, adults are able to impose a rigid framework through which imaginings of age for children and young people can be ordered and organised (Hood-Williams 1990). As in other schools in England, different year groups are linked together according to the qualifications that are relevant to them. Years 7–9, for example, are institutionally grouped together because they all follow the National Curriculum for Key Stage 3; Years 10 and 11 are similarly grouped together because they study for GCSEs and other qualifications of a roughly equivalent level, such as the Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) qualification. Years 12 and 13 are even more explicitly grouped together and institutionally recognised jointly as the sixth form, partly because they follow the same range of A-Level, A2 and AS-Level qualifications. This increasingly tight control over the stages through which students pass on their way through education serves to further cement an imagining of age for children and young people that is

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­ remised on orderly progress. What is more, such qualifications are p important in establishing a sense of imagined generational identity on a national scale: pupils in any given school can picture themselves as members in a national cohort sitting for a particular examination. As Pilcher puts it, childhood [and youth] has become a stage characterised by the intensive ‘chasing of credentials’. The introduction of the National Curriculum and testing at ages 7, 11 and 14 can be interpreted as an attempt to encourage specified educational achievements within childhood. As a result, in educational achievement terms at least, childhood is becoming ever more tightly defined into stages. (1995: 55) [my parentheses]

In order to even further stratify the experiences of students according to age, during the course of the school day students between years 7 and 11 are separated loosely according to ability, which in turn can be seen as a reflection of how closely students’ academic achievements and behavioural dispositions are matched against an imagined, ideal notion of how they should be developing and progressing through the year groups. Or, to put it another way, we might conceive of the upper end of the ‘ability’ stream as those students who are seen to be developing at the ‘right’ pace for their year, while those in the ‘lower’ groups still need to ‘catch up’ with their contemporaries (James and Prout 1997a: 237). Occasionally, as in the example of David in Year 7 (described below), there are also cases of what teachers described as ‘old heads on young shoulders’, or students who, by virtue of their intellectual precocity, transgressed commonly held imaginings about students of a particular age. As the academic groupings of students become more diffuse in Years 10 and 11, the sense of identity fostered by the year group remains a salient means of locating oneself both socially, academically and institutionally within the school. However, academic class groupings also remain an important locus of identity over the 2 years of the GCSE curriculum—not least because they provide a means for students to position themselves in terms of their academic progress within their year group. As we shall see in Chap. 5, these academic divisions also have resonance in the informal social lives of students, in part providing a means for

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­imagining different kinds of youth often linked to class (‘chavs’, ‘geeks’, ‘emos’ and so on)1 and which correspond roughly to academic groupings within each year (Levinson 1996). While we shall focus on aspects of the content and delivery of the curriculum in Chap. 5, the structure of the curriculum also provides a particularly salient means of framing the experiences of students at Lakefield in terms of progress through discreet age-based stages. Imagining age in this fashion can be seen in the perspectives of staff who themselves develop imaginings of age for their students relative to their position within the framework of the curriculum. Sophie, for example, described how her perspective of students changed significantly at the point at which they choose their own academic options in anticipation of starting GCSEs in Year 10. Sophie’s imagining of students as ‘children’ or as more ‘adult’ was, to some extent, structured according to how this process of choosing Options was organised formally within the school: Really, up to Year 9s I see them as children. Once they’re given more control over their curriculum, when they’re in Year 9, you know, they’re finally given this control, to a certain extent, they’ve got to make these mature choices. It’s probably the first time in their life that they have to make mature choices—I mean, obviously for some people there are exceptions— but really, if you think about it, I don’t think I made a choice that was to do with my future—my sort of education—until Year 9 when they ask you ‘OK, what subjects do you want to take?’…so I think when it gets to that point…I feel like I have a lot more similarities with them because they’ve had that very, sort of, basic…event in a way, of making those [kinds of ] choices which as an adult you kind of have to do everyday

Choosing options in Year 9 emerges here as one among a number of formal points of transition recognised by the school. As the culmination of the processes described above, whereby students are encouraged to imagine age according to the neat parcelling of the year group hierarchy, examinations can be seen as another obvious moment in the formal calendar of the school year that clearly marks the transition or rite of passage  See Chap. 6 for an explanation of the terms ‘chav’, ‘geek’ and ‘emo’ as they are used in the context of this thesis. 1

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from one age-based status to another—at the institutional level, at least (Van Gennep 1960). For year groups not taking national examinations, Lakefield maintains this ritual process of transition by organising ‘Celebration’ events serving a similar purpose of marking the end of one year and the beginning of the next. At the end of Year 7, for example, students and their parents and carers were invited to attend a ‘Celebration afternoon’ where students were given awards and prizes for their academic achievements. As stressed in the head teacher’s initial message to carers and parents, at the ceremony a particular emphasis is placed on progress, with students receiving awards for the amount of progress that they had achieved during the year. There are, then, a range of different ways in which students’ lives at Lakefield are organised, on an institutional level, according to age as defined by the year group category. Age is in this respect a constant and pervasive aspect of how students’ lives are formally organised. As can be seen particularly in the increased levels of freedom and independence afforded to the sixth form (or in the reduced levels of freedom and agency for the rest of the school), the statuses apportioned to these age-related categories change as students move through the school and this provides an indication of the relationship between year group organisation and the ideas of progress and becoming that structure imaginings of age at Lakefield on an ideological level. More generally, it is possible to see how the structure of year groups, tutor groups, academic groups and the structure of the curriculum serve to reinforce a neat, orderly framework for reining in imaginings of age.

Part III: Contested Agency Student Voice However, as suggested above, an orderly gerontological hierarchy was not the only imagining of age supported by the institutional structure of the school. The ‘vision’ statement and other official school documents also speak of the active role of students in the ‘running’ of Lakefield. The

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main formal channel for students’ participation in the ‘running and decision making of the school’ was the Student Voice panel. In each year, students volunteer to become representatives of their cohort as part of the Student Voice panel, which then met on a number of occasions each term to discuss issues of importance to students. These meetings were overseen by a teacher who acted as a liaison with the senior management, to whom the minutes of each meeting were sent for consideration and for inclusion in the staff notices. From this platform, students then had representation in other areas of school life as well. As described in Lakefield’s prospectus, Lakefield School already boasts its own student associate governors and from September 2006 this role will be extended to student representation in all major policy decisions, providing students with opportunities and responsibilities to shape the development of their school.

On the surface there was in this respect a viable means through which students in all years were empowered and recognised as participating in the functioning of the school, whether in Year 7 or in Year 13. In practice, however, the scope and real power of the Student Voice in the school was more limited than the above description might suggest. While there was a genuine interest in incorporating students into the running of the school, and through this process to recognise them as individuals and empower them as active members of Lakefield’s community, the real extent of students’ influence was debatable. This was made evident late in the Autumn term when Ms. Gibson, then the staff liaison for Year 7 Student Voice, inadvertently published the proceedings of the latest Student Voice meeting in the staff notices without first significantly editing the minutes, as was the normal, if unspoken, practice. As she was new to the teacher liaison position, Ms. Gibson had taken the description of the Student Voice panel at its word and had accurately represented the thoughts and feelings of the Year 7 representatives to the staff as they had been expressed in the meeting. The head teacher’s accompanying comments to teachers were generally positive, but provided caveats aimed at pre-empting teacher complaints:

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you will find the comments in places perceptive, but you will find a concentration on what could be better …if we want our school to be the best it possibly can be then we must give students an important role in the evaluation of what we do but balance this with a recognition that the student perspective will of necessity be very different from ours. I suggest a strong drink to accompany reading! [Excerpt from Staff Newsletter, 16-11-07]

When the staff notices had been distributed in the staffroom Ms. Gibson told me that she was instructed by the senior management that normally the thoughts of students were not passed on in detail, but should instead be glossed over with only key points to be relayed back to the staff. More generally, there was little evidence that students had any real influence on the important decisions made in the school, even if they were engaged at some level in learning the systems of management by which the school is organised. Ironically, learning such systems of (self ) management was also a practice in self-discipline. Sara Bragg (2007a) has identified in her own research on Student Voice initiatives how this approach to governing life at school may seem to nurture neoliberal values of individualism and self-reliance and self-management. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality (2007 [1977–1978]), Bragg argues that this apparent participation in the decision-making processes that shape life at school may actually serve more accurately as a means by which students can participate in their own subordination—kind of disciplining of the self by the self. This might also be construed as the misrecognition, to borrow from Bourdieu, of participation as power, while in reality the limits on the nature of student participation actually mask deeper constraints on their agency to affect change in the politics of the school.

The Headteacher’s Perspective Despite the difficult reality of attempting to marry a more progressive approach to the inclusion of students with the rigid structural hierarchy of the school, the head teacher, Simon, was particularly committed to

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this ideal of the role of students in the school because it underscored his vision of Lakefield as a community. Discussing Student Voice in his office one morning, he talked about his philosophical approach to education, suggesting that ‘you can facilitate the engagement and confidence of students by creating a sense of community, partly through including them in the decision-making processes of the school.’ However, he also recognised that Student Voice, and other initiatives, formal or informal, aimed at narrowing the gap between students and staff, were inevitably limited by the structure of the education system and by the ingrained practices that it has engendered in teachers. He argued that there are structural restrictions in school to ‘thinking about age’ in a way that emphasises sameness rather than separation, as well as resistance from staff who are more comfortable asserting what he called a ‘traditional hierarchical student-­teacher relationship’. He also admitted that even his own abilities to assert a less hierarchical relationship with students was influenced by personal prejudices and experiences of how these relationships can realistically be figured in the day-to-day school life. As Bragg suggests, this is an issue of significance in Student Voice initiatives, not least because the reluctance of teachers also raises questions about teacher identity and ‘teacher voice’—and, I would argue, about how teachers ‘think about age’ (Bragg 2007a). More generally, Simon also commented that his vision of achieving ‘success’ (moral, civic, philosophical) through community is limited by the structure and ideology of state schooling. He agreed that this was the case insomuch as he has no choice but to engage in the ‘game’ of education and take on aspects of the current ‘culture of education’ in order to ‘stay afloat’—as he put it, ‘you have to engage with the apparent certainty of educational policy, while still attempting to go ahead with the philosophical vision of the school that you have.’ Simon emphasised that this was the most challenging aspect of his job.

 ontested Institutional Imaginings of Age: Dialogues C in Assembly It was interesting to observe how the tensions between these two imaginings of age—of recognising the agency of children and young people as

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individuals actively engaged in the shaping of the world around them, while attempting to do so within an institutional structure predicated on the subordination of children and young people to the control of adults— emerged in the context of a whole assembly towards the end of the school year. Lakefield had just experienced an inspection from Ofsted, the national regulatory body for state education, and Simon wanted to relay the results of the visit to the students. He began by describing Ofsted’s comments about the good behaviour exhibited in the school, about the need to track students’ progress even more vigorously, and about the need to ‘engage’ them more in lessons: Simon: It [the Ofsted report] says ‘we can build on this impeccable behaviour by encouraging greater progress and greater engagement in the lessons.’ Greater engagement means within the lessons, having you more and more involved. Because your behaviour is good, it means that we can try more and more exciting things with you in the classroom. But what comes with that is a great deal of responsibility on your part. So I hope that as we move into next year we can all feel confident about trying to be more… exciting in what we do in lessons. Now that doesn’t mean screaming and shouting and dancing around and being silly, it doesn’t mean that. But it means that the level of engagement between you and the staff that are working with you, and with each other, will increase.

In this message, Simon articulates the points that he also mentioned to me in private, in terms of the need to ‘engage’ students and staff in ways that nurture mutual respect and that encourage students to take an active, participatory role in framing how teaching and learning take place. The emphasis is on working together, but at the same time Simon pre-empts the possibility that students might mistreat this increased ‘engagement’ by reminding them that it does not involve ‘being silly’, but instead involves a ‘great deal of responsibility’. There is the potential for empowerment, for being treated like equals, but also an undertone of uncertainty about the capacity of students to use this power in the right ways. This double message, of individual empowerment and the need for adults to check this power, was also conveyed in Simon’s comments about behaviour:

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Simon: [In response to Ofsted comments that behaviour in the school was ‘impeccable’] But are we always that good? Is behaviour always good in lessons? I wonder if it is. They, as an Ofsted team, saw no bad behaviour in lessons…But I’m not convinced that every single one of you does behave in an appropriate way—impeccably—in every lesson. And those of you who don’t, I want you to take note of that. Because if there are students who are sitting in lessons who are disrupting learning, they need to stop it. We have systems in place to stop it, but they need to stop it. Just as we wouldn’t ever have to have Community Service students picking up litter if nobody ever dropped litter, neither would we need a behaviour management system and detentions if nobody ever disrupted a lesson… That power is with every single one of you. If you committed yourself never to drop another piece of litter and never to disrupt another lesson, what a fantastic place this would be, and how far you could go. What you need to have is confidence in yourselves…You are a great school…and now we need to go forward. [my emphasis added]

Here again Simon is addressing the students at Lakefield as empowered individuals, irrespective of their status in the hierarchy of the school: as he suggests, ‘That power is with every single one of you’. And yet he is also intent on reminding students that there is still room for improvement. Students have the ‘power’, but they must modify their behaviour in order to harness (or rein in) this agency. In short, they must act ‘responsibly’ and with ‘commitment’, qualities we have seen elsewhere in this chapter associated with the long journey towards young adulthood. What is more, the school ‘has systems’ for controlling students’ behaviour, and we are in this respect reminded of the ultimate power of the staff to manage behaviour, even though Simon would rather that recalcitrant students take control over their own behaviour. The intent is to afford students with the freedom, trust and responsibility to improve themselves, but the message is also couched in terms that belie an awareness that this cannot be fully realised in a system that anticipates the need for this freedom to be curtailed and controlled by adult teachers.

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Conclusions This final point brings us back to the tensions registered in Part II. The ethnographic section of this chapter began by revealing how age emerges in Lakefield’s ‘vision’ statement and in other documents that reflect the formally legitimated philosophical and educational aspirations of the school. In these institutionally sanctioned narratives of life at Lakefield— these official portraits of the school—we are first presented with an imagining of age focused firmly on the process of progress, of growing up, of gaining trust and responsibility and of becoming ‘young adults’. As an organising concept both for how the school is practically structured and for the moral, pedagogical and philosophical ends that it hopes to achieve, this linear, progress-oriented ‘vision’ of age exerts a powerful influence over the workings of the school. In this ‘vision’ we can see the ingredients of entrenched popular imaginings of age, founded on a developmental model that aligns progress through childhood and adolescence with the linear flourishing of social, moral and emotional competencies. In this vision we see the shadows of successive policy shifts in mass state education since the late nineteenth century focused on cementing the normative and inevitable qualities of age as it is organised in schooling. These ideas about the nature of ‘growing up’ through schools find their institutional manifestation in the dominance of the year group system, which pervades all aspects of school life at Lakefield. From toilets to tutor groups, the influence of the year group is shown on a mundane, daily basis to reinforce the linear imaginings of age put forward in the school’s ‘vision’ statement. The significance of the year group as a marker of identity is also reinforced through ritual activities and cultural artefacts that mark either belonging to, or transition from, a particular age-class within the school. School photographs and ‘celebration’ evenings, for example, both serve a symbolic purpose in reinforcing and normalising the social importance of the passage through the school’s age-related hierarchical structure. It is not the case, of course, that age, imagined here principally in terms of year groups, is an intrinsic, ‘natural’ aspect of how the education of children and young people is organised, and yet the year group category is inscribed with a level of institutional significance that makes

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it socially and ideologically meaningful to students and staff alike, and it therefore has salience as a primary means for imagining age at Lakefield School. The year group system in this respect represents a locally contextualised taxonomy of known age imaginaries, within which it is also possible to perceive the taxonomy of becoming that underpins broader popular discourses of age. At the same time, however, the findings in this chapter also make evident the deeply contested nature of age imaginaries at Lakefield. Just as the ‘vision’ statement emphasises the notion of an accumulative trajectory towards adult personhood, so too does it recognise and encourage the agency of students through their active participation in the community of the school. The school’s child-centred approach to participation reflects more recent shifts in the structure and organisation of schooling since the 1980s and into the twenty-first century. This more nuanced understanding of the status and competencies of pupils is also reflected in the head teacher’s comments during school assemblies and, more concretely, in the formal systems put in place to encourage pupil participation in the running of the school. This imagining of age is couched in terms of mutual respect, responsibility and empowerment—phrases that emerge throughout the remainder of the book as a means for students and staff to articulate the precarious process of positioning one another within but also beyond the imaginings of age upon which the structure of the school is predicated. While I suggest that the formal channels for acting out this agency within the school are inherently limited by the imbalance of authority and power between staff and students, the fact that they exist at all presents a means for imagining age beyond the limits put in place by the hierarchy of the year group system. There are clear historical consistencies in terms of how age emerged as an organising framework for mass schooling, and in the institutional practices and discursive context of Lakefield School in the recent past. What, we might ask, has changed in how schools frame age at the discursive and institutional levels since the research took place in 2008? If anything, the last decade has seen a deepening of the tension described above between adult authority and control over young people, and adult advocacy for the rights and agency of pupils. The 2016 amendment to the Children Act clearly emphasises that any person under 18 should be

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c­ onsidered to be a child—a move in legislation that clearly extends the chronological scope of childhood and its concomitant archetypal qualities, including notions of dependence and vulnerability. While no means coherent in its application, the rollout of extending to 18 the legal age until which young people should be in education, employment or training, has now become a normal part of life for many who, ten years earlier, may have simply left school at 16. In light of the voracious uncertainty that characterises the present since 2008, it is interesting to note how little has changed in terms of how schooling frames life after school. Indeed, in terms of curriculum and qualifications, if anything schools now represent an even more modernist interpretation of how knowledge gained in school relates to life in the wider world. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the future, ever more uncertain, is presented to young people as an ever-more conclusive prospect. Under Michael Gove as Secretary for Education, A-Level subject choices became more constrained, and the structure of A-Level assessment reverted to a more traditional summative model that added further emphasis to examination as a rite of passage between educational phases. The shift in the funding structure for Higher Education now also demands that students interested in attending university must engage in increasingly calculating, rational-choice modes of decision making in order to justify the (current) £9000 per year price tag of pursuing a degree. This process inevitably involves the promise of return-on-investment—a cruelly ironic reckoning of life after school, given the financial climate post-2008 (Berlant 2011). The years 2008–2018 have also seen a profound shift in popular concern around the mental health and well-being on children and young people. Seen variably as a generation understandably destabilised by the precarities of the present, or as a vulnerable ‘snowflake’ generation, there is in either case a sense of greater obligation on the part of schools for the well-being of children and young people. This is particularly the case where ‘bad behaviour’ is seen to be on the rise in schools. For those demonstrating ‘disordered’ behaviour (including behaviour that challenges traditional notions of deference to adult authority or transition to adulthood), education policy has facilitated a right-realist, ‘zero tolerance’ approach that has resulted in escalated rates of detention, isolation and exclusion (see, e.g. Bennet 2018). That such practices are shared with

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other disciplinary institutions, including migrant detention centres and prisons, is perhaps no great surprise. At the same time, there is a greater recognition of the active role of young people in establishing the parameters for what their well-being should look like (House of Commons Select Education Committee 2018); and, as suggested earlier in this book, young people are now at the fore of ecological and political activism that, poignantly, manifests itself in rebellion against school attendance. And yet, ultimately, in terms of policy and at the level of practice, the picture remains very much unchanged in terms of the self-efficacy of young people. Schools still serve the reproduction of gerontocratic social structure even if they are also sites for advocacy about the rights and needs of children and young people as equals to adults. The key point emerging at the end of Chap. 3, then, is that while at an institutional level the negotiation of age imaginaries is contested at Lakefield School, revealing opposing but concurrent visions of age, the dominant imagining of age is vested in the hierarchy of the year group system. In the last century, more remains the same than has changed in how age is imagined in the discourse and organisation of mass schooling. The fact that the agency of students is now recognised, but not necessarily always realised in practice in the school, could be seen as a reflection of new taxonomies of known age imaginaries—as a reflection of broader popular and political discourse directed towards recognising the rights of children and young people to actively participate in society, but not necessarily facilitating critical participation in practice—despite the best intentions of those adults, like Simon, who are engaged in this process (Bragg 2007b). In the next chapter I will explore the ways in which students and teachers articulate imaginings of age that adhere to those ingrained in the institutional structure as described here. However, I will also consider alternate age imaginaries that exist alongside and sometimes in contradistinction to those otherwise formally recognised in the school. Just as age can be imagined in multiple and contradictory ways on an institutional and discursive level, so too is age imagined in multiple ways in the day-to-day classroom practice. It is to this context that we now turn.

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References Alanen, L., & Mayall, B. (Eds.). (2001). Conceptualizing Child-Adult Relations. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Alexander, P. (2013). Durkheim. In J. Ainsworth & G. Geoffrey (Eds.), Sociology of Education: An A-to-Z Guide. London: Sage. Alexander, P. (2017). Coming of Age Through The Recession: High School Imaginings of Post-Recession Futures in London and New  York City. In J.  Nelson & G.  Stahl (Eds.), Masculinity and Aspiration: International Perspectives in the Era of Neoliberal Education. New York: Routledge. Anderson-Levitt, K. (2012). Complicating the Concept of Culture. Comparative Education, 48(4), 441–454. Ball, S. (2013). Foucault, Power, and Education. London: Routledge. Bennet, T. (2018, July 26). Yes, School Exclusions Are Up. But Zero-Tolerance Policies Are Not to Blame. The Guardian. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/schoolexclusions-zero-tolerance-policies-disruptive-pupils. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Bloch, M. (1998). How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bragg, S. (2007a). ‘But I listen to children anyway!’—Teacher Perspectives on Pupil Voice. Educational Action Research, 15(4), 505–518. Bragg, S. (2007b). ‘Student Voice’ and Governmentality: The Production of Enterprising Subjects? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28(3), 343–358. Chitty, C. (2007). Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education. London: Continuum. Christensen, P., & James, A. (2001). What Are Schools For? The Temporal Experience of Schooling. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualising Child-Adult Relations. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Cunningham, H. (2005). Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500. Harlow: Pearson. Department for Education. (1996). Education Act. Retrieved from http://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/56/contents. Education Endowment Foundation. (2018). Repeating a Year. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit/repeating-a-year/.

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Foucault, M. (1981 [1976]). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2007 [1977–1978]). Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (M. Senellart, Ed., G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Galton, M., Simon, B., & Croll, P. (1980). Inside the Primary Classroom (The ORACLE Report). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gillard, D. (2011). Us and Them: A History of Pupil Grouping Policies in England’s Schools. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from www.educationengland.org.uk/ articles/27grouping.html. Gillard, D. (2018). Education in England: A History. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from www.educationengland.org.uk/history. Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Doubleday. Hadow, H. (1926). The Education of the Adolescent Report of the Consultative Committee. London: HM Stationery Office. Hadow, H. (1931). Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School. London: HM Stationery Office. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from http:// www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/hadow1931/hadow1931.html. Hadow, H. (1933). Report of the Consultative Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools. London: HM Stationery Office. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/hadow1933/ hadow1933.html#06. Hargreaves, D.  H. (1967). Social Relations in a Secondary School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hendrick, H. (1997). Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Hood-Williams, J. (1990). Patriarchy for Children: On the Stability of Power Relations in Children’s Lives. In L.  Chisholm, P.  Buchner, H.  Kruger, & P.  Brown (Eds.), Childhood, Youth and Social Change: A Comparative Perspective. London: Falmer. House of Commons Select Education Committee. (2018). Forgotten Children: Alternative Provision and the Scandal of Ever Increasing Exclusions. London: House of Commons. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmeduc/342/342.pdf.

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James, A., & Prout, A. (1997a). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer. James, A., & Prout, A. (1997b). Re-Presenting Childhood: Time and Transition in the Study of Childhood. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer. Lacey, C. (1970). Hightown Grammar: The School as a Social System. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lancy, D. (2015). The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, B. (1996). Social Difference and Schooled Identity at a Mexican Secondaria. In B.  Levinson et  al. (Eds.), The Cultural Production of the Educated Person. New York: SUNY Press. Pilcher, J. (1995). Age & Generation in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Qvortrup, J. (1994). Childhood Matters: An Introduction. In J.  Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics. Aldershot: Avebury. Suissa, J. (2010). Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective. London: PM Press. The Plowden Report. (1967). Children and their Primary Schools. A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Valentine, G., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (1998). Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge. van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge. Walford, G. (1986). Life in Public Schools. London: Methuen. Well, K. (2015). Childhood in Global Perspective. London: Polity. Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2015). Youth and Generation: Change and Inequality in the Lives of Young People. London: Sage. Wright, D., & Osborne, J. (2007). Preparation for Teaching in Rural Schools. In British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, London. Wulf, C. (Ed.). (2010). Ritual and Identity: The Staging and Performing of Rituals in the Lives of Young People. London: Tufnell Press.

4 Learning to Act Your Age in the Classroom

Introduction Chapter 4 focuses in to look at how particular ideas about age and social identity are cultivated and articulated in the day-to-day social interactions of the classroom at Lakefield School. Drawing on examples from classes in Years 7, 9, 10 and 11, I analyse how ideas about age are negotiated both in everyday classroom practice and in the recounting of time spent in lessons provided by students and staff. With this in mind, the chapter is divided into two discrete but interconnected parts that look, in turn, at how imaginings of age are performed and narrated in the classroom. In Part I of the chapter, I set the scene by showing how, in the case of Lakefield, age imaginaries are embodied through the various levels of control placed on physical movement and interaction within classes in different year groups, and in students’ tacit acceptance or overt contestation of this control. In Part II, I focus on how age imaginaries emerge both in the content of the curriculum and in the processes through which students and staff negotiate the delivery, or avoidance, of the curriculum in the day-to-day lessons. I consider the content and delivery of the

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Personal Development Curriculum (PDC) for Year 7 (lessons aimed broadly at moral, social, and civic well-being), looking in particular at the discourses of ‘childhood’ and ‘growing up’ that are presented. I then look at the context of Citizenship lessons (also focused broadly on civic processes, rights and responsibilities) for an academically marginal group of students in Year 11. Here, imaginings of ‘youth’ and ‘citizenship’ are explored. I conclude by arguing that in the case of Year 7, students manage to negotiate a ‘dual life’ (Lanclos 2003) between the kinds of imaginings of age deemed appropriate by teachers in the classroom (e.g. performances of childlike ‘innocence’) and those that earn them favour among their student counterparts by transgressing the boundaries of these imaginings (e.g. sexual or violent humour). Most of the time, they are successful in this enterprise; but from time to time they are not, and this incurs sanctions and punishment. In the case of Year 11, I argue that in Citizenship the curriculum becomes peripheral because students imagine age in opposition to the ideas of ‘age’ presented to them in formal teaching and learning. Indeed, it is the gap between the representations of age in the curriculum and students’ own lived experiences of ‘youth’ that is of interest here. In each context, students (and staff) reveal their ability to actively engage in balancing these diverse and potentially divergent imaginings of age. In Part III, I consider how both students and staff narrate their experiences of negotiating age in the classroom, paying particular attention to the ways in which age is imagined relationally between staff and students as the latter shift positions in the hierarchy of the school. I conclude by pointing out the three main findings of the chapter. Firstly, I argue that staff are implicitly engaged in reinforcing the taxonomy of age imaginaries imposed by the year group structure through their exertion of different levels of disciplinary control over students in different year groups. This relates to all aspects of the lives at school, is embodied and governs their use of time and space. However, students are also actively engaged in this process, and the performative aspects of age imaginaries emerge here both in students’ ability to successfully ‘act their age’, or control their bodies in ‘appropriate’ ways in lessons, and in the ‘disruption’ caused when they are unable or unwilling to do so. Secondly, I argue that both students and staff are reflexive and aware of the shifts that take place in how they imagine age as part of their

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classroom interactions with one another. Just as much as students are conscious that they are treated differently and respond differently to teachers as they move from classroom to classroom through the school day, and up the school, so too do teachers recognise the ways in which their working days are defined by age-based shifts in how they ‘act’ their own age relative to the age imaginaries of students. Finally, I argue that in both cases, control, discipline, authority and respect are key issues underpinning the relational nature of age imaginaries in the classroom.

Part I  rganising Bodies: Age as an Embodied Aspect O of Social Interaction in the Classroom Chapter 3 showed how space is strictly organised within the school according to year group, providing a physical manifestation of the ‘institutional separateness’ between staff and students and between students in different years. In the classroom it is also possible to see that age imaginaries are embodied in terms of the varying levels of physical control that teachers place over students and in the ability of students to navigate the explicit and implicit rules of this control over the docility of their bodies (Foucault 1977). As discussed in Chap. 1, notions of habitus and capital—and here, more specifically, notions of embodied capital as an aspect of habitus—provide a valuable theoretical language for thinking about age in this way as an embodied aspect of social practice (Bourdieu 1991). While Bourdieu does not necessarily explore the specific realm of age as an aspect of embodied cultural capital within education, the idea of embodied capital can be used in this context to describe the ways in which the physical is imbued with particular social and cultural meanings: the body is in the social world but the social world is within the body. And the embodiment of the social that training accomplishes is the foundation of a presence to the world presupposed by socially competent action and by the ordinary experience of that world as taken for granted. (1991: 190)

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With this idea in mind, here I want to begin by exploring how linear, hierarchical imaginings of age are reinforced—how they become ‘taken for granted’—and how they are contested, through the mediation of embodied capital in the classroom.

Lining Up, Answering Questions and Packing Up Let us begin with a rather uncontroversial observation—but one that nevertheless requires attention in terms of what it tells us about age as an embodied aspect of classroom activity. In Year 7 it was the case that almost all of the lessons that I observed began with students lining up in single file outside the classroom, waiting for the teacher to allow them to enter. Lining up Year 7 students before lessons was not a procedure explicitly enforced by the school, but it was an approach that was followed, to a greater or lesser extent, by all the teachers that I observed with Year 7 groups. One of these groups, 7GB, was the tutor group of Miss Gibson, a Music teacher in her late twenties. I observed this class most Wednesday afternoons during the period allotted for the Personal Development Curriculum (PDC), commonly known as ‘tutor’ among students and staff. Occasionally I would alternatively spend time with 7FB, the tutor group of Ellen Fairbanks, a Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) in her early twenties. In both of these tutor groups it was the norm that the class would line up against the wall in single file and be expected to be quiet before being allowed to enter the classroom. Some of the students from 7GB I also encountered while spending time with 7B, a ‘low ability’ group in the school’s system of streaming who were less adept in this regard. In French (with Mrs. Gallagher) and Philosophy and Religion (P&R, with Mr. O’Reilly), 7B were expected to line up in single file and be silent, although they were seldom able to do this successfully without first being told off. For Art, 7B were also expected to line up, but were frequently distracted by the railing at the side of the entrance to the classroom, which they would sit on or jump off. I also spent time with 7A, a ‘middle-band’ group who I observed mainly in English lessons throughout the course of the year (also taught by Ms. Fairbanks). Ms. Fairbanks lined up her Year 7 English group in exactly the same way that

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she did her tutor group. Later in the year I spent occasional lessons with Year 7s from other, ‘higher ability’ classes as well. In these lessons as well the rule for lining up outside was followed. In this sense there was an implicit and mainly unspoken understanding among Year 7 teachers that Year 7 students required a high level of physical control—that their bodies should be compliant. While in practice these lines were occasionally noisy and unruly, with students chatting, shoving each other and otherwise messing around, teachers of Year 7 classes made a point in attempting to establish a sense of order and control over younger students in this way. Ms. Fairbanks’ English lessons with 7A served as an interesting example of this method of organising the bodies of younger students. Before every lesson, she would ask her students to line up along the wall outside her classroom. She would then stand at the door and watch them sternly, arms folded, waiting for them to be quiet. It would sometimes take several minutes before they had become still and quiet enough for Ms. Fairbanks to allow them to enter the class. As they worked through this sometimes slow process of bodily control, it was frequently the case that the ‘better behaved’ members of the class would nudge or hush the noisier students in the line in order to please Ms. Fairbanks and expedite gaining access to the classroom; and in so doing they were exhibiting a heightened awareness of the embodied capital necessary to succeed in Year 7. In Mrs. Gallagher’s French lessons with 7B, to use another example, it occurred on a number of occasions during the first month of the Autumn term (and, indeed, later in the year as well) that Mrs. Gallagher would march the class back out of the classroom to line up again if their entrance was considered too noisy or shambolic. 7B did not generally share the awareness of physical or embodied capital demonstrated in 7A. The continued, repetitious drilling of Year 7 students in this way served as a means of reinforcing on a basic level the kinds of physical behaviour that were required and expected of students in their year group. Part of learning to act one’s age in Year 7 was the process of succumbing to (or taking for granted) a particularly high level of adult control over one’s physical movements, commensurate with a notion of children as individuals less than capable of exerting this kind of physical control on themselves.

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From my experiences with these classes, and from observations of other Key Stage 3 classes around the school, there appeared to be an implicit understanding that Key Stage 3 classes should all line up outside classrooms at the beginning of lessons in roughly the same fashion. In contrast, a greater diversity of approaches was adopted by teachers with classes in Years 10 and 11. For Years 10 and 11 it was normally expected that students would wait outside the classroom for the teacher, but students were less frequently expected to line up in single file or to be completely silent while they waited. For some teachers, the idea of trying to get students to line up beyond Key Stage 3 was unthinkable. Talking about her different approaches to physical control with students, Sophie commented: I mean something as simple as getting them to line up outside the door, separating them into boys and girls…you know, the fact that I get them to sit down in a boy-girl circle for Key Stage 3, I’d never do that in GCSE or A-Level…So…like Year 10s, they wait outside the class but I’d never say ‘line up’. I just think it’s a little bit…militant. It’s like ‘OK, let’s give them a bit of respect, they’ve been able to make their choices, of what they want to teach [sic], these people have—especially for me because it’s [drama] an option—they’ve made this choice to do this, I’m not going to treat them like Year 7s who have to be here…so it’s something as simple as that…or something as simple as every time the year begins [for Year 7] I always have an introductory lesson of my expectations, health and safety, rules of the drama studio…but I’m not going to do that for Year 10 & 11, because they should know that by now.

Sophie’s comments provide an insight into the ways in which she makes sense of imposing varying levels of physical control on students in different years. This is framed relative to her imaginings of age for different year groups, both in terms of the respect she affords students in different years, particularly in relation to their status as ‘independent’ learners (‘they’ve made this choice to do this’), and in the assumptions that she makes about how they have over the years learned to ‘act’ appropriately in lessons. For other teachers, such as Marie Coram (an English teacher in her early fifties), the rules for this particular part of classroom interaction seemed to relax as the year developed. In September, during

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her first lessons with her Year 10 English group, she would tell students off for coming in before they had been invited; instead they were to wait (although never in a line) on the somewhat cramped landing outside her classroom until she opened the door. By December, however, it was usually permissible for them to wander in uninvited at the beginning of the lesson and take their seats, provided that Marie was already there. This seemed to reflect Marie’s increasing levels of trust for her class and her view that as Year 10s they should now be able to take responsibility for their own learning (see also Marie’s comments below). A slightly more relaxed approach was also adopted with GCSE students by Mary Garrison. While she did not explicitly establish the rule, her Year 10 Citizenship class would wait outside her room until she invited them in. With her Year 11 groups, however, there were no hard and fast rules about entering the classroom: normally students would simply walk in as and when they arrived. This was not so much a practice sanctioned or encouraged by Mrs. Garrison as it was an implicit, negotiated understanding between her and the class. Mrs. Garrison’s Year 11s would normally just come into (and occasionally out of ) the room at their own discretion, and she had decided that it was more trouble than it was worth to attempt to enforce more stringent controls over this class. Mrs. Garrison’s Year 11s were actively engaged in this way in defining the level of physical control imposed on them during lessons, as we shall see below (and in Chap. 5). But it was not only older students in the school who were willing or able to challenge the embodied imaginings of age put forward in the classroom. Getting students to adhere to particular forms of physical control at the beginning of the lesson, for instance, proved more difficult with some Key Stage 3 classes than with others. In particular, my time spent with 7B presented interesting examples of the fine balance between different kinds of imaginings of age—especially in terms of transgressions of the normative boundaries that delineated ‘appropriate’ behaviour (in terms of physical comportment) for Year 7 students. The ‘lowest ability’ group in Year 7, 7B, had a reputation for being disruptive and ‘off-the-wall’, as the school’s TAs frequently described them. At the centre of most of the disruption caused in 7B’s lessons were a group of five boys. Jack, a tall, skinny, blonde student with a h ­ igh-­pitched voice was frequently at the centre of whatever had happened to upset the

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lesson. Jack was prone to shouting out, swearing, bullying other members of the class and complaining in his high pitch about always being blamed for any disruption taking place. Sheila, the TA who was also normally in lessons with 7B, repeatedly described Jack as having ‘ants in his pants’ as a way of conveying his energetic and frenetic physical comportment. On numerous occasions she would ask, ‘What’s the matter, Jack, got ants in your pants?’, in response to his inability to line up, sit still or wait quietly. James, a small, brown-haired boy with a round, freckled face, was also very disruptive—so much so, in fact, that soon into the term he was placed on ‘red’ report by his Year head. If a student was placed on ‘red’ report, this indicated that he or she was recognised as a ‘disruptive’ student who had already graduated from ‘yellow’ and ‘green’ reports to the highest level of behaviour monitoring. Students on ‘red’ report were monitored lesson-by-lesson for behaviour. Each teacher would sign and comment on the student’s ‘red’ report to indicate the level of their behaviour and this would be relayed back to their Year head on a daily basis. Michael, another freckle-faced boy, was also a member of the core of boys in 7B, as was Toby, who we will also see in 7GB. Shawn and Taylor were also frequently involved in ‘disruptive behaviour’ in the class. The following scenario serves as an example both of students in 7B contesting physical control and docility, and more generally of their negotiation of multiple ideas about age as part of daily classroom practice. Early in the year I was waiting with 7B and a teaching assistant, Karen, outside a ground floor classroom near the entrance to the school, waiting for the art teacher, Mr. Bampton, to arrive. The boys were shouting loudly and swinging on a nearby railing, violating the physical, bodily control exerted over them as Year 7s by refusing to line up before the lesson. Karen told them to come and line up with the rest of the class, and a few reluctantly started to come over, complaining (Jack, exaggeratedly swaggering: ‘Ah, man! What now?!’) as they walked. As they assembled outside the classroom Karen bent down to straighten Taylor’s tie, which had been loosened and was hanging round his neck. He looked off into the playground while she did this, absent-mindedly, apparently unembarrassed by the whole process, until James noticed what was happening. James jumped forward, leaned in and started cooing and making baby noises in Taylor’s face, before repeating ‘Baby! Baby! Waaa! Waaa! Faggot!’

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Taylor screwed his face up and shouted ‘Shut up!’, while Karen added, sternly: ‘James, that’s enough!’ Taylor let Karen finish a few seconds later before wriggling free, looking a little sheepish in the other direction as Mr. Bampton came into view, scowling as he strode quickly across the playground. In this description, it is clear that gender and sexuality are also important facets of how these students physically embody imaginings of age. In lessons with 7B it became clear that acting ‘bad’ or ‘hard’ was an important aspect of the relationships between the core of boys in the class, and that acting ‘bad’ or ‘hard’ meant fighting, swearing and finding ways of avoiding doing class work. Being ‘hard’ also meant not being a ‘baby’ (crying, showing weakness, asking for or receiving pastoral support from TAs or the teacher) or a ‘boff’ (working or trying hard)—both of which embodied the opposite of the masculine identities that the boys seemed to want to emulate. Being a ‘baby’ in particular evoked the kinds of childlike qualities—dependence and weakness—that the boys wished to eschew. While there were certainly many occasions when the boys forgot about being ‘hard’ and happily acquiesced in activities that would otherwise make them ‘babies’ or ‘boffs’, they were routinely locked into competition to see who could be ‘hardest’ or ‘baddest’. This frequently involved acting in lessons in ways considered ‘inappropriate’, particularly in terms of embodied imaginings of age for students in their year group. As with constraints on lining up, rules about physical movement—and answering questions in lessons in particular—were similarly quite rigid for classes in Key Stage 3 and less so for Years 10 and 11, and above. In Years 7, 8 and 9, it was obligatory, in theory, for students to put their hands up and wait quietly to be chosen to answer a question by the teacher (see the example from ‘tutor’ with 7GB below for evidence of this kind of exchange). Of course, this was not always what transpired in practice, but it was infrequent that the calling out of an answer would be greeted with a positive response from the teacher. In French lessons with 7B, for example, Mrs. Gallagher would reward students for obeying the ‘hands-up’ rule by giving them a point for answering the question correctly; those who shouted out the correct answer either scored a zero or were obliged to sit out that particular activity in the lesson. In history lessons with 9Y, Ms. Holmes also strictly enforced a ‘hands-up’ rule.

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Students very seldom deviated from this rule when answering questions; if they did, Ms. Holmes was consistent and firm in re-emphasising that answers would only be acknowledged when hands were up. This was one among a number of classroom practices that afforded her a reputation as a ‘well strict’ teacher among students (and among teachers, as we shall see in Chap. 6). Again, for older students in Years 10 and 11, the protocol for participating in lessons was less fixed. Frequently, teachers would expect raised hands in order to answer a question, and students, now well-versed in this aspect of classroom practice, would do so without being asked. But it was not uncommon, particularly in Year 11, for students to call out answers, as long as this was done in an ‘appropriate’ fashion—that is, avoiding shouting or talking over one another, swearing or being ‘silly’. The following provides an example of this kind of open exchange taking place in Mary Garrison’s Year 11 English class. During this lesson, the groups were going through exam techniques together, talking in particular about different characteristics of persuasive writing: Mrs. Garrison: …OK, right, what is it about that bit – have a listen – ‘flag or fail’, what is it makes this phrase catchy? What has it got…that makes it catchy? Danni: Flag or fail… Stanley: Two ‘F’ words. Mrs. Garrison: Good. Well done – Danni: Oh, well done Stuart! [sarcastic] Mrs. Garrison: Shh. [smiling] Good! Two ‘F’ words. So we’ve got two ‘F’ words, ‘flag’, ‘fail’, ‘Fuh’, ‘Fuh. Does anyone know – let’s see how clever you really are – does anyone know what you call it when you repeat the sound at the beginning of a word? Danni: Ohh… Steven: What does it begin with? Mrs. Garrison: What? Steven: What does it begin with? Mrs. Garrison: Al…. Steven: All….. Danni: Oh I know this… Stanley: Alopecia, there you go…

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Mrs Garrison: Come on, we’re not talking about a medical condition… [laughter] Danni: All…Allerat – Oh I don’t know I don’t know how to say it – Mrs. Garrison: A-L-L…Go on, you’re nearly there…Allit…Alliteration! Stuart: Oh, Alliteration!

There are numerous occasions in the above discussion where Mrs. Garrison allows students to openly answer questions rather than raising their hands or waiting to be asked by the teacher, as was frequently the case with students in Key Stage 3. As well as affording some space for joking and banter (Danni’s sarcastic remark and Stuart’s joke about ‘alopecia’), Mrs. Garrison encourages an open dialogue with the class. In most (but not all) Key Stage 3 lessons (see, e.g. Ms. Gibson’s PDC lesson entitled ‘About Me’, described below), this kind of exchange would instead involve a highly formalised, regimented exchange in which the teacher demanded and received docility, establishing complete control (in theory at least) over who was speaking, when they spoke and what they were expected to speak about. Here again we are provided with an example of how decreasing levels of physical control in the classroom run parallel to students’ progress up the hierarchy of the school. However, there were also frequent occasions when students contested the fixity of these rules, and in so doing undermined the embodied imaginings of age imposed upon them. One sunny spring afternoon in May, for example, 7B were having a lesson on Christianity in their Philosophy and Religion class with Mr. O’Reilly. Mr. O’Reilly was attempting to convey to the class why it was that Jesus could be seen as a rebel. I was sitting next to James at the far end of the horseshoe of tables in the room, looking across at Jack and Taylor. James had been particularly ‘disruptive’ during the lesson, despite his teaching assistant Karen’s multiple attempts to try to engage him in the work. Instead, he sat hunched over his desk, kicking at his chair and occasionally talking or disrupting the work of other students, for which Mr. O’Reilly gave him a number of warnings. Towards the end of the lesson, Mr. O’Reilly had been going around the class asking for ‘hands up’ from students to explain what they had learned that day about why Jesus might be a rebel. Without

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being prompted, and without raising his hand, James raised himself off the table, and, with a conspiratorial look and smile over to Jack, shouted, ‘Because he bummed his mum!’ The boys in the class burst into laughter, rocking back on their chairs. Mr. O’Reilly sighed and quietly told James to go and stand outside the classroom. It was not long after this lesson that James’ presence in 7B became less and less frequent, as he had been removed from most normal scheduled lessons because of his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour. Generally speaking, the rules for packing up and leaving at the end of a lesson were also differentiated between year groups, again with a distinction between students in Years 7, 8 and 9 and those studying for GCSEs. At the end of most lessons with students in Key Stage 3, teachers would ask students to pack up their things, tuck their chairs under and stand behind their desks waiting to be dismissed, normally table by table or row by row. Just as with students entering classrooms and answering questions in Years 10 and 11, approaches to controlling the movements of students at the end of the lesson varied between classes. In most cases, however, teachers would not expect the same kind of discipline required of younger students. Instead of having to stand up and wait behind their chairs to be dismissed in smaller groups, it was more often that teachers would dismiss the whole class together, in a less regimented fashion. In the same Year 11 English class with Mrs. Garrison, for example, the lesson ended in the following way: [Bell rings] Mrs Garrison:…Right, OK, well done, can you keep the sheets for revision please, can I have all the pens back in please – Uh, wait Danni, I didn’t say go, come back. [Danni moves away from the door] [general chatting and packing up] Mrs. Garrison: Come on, let’s get this packed up… [general chatting in the background as class packs up] Mrs. Garrison: Right, don’t forget to take your sheets with you… Janie: Can we go yet? Mrs. Garrison: Yep. [class begins to leave, chatting]

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While Danni isn’t simply allowed to leave the classroom of her own accord, the students here feel entitled (and are permitted) to ask when they can leave, and are given a response that suggests no further controls over their movement. In most Key Stage 3 lessons, on the contrary, it was the case that exiting the classroom was a highly formalised affair often involving (as with Ms. Fairbanks’ class above) further sanctions for those students who called out or failed to adhere to the physical controls imposed on students. Returning to Bourdieu (1991), it is possible to see how the idea of embodied cultural capital—what might be described as the development of taken-for-granted cultural competencies that are manifested physically in how one controls one’s body in particular social and spatial contexts— helps to make sense of the way in which the physical aspect of classroom interactions changes as students progress through the age-based hierarchy of the school. On one level, the extent of physical control imposed on the bodies of students by teachers is related to age in terms of assumptions about the relationship between age and levels of knowledge about the rules of physical comportment in lessons. That is, teachers apply more or less stringent controls on physical movement and social exchange in lessons depending on a relatively arbitrary understanding of how a person in a particular year group is likely to act (and embody) their age. Year 10s can be trusted to stand outside a classroom without lining up, and Year 11s can be permitted to leave a class en masse because it is assumed that their position in the hierarchy of year groups is an indication of particular kinds of embodied capital (i.e. either the ability to carry out these tasks without breaking school rules, or without being ‘silly’ or disruptive). Attempting to impose stringent controls on the physical movement of older students would in turn be unlikely to work (as in the case of Mrs. Garrison’s Year 11s), because students’ own imaginings of their age also incorporate the idea of increasing freedom and independence as they move up the school. As Keisha, a Year 13 student, suggested in relation to watching Sophie teach Year 7: I used to help with Miss Leckford’s lessons sometimes, and I was really shocked when she put up her hand and the whole class just goes quiet! And

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it’s like ‘Oh, OK’ but if she did that to us I’d be like ‘What are you doin’ put your hand down! You know! It’s so weird!’ [laughter]

It is presumed that Year 7s, on the other hand, will not display the kinds of cultural competencies embodied by older students because they are not yet ‘mature’ enough to do so (see, e.g. Sophie’s quote above). Year 7s are therefore inculcated, through repetitive, ritualised activities such as lining up and raising their hands, in the kinds of physical behaviours expected of students in their year group and Key Stage. Much of the time this results in an embodiment of age through the successful adherence of students to these physical controls. At the same time, of course, there are also moments where the idiosyncrasies of day-to-day interactions among teachers, classes and individual students do not neatly fit with these controls, as in the case of Danni above, or in the example of students calling out instead of raising their hands in 7B, or failing to line up quietly before a lesson. Staff and students must sometimes, therefore, negotiate paths between the explicit and implicit age-based rules for embodied social practice in the classroom, and the occasional transgression or modification of these rules. While the physical embodiment of age imaginaries in lessons commonly serves to reinforce the taxonomy of the year group system, then, there are also moments where this taxonomy is troubled and subverted. Let us now move on to consider how ideas of age are similarly reinforced and challenged in the process of teaching and learning and in the content and delivery of the curriculum.

Part II  ge in the Personal Development Curriculum: A Negotiating Ideas About Childhood and Growing Up At the beginning of the school year, detailed reflexive discussions about identity, life in school and processes of ‘growing up’ were an important part of the curriculum for Year 7. Ideas about age and identity were particularly prevalent in the curriculum for Personal Development Curriculum (PDC), both in terms of reinforcing an understanding of

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students’ current position in the social world of secondary school and in mapping out their trajectory through it. PDC was structured in order to complement the broader curriculum for Citizenship. Accordingly, the PDC curriculum for Year 7s included topics such as identity, community, participation, learning skills, bullying, risks to young people, puberty and health, rights and responsibilities, and preparing for the future (i.e. Year 8 and beyond). It was interesting to note that in Year 8, officially on their way into the realm of adolescence, they would be confronted in PDC with such topics as negotiating in relationships, young people and the law, the dangers of smoking and alcohol, body image and other topics considered relevant to students on the early cusp of teenage life.

Ms. Gibson’s Tutor Group In the first PDC or ‘tutor’ session with Ms. Gibson’s Year 7 tutor group, the class was exploring the topics ‘This Is Me’ and ‘What’s School All About?’, which, while aimed partly at allowing students to talk about their identities and to get to know each other, were also designed to establish the importance of seeing their present activities at school as part of the task of preparing for an adult future. In the airy new music room, surrounded by banks of computers and piano keyboards, 7GB sat in groups of five or six around grey circular tables. Meagan—a bobbed, freckle-faced, energetic and outspoken member of the class—was one such student; Lance—tall, slight and somewhat prone to melodrama— was another. On the right of the room sat Toby, a smaller, freckle-faced, ginger-haired boy, and his skinny, easily distracted friend, Steven. Toby was also one of the memorable faces from 7B. On a different table was David, a friendly, intellectually mature student, and perhaps the most academically able boy in the year. As suggested above, David’s precocious intelligence led him to be characterised by a number of his teachers as the afore-mentioned ‘old head on young shoulders’—that is, as a very pleasant but sometimes irksome anomaly within the framework of teaching and learning normally applied to Year 7 students. Having put the title of the lesson on the interactive whiteboard, Ms. Gibson asked the students to talk in groups about themselves and their

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aspirations as a way of getting to know one another better, in this, the turbulent and potentially uncomfortable first week at what she called ‘Big School’. Ms. Gibson, who had been a primary school teacher before coming to Lakefield, addressed the students in a lilting, high-pitched tone. She began by asking the ‘boys and girls’ how they felt they were settling in, and how they were getting used to life in secondary school. A number of students talked about how they felt that they had already become more ‘mature’ than they were at primary school: as Meagan suggested, ‘Like, if I was in P4 (Primary Year 4) or something I would probably like say I was afraid of the dark…but I’m not now’. Other students made similar declarations of having conquered the irrational fears associated with being ‘babyish’ in primary school in order to start their new lives at Lakefield. Toby offered, ‘Before my mum wouldn’t let me ride my bike to school, but I can now, like, if I go with my mates and that’. As hands went up around the room, students made similar statements about new moves towards settling in and growing up—about being more confident about riding to school on a bike, about being more comfortable around older students, knowing the school better—all things commonly associated, it seemed, with settling in well as new Year 7. As with Meagan’s statement, many of these competencies were described as being different to life in primary school. In this lesson, most of 7GB seemed quite confident, on the surface at least, with talking as if primary school was well behind them. Indeed, the students contributing to the discussion seemed to use it as a chance to publicly disassociate themselves from the ‘childish’ world of primary school, identifying instead with their new position as Year 7s. Ms. Gibson moved on from the discussion by asking the students to fill in a worksheet entitled ‘This is Me’, which asked students to describe themselves by filling in boxes. Age was quite literally at the centre of this task. In the centre of the page, under the space for each student’s name, was a space for ‘birthday’; at the top centre of the page was a box entitled ‘when I grow up I want to be…’. Many of the students filled this with the phrase  ‘don’t know’ or with a series of question marks, while others had included answers such as ‘beautician’, ‘footballer’, ‘army’, ‘teacher’, ‘TV’, ‘hairdresser’, ‘rugby player’, ‘wrestler’ and so on. Other boxes

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included strengths and weaknesses, favourite bands and TV shows, favourite subjects and hobbies. Using some of the answers from this sheet, the discussion moved on in the second half of the lesson to discuss ‘What’s School All About?’. Ms. Gibson started by saying, ‘I want you to have a think more about what you’ll be when you grow up’, encouraging the students to think more about the types of careers that they had indicated on their sheets, and to consider the particular skills and qualifications that they might need to achieve in order to get these jobs (according to the generic lesson plan for this PDC session, one of the explicit learning outcomes for the lesson was to ‘Recognise the links between education and the world of work’). A number of the students in the tutor talked quite seriously about their perspectives of secondary school as a means of achieving the qualifications that would lead them, year by year, towards their desired job. Lance, for instance, self-confidently said ‘I always thought school was boring until you realise it’s about how you get jobs and stuff’, to which the more eager members of the class nodded in agreement, adding similar comments. Meanwhile, others were less seriously engaged in the discussion: on the table at the front on the right of the classroom, Leon murmured to Toby, beaming, that he wanted to be a wrestler when he grew up, to which Toby hissed, grinning, ‘then I’m going to beat the shit out of you!’ Just out of earshot of Ms. Gibson, this comment passed undetected within the broader discussion. This lesson provided an early indication that age would emerge both as an undercurrent in classroom interactions and also as a topic in explicit, self-reflexive discussions in lessons about student’s ideas of identity and self—both in the present and projected into the adult future. The topics discussed in this lesson—particularly asking students to project themselves into the economic future by asking them what they want to be when they ‘grow up’—provide clear examples of discourse that frames childhood as a time of becoming, of progress towards adulthood. The students were quick to emphasise the progress that they had made in the short time since leaving primary school, and actively engaged in the ‘grown-up’ future-gazing that the activities require. Indeed, as soon as they arrived at secondary school, they were being prepared to leave it.

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Mr. O’Reilly’s Tutor Lesson Other experiences with 7GB and other Year 7 classes provided further examples of the range of different discussions and articulations of age, as part of identity, taking place in the context of PDC. Several months after the lesson described above, for example, 7GB were having a tutor session with Mr O’Reilly, in which both ideas about age-related rights and responsibilities and about different experiences of childhood were explored. Mr. O’Reilly was leading the session on ‘rights and responsibilities’, which he approached by talking about the rights of children. As the lesson began I sat in the bottom left hand corner of the horseshoe of tables and chairs in Mr. O’Reilly’s classroom, next to Steven. As usual, Steven was excitable and distracted. Mr. O’Reilly quietened the class in order to introduce the theme of the lesson while Steven, finishing a giggling conversation about something on his mobile phone, turned back around to listen. Mr. O’Reilly began by introducing the idea of rights and responsibilities, talking about how certain rights, like the right to education, come with responsibilities (i.e. acting responsibly when at school), and that certain rights and responsibilities increase with age (voting, marriage, driving and so on.). He then asked the class what kinds of rights children should have in order to live a fulfilled and happy life. With prompts from Mr. O’Reilly, some answers included ‘a family’, ‘a home’, ‘food’, ‘toys and stuff at home’ and ‘going to school’—things that students in the class agreed all children should have. Mr. O’Reilly then briefly described the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by comparing the rights the students had suggested with the universal rights that the UNCRC is supposed to legally protect. In order to highlight the point that this was not necessarily always the case in practice, however, and that such rights should not be taken for granted, Mr. O’Reilly continued by putting on a DVD about children’s lives in Africa. In the half-darkness of the room, and against the faint sound of a netball game being played outside, the video focused on the differences between children in Africa and children in Britain, particularly in terms of access to clean water, sanitation, child labour and access to education. Scenes of African children hauling water, playing dusty games of football or attending lessons in sparse, overcrowded classrooms

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were contrasted with scenes of life at school in Britain. When the video was over, the class discussion continued. A number of the students expressed their surprise both at the conditions that the African children were living under and of the fact that the rights that they had previously talked about were not in fact universal or inalienable in practice. In particular they were surprised by the fact that children had to work full-­ time—something that they were certain was only ‘allowed’ after 16, as Lance suggested: Like…the film shows…like I always thought that it wasn’t allowed for children to work before they were 16…because they’re supposed to go to school…but in the film they were working, carrying water and stuff, when they were really young…

Coupled with this was surprise about the idea that children their age in Africa did not go to school. Steven looked at me and murmured, ‘Aw, that’d be well good!’, while still toying with his phone in his bag under the desk. Mr. O’Reilly pointed out that while the idea of not going to school might seem ‘brilliant’, going to school was a lot better than having to do the kind of work that the children in the video were expected to undertake (across the room Sarah, a dark-haired friend of Meagan’s, commented ‘God, I’d much rather be in school than do that work [the heavy labour shown in the video]—even maths!’). Segueing into the plenary of the lesson Mr. O’Reilly pointed out that going to school was in this sense a privilege, not a chore: …So next time you’re moaning to your mum about getting up in the morning to come to school, or you’ve got homework to do, or whatever, you have to remember that in other places there are children who would love to go to school, they would love that opportunity…so you’ve got it quite good, really…

Meanwhile, amidst the slow crescendo of books being slipped into bags in anticipation of the bell, Steven twisted around again, phone in hand, to show it to Jake, a boy with spiky gelled hair two seats away. Both were turning red and guffawing with stifled laughter. When Steven turned

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around to me, sizing up my response to his laughter, I asked him what was so funny. He looked up to see that Mr. O’Reilly wasn’t looking before showing me his phone under the table. A lurid image of the cartoon character Betty Boop, naked, danced back and forth jerkily on the screen. He looked back at me, hissing laughter through his teeth, as the bell went for the end of the lesson. As in the other PDC lesson described above, age—in this case, notions of childhood and children’s rights—was a subject of open, explicit discussion in which some students reflected on the nature of their own experiences of childhood and on the relative difference between their experiences and those of others. While part of the lesson served to reinforce the idea that rights and responsibilities accrue with age, it also served as an opportunity for students to question their perceptions of what it means to be a child of their age (i.e. to recognise a diversity of experiences of childhood, but also to recognise themselves as children) and to view their experiences of childhood in a slightly different way as a result. In this sense, here we can see a very different kind of discourse about childhood taking shape compared with that in Ms. Gibson’s lesson. By introducing the idea of children’s rights, Mr. O’Reilly was exposing the class to a more nuanced vision of childhood than that presented in earlier PDC sessions. At the same time, however, the content and delivery of the lesson also obliged these students to identify themselves as children: in opposition to the ideas of ‘growing up’ put forward in Ms. Gibson’s lesson, 7GB were identified by the teacher as children, and during the course of the lesson acquiesced in this imagining of their age. And yet Steven’s exchanges with other students in the lesson (and with me) about the ‘adult’ content on his mobile phone also provided evidence of an additional undercurrent in the lesson. Simultaneous to learning about the rights and responsibilities that relate to children, and in the company of classmates engaging in imaginings of age along these lines, Steven was involved in an activity that indicated his ability to momentarily sidestep some of the more formalised ideas about childhood and growing up being discussed in PDC. Ironically, viewing and responding with conspiratorial laughter to the kind of adult content that Steven had on his phone would likely be characterised as ‘silly’ or childish by teachers.

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Contesting Imaginings of Age in PDC: Charity Stalls In her ethnography of a primary school in Belfast, Donna Lanclos describes how students are capable of troubling the boundaries between children and adults through their knowing use of ‘rude’ (sexual or violent) language ill-fitting with an ideal construction of the ‘innocent’ child (2003). As Lanclos argues: Children do not passively accept the definitions of ‘child’ that are imposed from without—they are aware of the realities from which adults attempt to shield them, and find their own ways to define the world in which they find themselves…It is crucial to recognise the importance to kids of presenting to adults the ‘expected behaviour’ (that is, that which most closely corresponds with adult pre-conceptions of how Good Children are supposed to behave). (2003: 49)

In the same way that Lanclos’ description highlights the active, performative aspects of children’s negotiations of ‘childhood’ (or age) at school, students at Lakefield (like Steven) were actively engaged during lessons in an ongoing negotiation of different imaginings of age that play on ‘innocent’ imaginings of childhood, but that also stray into the otherwise seemingly ‘profane’ sphere of ‘adulthood’. Other examples of classroom interaction in Year 7 revealed more complex glimpses of how age emerged as a subtext during lesson time, alongside the discourses of age being presented in the formal curriculum. As in Steven’s case, here these undercurrents emerge particularly in relation to media consumption. Several weeks before the lesson described above, in November, 7GB were in the process of putting together ideas for stalls for the Year 7 fair at the end of term. The tutor group had been divided into different groups, each of which would run a stall and select a charity to support. In terms of personal development, Ms. Gibson described the objectives of the project as being to act ‘responsibly’ and ‘independently’ as a ‘working’ group and to adopt a ‘mature’ attitude to the issues that the charities were supporting. In this sense, age imaginaries were an implicit aspect of the lesson in so much as the ‘boys and girls’ were being asked to develop a ‘mature’ and ‘grown-up’ attitude to both the task of organising a stall and

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to the serious issues being addressed by the charities. Ms. Gibson also wanted the Year 7s to show that they were ‘sensible’ enough to work independently in their groups to do research on the charities that they were going to support. Students from each group provided sensible, ‘mature’ suggestions when asked what charities and causes they might support with the funds raised by their stalls—among which animal charities and cancer research were the most popular choices. The exchange began with Meagan’s suggestion of the RSPCA: Ms. Gibson [standing, resting on the front of her desk]: OK then, boys and girls, what kinds of things are you thinking about then, as charities that we’re gonna support? [Meagan puts her hand up eagerly] Ms. Gibson: Meagan [looks at Meagan] Meagan: We could do, like, animals, like, protecting animals… Ms. Gibson: OK, good, like you mean against animal cruelty? Like the RSPCA? Meagan: Yeah… Ms. Gibson: OK, good, good girl, well done. [looking around] Lance. [smiles and looks at Lance, who has his hand up] Lance: We were thinking about Cancer Research and Race for Life? Because both our mums are doing Race for Life… Ms. Gibson: Great! Good boy, well done, that’s a good idea.

Both Meagan and Lance were actively engaged in their exchange with Ms. Gibson in a way that reinforced both the embodied aspects of age for Year 7 as children, seen in this chapter (raised hands for questions, waiting to be asked before answering), and those that implied their ability to provide the ‘sensible’, ‘mature’ responses required of them. For her part, Ms. Gibson praised Meagan and Lance for this and addressed them individually as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ (the nomenclature of childhood), as she did with the rest of the class. After taking sensible suggestions from a few more students, Ms. Gibson left each group to explore their choice of charitable cause by searching for information online during the remainder of the lesson. Both Lance’s group and Henry’s group dutifully began by looking at the main websites for the RSPCA and Cancer Research, respectively, and

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were well ahead in terms of achieving what had been set out by Ms. Gibson as the objectives for the lesson. Others who had initially shown a similarly ‘sensible’ and ‘mature’ approach to the initial discussion, however, were eagerly exploring the more gruesome online content relevant to their chosen causes. Meagan, for example, was now typing ‘abused cats and dogs’ into Google Images with a mix of nervous anticipation and gleeful curiosity. The images that emerged were suitably shocking, producing stifled groans (‘Oh my God! Errrgh! That is so bad!’) and covered mouths from Meagan and the other girls huddled around the computer. As Ms. Gibson came over to investigate the noise, the window was quickly minimised in favour of the same RSPCA homepage being looked at by other groups. At another desk, Stuart, a boy with fuzzy blonde hair, had typed ‘people with cancer’ into Google Images and was nervously giggling and groaning with the boys in his group about the disturbing images of cancer patients that the search had produced. This time, it was my presence that urged Stuart to minimise the screen, with Stuart’s neighbour, Leon, hissing ‘Sir’s coming!’ as I wandered past. Both boys looked at me sheepishly, expecting admonishment for their behaviour from the other adult in the room aside from the teacher. Again, Ms. Gibson was unaware of this use of lesson time. As the lesson continued, at the far end of the classroom Meagan’s group of girls had typed ‘boobs’ into Google Images, and were giggling at the search results, some of which were mildly pornographic. Hearing the girls giggling, but without venturing to see what they were looking at, Ms. Gibson frowned and said ‘Um! Girls, I hope you’re not being childish and silly over there!’ before returning her attention to the group she was working with. Blushing, Meagan minimised the window and again returned to the RSPCA website. When the bell rang to mark the end of the lesson the students were asked to pack up and stand behind their chairs, and then were dismissed table by table. As I followed the class out, the girls previously looking at ‘boobs’ on the internet ambled out of the door in a huddle, murmuring to each other about whose ‘tits’ were biggest, giggling and blushing as they went. Here there was evidence of Year 7s engaged in negotiating different imaginings of age on a number of levels. In their interactions with the teacher the students were complicit in acting like ‘boys and girls’, providing  responses to Ms. Gibson’s questions that were appropriate and

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s­ anctioned within the context of the lesson, but which also displayed their ability to meet the objectives of the lesson in terms of acting in a ‘mature’, ‘grown-up’ and sensible way. Or, to put it another way, they were able to successfully ‘act’ their age according to imaginings of both innocent childhood and nascent, progressing adolescence. At the same time, when left to do the work a number of students were also looking at and talking about images and subject matter that were outside of the boundaries of this particular performance of age—partly in terms of their ‘innocent’ and earnest responses to ‘serious’ subject matter, but also in terms of gaining access to ‘adult’ content online and using ‘adult’ conversation (e.g. the girls’ conversation about ‘tits’) to experiment with imaginings of age not normally associated with or sanctioned for Year 7. In this latter example, issues of gender and sexuality were crucial to how the girls imagined age through ideas of body image. It was revealing to see how in this way nuanced aspects of age imaginaries could be manipulated and negotiated in multiple ways, even within the confines of specific lessons or classroom contexts, as students shifted moment-to-moment between different enactments of age. In this lesson it had been possible for Year 7 pupils to segue quite smoothly from performances of age that were in keeping with Ms. Gibson’s tone and register towards them as children, into interactions with each other that belied a slightly more ‘grown-up’ presentation of self. At the same time it also seemed important for them to attempt to do so without letting Ms. Gibson (or, indeed, me) become aware of this, because to do so would presumably involve sanctions from adults for acting ‘inappropriately’ as children (e.g. the minimising of screens or hushing of conversations with ‘adult’ content in the presence of adults). In each of the above examples from Year 7 PDC, it is possible to identify a number of different discourses of age at work in the classroom. While some are presented in the content of the curriculum itself, imaginings of age also emerge in the exchanges between teachers and students taking place in the delivery of the curriculum. Depending on what is required of them, Year 7 students show that they are capable of presenting representations of self that emphasise either childhood innocence or the markers of progress towards adolescence and adulthood. Among themselves, however, Year 7s are able to re-imagine age in alternate ‘adult’ guises as well by engaging in exchanges that might be deemed ‘rude’ or

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‘inappropriate’ if observed by adults. With these imaginings of age in mind, I want in the next part of this chapter to consider how age is imagined in the context of Year 11 Citizenship. While the students in Citizenship are not concerned about shielding their teacher from their emerging ‘adult’ imaginings of self, they nevertheless reveal multiple imaginings of what the transition from youth to adulthood might entail. Here, the focus shifts from gender to class—issues that I return to in more detail in the conclusion to this chapter.

 hy ‘School Sucks’: Negotiating Contested Age W Imaginaries in Y11 Citizenship School sucks, it’s so gay. I can’t wait to get out of here.

Frank, Year 11

The above quote from Frank, a lively, likeable but notoriously volatile member of the Year 11 Citizenship class, was said in response to a question I asked him about his feelings on the cusp of leaving formal education. Looking away, leaning back on his chair in the back row of the classroom, with one arm reaching idly for the tatty edge of the curtains hanging to his right, Frank adopted a pose that reflected the sentiments of his seemingly recalcitrant and definitive statement. In time, however, I came to understand that Frank’s perspectives on leaving school, and the imaginings of age associated with this transition, were by no means as simple as this statement of defiance had at first suggested. By describing the experiences of Frank and other members of Year 11 Citizenship, Part II of this chapter explores how students navigate age imaginaries on the margins of Lakefield School. Citizenship education was introduced as part of the British National Curriculum in 2002, principally in response to the findings of the Crick Report (QCA 1998), which highlighted the need for Citizenship education as a means to counter the apparent political apathy among young people in Britain. It has in this respect been regarded by some as part of a much longer legacy of moral panics about the nature of the nation’s ‘youth’ as something either to protect or to be protected against (Jones

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and Wallace 1992). By advocating for Citizenship education, the report hoped: to build on and to extend radically to young people the best in existing traditions of community involvement and public service, and to make them individually confident in finding new forms of involvement and action among themselves. There are worrying levels of apathy, ignorance and cynicism about public life. These, unless tackled at every level, could well diminish the hoped-for benefits both of constitutional reform and of the changing nature of the welfare state. (QCA 1998: 7–8)

With this ambitious goal in mind, Citizenship has since become a statutory part of secondary education in Britain as part of broader lessons dedicated to personal and social education (PDC at Lakefield) or as a specific optional GCSE qualification for students aged 14–16. It was in the latter guise that I most frequently observed Citizenship in action at Lakefield. At Lakefield the curriculum for Citizenship presents one of a number of arenas in which students are explicitly presented with the ideal image of ‘young people’, ‘growing up’ and ‘citizenship’ to which they are expected to aspire. To some extent we have already seen this as an element in the PDC curriculum for Year 7 above, but here I focus on Citizenship as a subject unto itself.

Existing on the Margins of the Curriculum It is important to point out that Citizenship, despite its underlying tenets, was not a subject in which students experienced political empowerment at Lakefield. Although an option for GCSE, Citizenship was not actively presented as a subject that students should choose when selecting GCSE options in Year 9. It was instead presented as an alternative option that students would be obliged to take if it was considered that they were not academically equipped, or were too ‘disruptive’, to be included in other GCSE options scheduled at the same time. There were no students in Year 11 who had actually chosen to learn about Citizenship: ironically, in this respect, the first lesson that they had learned about Citizenship was

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that they had no choice but to study it. Year 11 were grouped into Citizenship lessons in this fashion with Mary Garrison, who had been timetabled to take Citizenship as well as Year 11 English and Media Studies (there were no dedicated Citizenship teachers in the school). From the very beginning of term, it was evident that Citizenship was afforded a low status within the school: beyond informal discussions and conversations about course content between the two teachers sharing this Year 11 group, the only real long-term structure within the course was provided by the different sections in the textbook. In practice there was no member of staff in charge of leading the delivery of Citizenship, meaning that Mrs. Garrison had no real support either in terms of lesson content or in terms of administering the class. These shortfalls in the way that the class was organised were reflected in Mrs. Garrison’s general disinterest in teaching Citizenship, not least because she felt that she had been ‘lumped’ with both an unpopular and unfamiliar subject, and an unpopular group of ‘disruptive’ Year 11s. As a de facto Citizenship teacher, hers was a marginal position. For their part, the students in the class were similarly disinterested and unwilling to participate in a lesson that they saw as boring, irrelevant and a waste of time. The context for teaching and learning Citizenship, in this sense, was firmly at odds with the ideal of engagement and participation that underpinned the Citizenship curriculum. Partly because of its somewhat marginal position in the curriculum, attendance of Citizenship lessons was a rather ad hoc affair that was not strictly regulated by Mrs. Garrison. As suggested above, things were also made more confusing at times by the fact that Mrs. Garrison also taught the same Year 11 students for English, ‘Alternative’ (which in theory also incorporated aspects of a vocational course entitled Skill Force) and Media Studies, sometimes in lessons that were back-to-back. Occasionally, this made it quite difficult to discern one lesson from the next, as work from one lesson would sometimes blur into the other. Some members of the Citizenship class were also prone to long-term absences from school in general, making their attendance even less likely. It became very difficult to keep track of which students were expected to be in a lesson— something that added to the general sense of malaise and lack of interest towards lesson content.

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Existing on the Spatial Margins of the School As well as existing on the academic and behavioural backwaters of the school, Citizenship for Year 11 was made even more institutionally obscure by the fact that it did not take place in a single room, but was spread over different classrooms which themselves were normally computer rooms situated on the edges and in the corners of the school site. Keeping track of which of these rooms the class were supposed to be in proved confusing for all those attending the lesson (myself included), making for even less reliable attendance, and a frequent trickle of latecomers who had gone (or who claimed to have gone) to Computer Room 2 instead of Computer Room 4 in error. Of those who did attend regularly, a small group of boys were the most lively and vociferous members of the class, and those with whom I spoke most frequently. Along with Frank, Richard, Stanley, Adrian and Steven were often more than willing to avoid whatever task they had been set in order to talk with me. While they would not, as Steven and Adrian vehemently told me, use the term to define themselves, this group of students would by other students be labelled ‘chavs’, ostensibly because of the way that they were dressed (wearing drawstring backpacks, particular brands such as Ecko and Hush Puppies, and gelling their hair in a particular way) but also because of the class identity and stereotype of anti-social, anti-­ school youth associated with this style and manner of dress. At the time of writing, ‘chav’ remains a term generally used in Britain to refer to working-class people in a derogatory way and is normally synonymous with a crass ‘low culture’ stereotype of brand-focused consumerism, fashion related to sportswear, welfare dependency and anti-social behaviour. More often than not, these five would spend much of lesson time joking and chatting with each other, or, when given the chance, looking up motorbikes, carp fishing or music on the internet (as most Citizenship lessons were taken in computer rooms, there were frequent opportunities for avoiding work by spending time online). Janie was another affable but occasionally acerbic member of the class. For parts of the year Janie was going out with a man in his early twenties (she was 16), and she was more than happy to discuss her relationship with Mrs. Garrison—including stories about sexual exploits (real and fictitious), MMS pictures and

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incoming texts on her phone. Danni, an occasional friend of Janie’s (who was pregnant later in the year), played a similar part in the dynamic of the class but was more likely than Janie to take disruptive behaviour beyond what Mrs. Garrison would permit. Janie and Danni were generally on good terms with the others in the class, but sat separately from the boys. Like Frank and others, Janie and Danni also became less frequent attendees in Citizenship as the year went on.

Negotiations of ‘Youth’ in the Citizenship Curriculum The first page of the Citizenship textbook being used to structure the lessons suggested that citizenship education gives people the knowledge that they need to play a full and active part in your society…Your Citizenship course will help you to understand how you can make your voice heard and change things you don’t like. (Culshaw et al. 2006: 8)

The main aim of the course content was to foster a sense of critical political engagement, principally within the framework of recognised, traditional forms of political activity. The textbook explored roles, rights, responsibilities and the functioning of mainstream politics, encouraging students to engage in school elections, student voice and campaigning for school-based issues. Other topics included young people and the media, human rights and globalisation. Interestingly, only one section of the Citizenship textbook dealt explicitly with the idea that rights, responsibilities and participation in mainstream politics are frequently limited according to chronological age, thereby denying young people access to many aspects of the political system that they were learning about. This, however, was perhaps made evident enough to the students through their experiences on the academic and institutional peripheries of school life. Indeed, the reality of the lessons provided both students and the teacher with ample evidence of the limits to their agency. Citizenship lessons in effect served to inscribe a sense of marginalisation rather than providing an opportunity for engaging agentively in established political processes. This contrast—between the ideal of the engaged ‘young person-as-citizen’

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being presented in the curriculum, and the rather less ideal realities of Year 11’s Citizenship lessons—prevailed throughout the course of the year. If anything, the lessons provided a context in which the students’ primary means of asserting some form of political agency was through a refusal to participate in lessons and through the acting out of an imagining of ‘young person’ (rebellious, anti-school, apathetic) that was opposed to the ‘young person-as-citizen’ ideal.

Negotiating Age in the Day-to-Day Citizenship Lessons The circumstances under which these Year 11 students experienced Citizenship education were, of course, very much the result of the politics within the school and of the difficulties encountered by the teacher in delivering the course successfully without adequate guidance and support; these were not problems intrinsic to the nature of what was being taught. But the adverse conditions under which Year 11 experienced Citizenship education nevertheless served to throw into harsher relief the disparities between the discourses of ‘youth’ and the ideas of ‘citizenship’ that they were expected to learn about and their lived experiences of being young people in school. The kinds of political activity described in the book—contacting a local MP, organising student politics, the model United Nations and so forth—were so far removed from the lives of the students in Citizenship as to make the curriculum for Citizenship itself marginal to their time in lessons. With this in mind, Mrs. Garrison’s own imaginings of age as part of her identity as a teacher, in terms of the limits of her authority as an adult, were also questioned by the nature of the lessons. The frequently unruly and generally disinterested nature of the class meant that she was almost always obliged to spend more time dealing with (or tacitly accepting) ‘disruptive’ behaviour than she was able to focus on the teaching and the learning in the lesson. In order to minimise the amount of confrontation that this might cause during the course of the year Mrs. Garrison and the class came to negotiate a tacit understanding of how much work and how much messing around could be brokered from each lesson, with the main incentives for students doing any work being either the prospect of passing the final exam or of having free time

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at the end of the lesson to ‘play’ on the internet or to ‘chat amongst yourselves’. Brokering an acceptable middle ground between what the lessons were supposed to involve and what Mrs. Garrison might realistically hope to achieve with Year 11 involved the subtle negotiation of an approach to classroom practice that recognised the increasing sense of autonomy that these students were developing as young adults, while also attempting to maintain some degree of order and discipline. Ironically, then, it was through an acceptance of her students’ unwillingness to engage with the Citizenship curriculum that Mrs. Garrison recognised their increasingly ‘adult’ imaginings of self. On a mundane, everyday level, this meant relaxing normative understandings of what kinds of language and what subject matter was suitable for discussion during lesson time. Swearing and sexual language were commonplace, and students would freely discuss aspects of their private lives (going out drinking at the weekend, relationships between students and so on) that might otherwise be considered taboo in the presence of a teacher. With this implicit pact in place, Mrs. Garrison and the members of Year 11 Citizenship developed what was effectively quite a convivial relationship—albeit a rather volatile conviviality that involved not infrequent attempts to push the boundaries of what counted as ‘acceptable’ behaviour. Because of her recognition of their increased autonomy and freedom within her lessons, the students generally considered Mrs. Garrison to be ‘safe’ and to be a ‘good’ teacher because she wasn’t ‘harsh’ with them in ways that they didn’t think they deserved. These were not necessarily compromises that caused Mrs. Garrison any great moral or professional consternation; indeed, she often justified her approach to Year 11 by pointing out that ‘at their age’ it was increasingly unrealistic and counterproductive for teachers to attempt to maintain rules that seemed out of kilter with the experiences of the students at whom they were directed. This was not an opinion shared by all staff members, of course, as was evidenced when Year 11s were taken by Mrs. Banks, a senior female teacher who had retired but continued to cover occasional lessons. Upon hearing Danni use the word ‘fuck’— something that would have frequently gone without notice in Mrs. Garrison’s presence—Mrs. Banks became furious, shouting ‘Danni,

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your language is immature and disgusting!’ The resulting argument escalated until Danni was eventually removed from the classroom for ‘inappropriate’ behaviour. Similarly, it was tacitly understood among Year 11 Citizenship that if the other teacher covering Citizenship—their Year Head, Mrs. Hepburn—was to enter the classroom, mobile phones in particular should be hidden lest the students (and Mrs. Garrison) get in trouble for the infringement. As in the case of the Year 10 girls described below, in Year 11 Citizenship it was necessary for students to remain aware of the different imaginings of age imposed on them by different teachers.

Impending Transitions As the year wore on, most of the students in the class were well aware that their chances of achieving any grade, let alone a passing grade, had been made slim by their lack of academic progress over the past two years. This sentiment was reinforced by the fact that it was increasingly obvious that the school was of a similar opinion: after a year of being moved from one loosely defined Citizenship lesson to another on particular days of the week, it became apparent to these Year 11s that they were unlikely to do much more learning at school. Again, the lack of organisation and structure within the teaching and learning of Citizenship in particular provided an indication of the extent to which certain staff had already passed the point at which they were willing to maintain the illusion of successfully developing these students into the kinds of ‘young adults’ that are described in the school’s ‘vision’ statement. Having failed in this sense to become the ‘young adults’ that the school had set out to make them, and the kinds of young people presented to them in the content, if not the delivery, of the Citizenship curriculum, these Year 11s began to face the increasingly real prospect of life after school with a mix of giddy excitement and raw fear as the year drew to a close. When I asked Frank how he was feeling about leaving school and what he would do, he made the comment already noted above: ‘I can’t fucking wait, man, school sucks, it’s so gay, I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m gonna… I’m gonna get drunk and then wait two years so my probation goes through and I can

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get on the dole!’1 Similar anti-school excitement was voiced by others, but such statements often appeared to be a way of articulating a much more complex ambivalence about the notion of being removed from the familiar, if supposedly negative structures of school life, and making the transition into young adulthood. When Mrs. Garrison asked them, in one of their final lessons, why they were acting up so much and being so horrible to her, Frank finally shouted from next to me, ‘It’s because we’re fucking scared, Miss! Because we don’t know what to do’. Having railed against the structural and ideological definitions, reinforced by the school, of what they should achieve, and how they should behave at this stage in their trajectory towards becoming young adults, they were now becoming increasingly aware of the fact that they were being steered, and steering themselves, towards a different imagining of young adulthood, aspects of which (i.e. paid work and the disappearance of the social, pastoral and academic structures of formal education) would reach them very much sooner than those contemporaries in the higher ability classes destined to remain in education for the sixth form and beyond. The Year Head for Year 11 later told me that Frank had come to her in his last week in tears at the prospect of leaving school. Of course, the class was not homogeneous in its experience of this process of transition, and not everyone was as outwardly antipathetic towards school as was Frank. Others provided somewhat different but equally evocative articulations of their feelings on the cusp of leaving school. For Steven and Adrian, for example, the experience of getting through Year 11 in some ways allowed them to retrospectively imagine their age in a way that fitted with a version of ‘young adulthood’ that the school hoped to nurture—even though they were by no means regarded as ideal young adults by the school establishment. In one particularly quiet Citizenship lesson towards the end of the year, Adrian and Steven started talking about the mixed feelings they had about leaving school. On one hand they were excited about the prospect of going to work and getting paid—for them a discrete marker of becoming more independent and ‘adult’, not least because it meant that they would be able to buy ‘peds’ (mopeds) and become more mobile. At the same time they  Frank was in the first year of a three year probation period after being charged for assault.

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r­egistered a sense of unease both about the prospect of leaving school behind and about the fact that they were about to begin a ‘harder’ stage in their lives: Adrian: They’ve [adults] got a harder life, if you know what I mean Steven: yeah Adrian: Ours is a bit more…relaxed Steven: It’s easy. But you know, they always say ‘it’s gonna be hard!’ Adrian: Basically, until we get to the end of Year 11, then it’s hard! [laughs] Then you go to be one of them [an adult], basically, ‘cause you’re workin’… Patrick: So do you think that’s the point at which it changes? Steven: Definitely … Patrick: And how do you feel about that? [pause] Adrian: Can’t wait…can’t wait to work Steven: Yeah, I can’t wait to work, I did feel a bit worried, but I can’t wait for it now.

They also seemed to register a certain regret at leaving behind those teachers with whom they had developed stronger relationships—teachers like Mrs. Garrison and Mrs. Hepburn. Steven and Adrian’s discussion of the run up to leaving school, and their discussion of developing stronger relationships with teachers, were framed within the context of ‘knuckling down’ and becoming more serious during Year 11, even though they had displayed little enthusiasm for schoolwork during the year and had been equally as ‘disruptive’ as the other members of the class. In this sense they, unlike Frank, seemed at least in part to acquiesce in the imagining of ‘young adulthood’ that the school promoted by re-telling their own narratives in a manner that they recognised as being appropriate for this stage in their development towards adulthood—even though their understanding of ‘knuckling down’ and self-improvement was some distance removed from the ideal notion of forward progress presented to them by the school or in the Citizenship curriculum:

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Steven: also…We feel we can speak to teachers way more now, they…now that they see I’ve been knuckling down… Adrian: We have more in common with Mrs. Garrison, because you know, we see a lot of her, for English, Media, Citizenship… Steven: Yeah we have her for pretty much everything Adrian: We speak to her more Steven: Talk about things – Adrian: …Like that’s the teacher that you’d go to if you wanted to tell her something. Steven: Mrs. Hepburn talks to me way more now. I’ve good a good rep with her now ‘cause I knuckled down this year.

In part such statements expressed a genuine sense of achievement at developing and becoming more ‘adult’ according to the kinds of personal attributes (‘knuckling down’) that were valued in the context of school. At the same time, however, these comments were also being made within the broader context of the marginalisation, apathy and educational failure that characterised Year 11 Citizenship. No matter how much they imagined themselves as ‘knuckling down’, there was little likelihood that it would be enough to alter the course that they were already on. Year 11 Citizenship, then, had very little to do with the Citizenship curriculum; on the contrary, the students in the lessons had established an early aversion to the ideal vision of ‘young adulthood’ presented to them in Citizenship textbook and had spent the rest of the time in lessons experiencing and perpetuating their experience of life at the margins of secondary education. Having fallen through the gaps in the structure of the school, these students outwardly adopted attitudes and behaviour that were not only at odds with the recognised means by which students and staff negotiated and regulated social interaction in the classroom, but that also ran contrary to the ideal notions of youth and citizenship that were presented to them in wider life at school. In the end, the imagining of youth that was presented to them in the reality of Citizenship lessons was much less positive than the ideal that existed in the pages of their textbooks.

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Part III  arrating Ideas about Age in the Classroom: ‘…if N you act like children…’ With these issues in mind, let us now turn finally to consider how performances of age—these physical embodiments and knowing acts of age imagining—intersect with students’ and teachers’ broader narratives about negotiating age as an aspect of interactions in the classroom. The beginning of the academic year provided a number of interesting instances where ‘acting’ age emerged as an aspect of social practice during lessons. Particularly in GCSE classes, it was in the nature of ‘setting the scene’ for the year to come that teachers would impress upon students the importance of behaving well and achieving in the current academic year, as part of the broader scheme of moving forward through the education system. In my first lesson with Marie Coram’s Year 10 English class (also her first lesson with them), for instance, it was only a few minutes before Ms. Coram brought the lesson to a halt, exclaiming, ‘Umm! If you act like children, I’ll treat you like children! Come on…you’re Year 10 now’. She then proceeded to ‘set the scene’ for the two years of GCSE English to come by emphasising the importance of working hard and being responsible now in order to achieve good grades and get better jobs in the not-­ so-­distant future. Similarly, in Mary Garrison’s Year 11 English class, the year to come was presented as a process of preparing for GCSEs and for the jobs or sixth form and college places that students might be able to get with these qualifications. Some students registered their weary awareness of the likelihood of such comments about ‘acting your age’ in lessons at the beginning of the year. As Emily and Hannah in Year 10 put it, Emily: [mock teacher voice] ‘You’re in Year 10 now…!’ Hannah: But they say that every year though, like in Year 7 they’re like ‘You’re in Year 7 now! You shouldn’t behave like that!’ and then in Year 10 they’re still doing it! [laughter]

These kinds of comments in turn encouraged me to explore how teachers and students justified the shifts in their relationships with one another

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relative to ideas of age. My own experience of teaching, and of being a pupil myself at school, suggested that students and teachers would naturally interact differently with one another according to age. Some initial conversations with teachers at Lakefield in part confirmed this assumption; indeed, for many this question seemed so very obvious as to not require an answer, and it proved more difficult than I had at first anticipated to extract more detailed explanations of why it would be that students of different ages would be treated in different ways, and how this worked in practice. Of course, it was not enough to take these assertions at face value simply because they seemed obvious to teachers. The more interesting question was, then, not if, but how and why the relationships between staff and students were differentiated in part according to age.

 aps in the Day: Teachers’ Perspectives of Negotiating G Age in the Classroom Mary Garrison provided an interesting starting point for this discussion by talking about the ‘gaps in the day’ in between lessons where she would mentally compose herself after one lesson and think about how her approach to the next class would be similar or different, depending mainly on their year group and on the particular disposition of the class to be taught. When comparing her interactions with her Year 7 Drama class (7B) and her ‘low ability’ Year 11 classes, she said, I mean, you’ve kind of got to [act in a certain way] in order for the whole thing to function. You couldn’t just go into a class, like I was saying before, and just say ‘hey!’ and act like a teenager—or, well, act like yourself— because it just wouldn’t work for behaviour. They [Year 7] need to know that a teacher is in control; the boundaries are strict and clear, you need a strong display of power. But those lot [Year 11] just wouldn’t buy it and it would be more trouble than it’s worth.

For Mrs. Garrison it was possible to establish a normative, clear-cut teacher-student, child-adult relationship with her Year 7 students because she felt confident that her performance of age—her display of adult/ teacher authority—was something in which the Year 7s would easily acquiesce. However, she also recognises that this only ‘works’ if she

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­ rovides a ‘strong display of power’ as a teacher. Mrs. Garrison suggests p that acting ‘like a teenager—or, well, like yourself ’ would not work because this imagining of age does not confer ‘power’ or ‘control’, and would therefore lead to issues with ‘behaviour’. In contrast, Mrs. Garrison had anticipated the academic and behavioural outcomes for her Year 11 class early on, and had therefore decided to temper her approach to them accordingly. Mrs. Garrison explained to me that she felt as if her ability to discipline these students had already been relinquished; that from the beginning of the year they were already ‘old enough’ to take care of themselves (they would be at work in a matter of months) and would therefore not take her seriously as a figure of authority in this way. In contrast to her strict, authoritarian approach to teaching 7B, with the Year 11s Mrs. Garrison saw the need therefore to be ‘on the level’ because she imagined them as ‘grown up’. The ‘gaps in the day’ were the necessary points of pause—moments of performative caesura—in which she felt that she could shift between different approaches in terms of mediating her own performance of age relative to imaginings of age for her pupils. Others saw the age-related nature of classroom interactions as working on two different levels during lessons. Robert Simpson, a 29-year-old teacher in the school, suggested that while he always tried to treat all students equally and to talk to them ‘as people’ regardless of their position in the age-related hierarchy of the school, there was nevertheless the need to adopt a particular kind of interaction with students when talking to them collectively, as a class within a year group, in lessons. Robert suggested that this collective approach—his way of acting, his tone of voice, the extent to which he would give a class leeway to ‘have a laugh’—was aimed at reaching what he considered to be the ‘middle’ of a particular class in terms of the social, academic and behavioural competencies to be expected of students in a given year. Using the example of Year 7, he explained that teaching to the ‘middle’ of the class involved not only personal assumptions about what kinds of interactions, jokes, banter and so forth would be ‘appropriate’ for an age group, relative to his experiences of teaching other Year 7s and to his own memories of being that age, but also involved an awareness that he would be teaching these students for several years and would therefore need to establish certain rules of classroom interaction that would carry forward into the future. By the time

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they reached Year 10, ideally these students would be well-versed in the implicit politics of social exchanges with him during lesson time, and would accordingly be afforded greater independence in terms of ‘having a laugh’ in the classroom. In this sense he was actively engaged in imagining the age of students not only with respect to their belonging within a particular year group in the present, but also in relation to their projected position in the broader structure of the year group system both in the present and in the future. Robert’s view of his own role in this process was active: he saw himself playing a role in helping students to learn to ‘act their age’ in particular ways through the limits that he placed on behaviour in lessons for students in different year groups. This in turn was reflected in their ability, in later years, to be ‘mature’ enough to be trusted with banter and ‘having a laugh’. Sophie Leckford provided another explanation of how classroom interactions might change according to year group. For her, there was a clear relationship between the progress that students make through the age-­ based structure of the school and the increasingly ‘mature’ nature of her exchanges with students as they came closer to the educational finishing lines of either Year 11 or Year 13: Sophie: with the younger ones…because there’s more of an age gap, you just feel like you have more control and power over them, and you do feel responsible…like I feel more like a mother figure with the younger ones, whereas from Year 10 onwards it feels more like a kind of older sister kind of thing… Patrick: So how about…Year 7s generally, would you consider them different…how do you see them as people? As children? Do they fit into that category? Sophie: Definitely. Definitely as children…I think as you get to like…the older you get in the school…especially from Year 10 onwards, when you start developing a real relationship with your teachers, then I think… [pause]…I think you’re more, sort of, controlling over who you respect… Sophie: Well I think it’s just also the simple fact of age, and growing up, I mean when they get to Year 9, that’s when most of them really start having the first, sort of, romantic relationships and, I think, in a way there’s kind of slightly more of a balance. I mean, you feel so far away from a Year 7 – especially, you know, the sorts of Year 7s that I’m teaching, you know, sort

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of naïve and very protected – but when it gets to Year 9 I think you get closer to the experiences that you both share…it’s like Year 7 – and teacher [stretches her arms out as wide as they will go], Year 8 – teacher [moves hands in slightly] and it goes in and in and in [moving hands closer together] and when they start creating these relationships that you don’t even…begin to think about until you reach a certain age…once they become more and more towards an adult, that’s why you can meet in the middle a bit more. And that’s why I think that relationships get better – that’s why I always prefer teaching the older ones…because I like to talk to them properly – not in a ‘friend’ way, but in the sense that you understand and respect each other. I think with the Year 7s and Year 8s they do – it’s not a respect thing – but they just…kind of succumb to it [adult authority] because that’s what they’ve been taught…I think the…meeting [puts hands together]…is an important thing.

In particular then, Sophie saw a difference in her interactions with students in Key Stage 3 classes, generally speaking, compared to the relationships that she developed with students studying for GCSEs and A-Levels. Commensurate with the different levels of physical control described in Part I, there is a distinction between the ‘power and control’ and ‘responsibility’ that Sophie feels for younger students, contrasted with the ‘real relationships’ that it is possible to have with students in Key Stages 4 and 5. The fact that Sophie explains these ideas in terms of the process of ‘meeting’ and sharing similar experiences and perspectives as students get older demonstrates the importance that notions of age play in her approach to teaching. Gender also emerges here in Sophie’s description of herself ‘as more like a mother figure with the younger ones, whereas from Year 10 onwards it feels more like a kind of older sister kind of thing’. Sophie’s use of these terms to frame her imagining of her own age in relation to students is revealing of the kinds of gender-specific qualities—from responsibility, as a ‘mother figure’, to ‘real relationships’ as a ‘big sister’—that she associates with interactions with students as they move up the school. The comments made by these teachers provide an indication that age was considered to be important by them, in classificatory terms, as a means of differentiating social interactions with students during lesson time. At the same time, however, they also provide evidence of approach-

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ing these distinctions in different ways depending on their own experiences and on particular relationships with certain classes or individuals. What had at first seemed too obvious to discuss—the notion that classroom interactions would vary according to year group—proved in this sense to be a complex combination of negotiating institutional categories alongside the idiosyncrasies of age as figured relationally between teachers and students in specific contexts.

Imagining Age in the Classroom: Students’ Perspectives Reflections from students in different year groups provided further evidence about the age-based differences in classroom interactions with teachers. As in conversations with teaching staff, students confirmed a sense of changing classroom relations as they advanced up the age-based hierarchy of the school, particularly in terms of transitions from Key Stage 3 to GCSEs in Year 10 and from Key Stage 4 into the sixth form.

Narratives from Year 10 Emily, Hannah and Katie, in Year 10, talked to me one lunchtime towards the end of the second term about how it was different being in lessons as a Year 10 compared with being in Year 9. In the relative calm of the Arts block, with the distant din of the playground simmering quietly in the background, we sat in the corner of a classroom to talk about the nature of social interactions in the classroom: Patrick: So it seems like there are different expectations in different situations… Emily: …so like more now they use like GCSEs as an excuse, like say ‘Yes, you need to concentrate, you’ve got GCSEs coming up…!’ [Laughter] Hannah: I mean different teachers obviously have different methods, sometimes it’s like…cause if they can trust you then it’s better…I think now that we’ve moved into Year 10 they’ve become a bit more trusting, like definitely –

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Emily: Yeah because they’ve known us for longer and stuff, so they know who misbehaves more and stuff, and who doesn’t, and you can have a bit more of a joke – Katie: Like with Miss Stone… Hannah: It’s like they kind of let you get away with it a bit more than you used to, it’s like… Hannah: But then again, it’s probably like you don’t realise that as you grow up you’ve got more mature…therefore it probably seemed pretty normal then but it was actually like ‘What?! You freak!’ Patrick: So you’ve noticed that then, that things have changed a bit since you’ve been in Year 10? ALL: Yeah Emily: We’re treated more like an adult… Patrick: Do you reckon? Hannah: And I think that’ll, again, be like even more when we move into 6th form definitely… Patrick: So what counts as being treated like an adult, then? What does that involve? Emily: When the teachers talk to you like a person rather than like a student, Hannah: …and they don’t look down on you more, you know, like if you’re messing about they just tell you to stop it, but they don’t, like, look down on you… Patrick: Do you see a change in that sense not then in how you’re acting but in how teachers act, as in they’re acting less like teachers and more like people themselves? ALL: Yeah – Emily: Yeah, they’re like less disciplinarian…

Interesting comparisons can be drawn between what the Year 10 girls had to say here about the age-based nature of changes in classroom interactions, and the comments made by teachers above. Mr. Simpson made the point, for example, that his approach to students in Year 7 was particularly influenced by an awareness that he needed to establish ground rules that would carry forward into future years when he would have to teach these classes again. In a similar sense Hannah mentions the notion of ‘trust’ as an important factor changing classroom interactions, pointing out that as time goes by (and as students get older)

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teachers are able to trust them and be less ‘disciplinarian’ because they know them better. Connections can also be drawn between what Mr. Simpson says about treating individual students like ‘people’—something that the Year 10 girls recognise as one of the better aspects of moving up the age-based hierarchy of the school and out of the stricter regimens that organise life in Key Stage 3. There is also a recognition that teachers themselves are able to act a version of adult authority that also makes them seem more like ‘people’ and less like ‘teachers’ (in some ways, an inverse description of the process of ‘meeting’ mentioned by Sophie, above). However, Hannah also highlights the fact that different teachers have different approaches to teaching in Year 10, and that while some—Miss Stone, for example—adopt an approach to classroom interactions quite different to that in previous years, for others the difference is not quite as marked. Changes in how age is imagined are in this sense associated with movement through the structure of the school, but it is also recognised that the shifts in relationships are by no means uniform or linear. This means that students are obliged to negotiate different kinds of age imaginaries with each of their teachers, developing relationships based variably on ‘being treated more like an adult’, or ‘being looked down on’. Negotiating these multiple imaginings of age successfully—remembering which teachers will treat you ‘more like an adult’ and which are more ‘disciplinarian’—is crucial to successfully navigating through the school day. Just as Mary Garrison describes ‘gaps in the day’ between lessons when she can pause and shift her approach to teaching relative to the age of the incoming students, pupils must also take advantage of these gaps to realign their own performances of age relative to the approaches of their teachers.

Narratives from Year 12 The girls in Year 10 had suggested that they thought their relationships with teachers during lessons would shift again as they entered the rarefied world of the sixth form, and I was interested to find out if this was the case in the experience of current sixth form students. Partial answers to

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this question were presented when, slightly later in the year, I spoke to a small group of students from Year 12. At first, their impressions of the shift in social interactions from Year 11 to Year 12 were not as drastic as I (or they) had initially anticipated. Aspects of how and what they were taught still seemed too prescriptive relative to the freedom that they had expected as ‘young adults’ in the sixth form. At the same time, however, they also agreed that entering the sixth form had involved new kinds of social interactions during lessons: Patrick: How about…sort of, in terms of the past five months [since the beginning of 6th form]– has that been a…departure in terms of how you experience school? Dominic: Less of a departure than I thought it might be… Patrick: Really? Dominic:…I thought A-Levels would be a lot more…open…but, I mean, there is a syllabus, so…[chuckles] Sean: I think it is…it’s a lot more free than…um, even going back to asking questions and such at GCSE level, because the teachers have a lot more respect for you, and, unfortunately, it is because you’re in 6th form and they see that you’ve got that far… Dominic: Yeah… Sean:…and that’s where the respect is, sort of, borne from…. Patrick: that strikes me as an interesting point because…three months after you’ve finished your GCSE’s, you know, things are different… Dominic: Interactions with teachers has changed a lot, I mean, even if the style of learning – you still have to learn the syllabus, even if it’s a slightly more advanced syllabus you’re still only learning…an exam, but the relationship with the teacher is different, I think… Patrick: Mmm Dominic [to Sean]: Would you agree with that? Sean: Yeah, I’d say that… It’s an odd mix, because when you’re in Year 7, I don’t know, I suppose the conditioning would start that the very start of schooling, so reception or whatever, but at Year 7, it’s still, when you first hit secondary school you get drilled in with this hierarchy and all of that, but you grow up, and the more you’re conditioned the more you begin to ask questions and…challenge it slightly, and that’s, er, I don’t know, that’s a strange mix.

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Dominic’s comments about the prescriptive nature of the curriculum are indicative of the conflict between his imagining of age in the sixth form as a time of independent learning and freedom, and the realities of Year 12, where the limits of ‘the syllabus’ must still be enforced. At the same time, however, Sean’s comments reveal his awareness that the essentially arbitrary shift from Year 11 to Year 12 involved significant shifts in his relationships with teachers. As he suggests, ‘teachers have a lot more respect for you [in sixth form]…and it is because they see you’ve got that far’. It is the change in institutional status, rather than any change in the character of individual students, that drives the change in the relationships between teachers and students. Ironically, Sean suggests that being subjected to the ‘conditioning’ of the school’s hierarchical structure also eventually involves developing the ability to challenge and question the age-based categories by which it is organised. By recognising the ‘conditioning’ that is taking place in younger years (a dawning awareness of what before was ‘taken for granted’), Sean recognises the arbitrary nature of the year group system, but also provides a good example of the kinds of ‘young adults’ that the school is aiming to produce. ‘Growing up’ in this sense involves coming to challenge the very terms by which ‘growing up’ takes place.

Narratives from Year 13 Conversations with students in Year 13 provided further evidence about students’ ideas of how relationships shift with teachers as one moves up the school. Like the girls in Year 10, Keisha, for example, also argued that trust and responsibility were major aspects of being treated differently in the sixth form: Patrick: Is age an important thing that defines who you are? Keisha: …like the way you interact with teachers changes the older you go up, ‘cause like they start, especially in Year 13 in particular they start treating you more like, you know, like university students, so they’ll give you a task, and even though they’re not there, they expect you to do it. So they trust you to do it. And even in like Year 12 if that was the case we’d just talk the whole time, but now we still talk, but we get the work done. That’s a big difference between Year 12 and Year 13.

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Patrick: So that’s a big part of it, then, being given the responsibility to sort of take care of yourself? Keisha: Yeah.

She also suggested that being in Year 13 opened up new levels of intimacy and friendship with teachers, while Tanya emphasised that students’ perspectives of teachers also change over the years: Keisha: but even in Drama, for instance, like, Oh my God! Mr. Norris (the head teacher) walked in on me once giving Miss Leckford a massage, and it’s just like, if I was in Year 11 it would be so much worse [laughter] but now it’s…I don’t know, you interact on like a friend level, broadly speaking – Tanya: – Because we realise that they’re trying to help us. Like in Year 9 & 10 I used to work against the teachers  – I think everyone did really  – because we thought ‘oh they’re just giving me homework because they hate me’ Keisha: I mean there are lessons now, where, like two weeks ago Ms. Botham was like ‘shall we just cancel our lesson now and go for a hot chocolate?’ [laughter] and so we went for a hot chocolate! I mean I think it helps that our class is small, but I mean, would you really think about doing that with some Year 10 students?! You couldn’t pull it off at all!… yeah, you can just have a laugh, but some teachers, they are just strict, you’re just scared of them, you just can’t break that boundary! Tanya: But I think in general when you’re in sixth form you lose that boundary with most teachers.

In particular, Tanya pointed out that the shedding of the formal nomenclature of ‘miss’ or ‘sir’ in the sixth form also allowed students in part to imagine themselves ‘on the level’ with teachers. Keisha continued to describe how this level of familiarity even extended to students inventing and playfully using ‘pet’ names for teachers, even in their presence: Tanya: And that’s another thing about being in the 6th form is that you don’t have to ‘miss’ them [call teachers ‘sir’ or ‘miss’] do you, although actually in Drama we still do call Miss Leckford ‘miss’. But that’s another way to do it, with names. That helps to make the boundaries…

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Keisha: Yeah I find that students from other schools are fine calling our teachers like Sophie or Angela [Miss Botham], but you look at them and go ‘what?! That’s Miss!’ [laughter] But I guess that’s because we know them. It feels weird to just change and call them their names! Tanya: I’ve never done that Keisha: I always call her [Miss Botham] Angela to wind her up! Tanya: You call her ‘Bush Baby’! You wouldn’t get away with that in Year 11! Keisha: Yeah that’s another thing, or I call her ‘babes’. You know I always say babes, and like teachers who you thought were strict, like Miss Rivers, even they’ll let you call them babes. She loves it! Like she was having this Year 9 lesson and we had just finished our exams, and I went in and said ‘oh babes when do you want to see me’, and I was just talking, but the whole class burst out laughing – I hadn’t even realised! And afterwards she out and said ‘you gave my Year 9 class such a shock because you called me babes! They said ‘are you allowed to do that?’ and I had to say that it was only you because you’re special. I didn’t want them to be thinking they could call me babes!’ [laughter] It would be a bit much if all the students starting calling her babes – Miss Babes! [laughter]

Interestingly, they agreed that the process of shifting relationships with teachers at this stage in their educational careers was justified, given that more intimate relations based on responsibility and trust required a ‘maturity level’ lacking in younger students. Tanya explained this with reference to her relationship with Miss Rawlinson, her current tutor. In previous years her own active attempts to ‘wind up’ Miss Rawlinson had put them at odds with one another, but now that she was more ‘mature’, it was possible to approach interactions differently: Patrick: in terms of things like that [different relationships with teachers], do you think it’s justified that you have to tow the line in different years at school? Tanya: I think it is, because you haven’t got the maturity level to deal with it, to get rid of the boundaries – Keisha: The time comes naturally anyway when there’s this change, like, especially from year 11 to Sixth Form…

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Tanya: Yeah, like Miss Rawlinson is my tutor, and like when I was younger we really didn’t get on at all – well, basically I just really wound her up a lot, I knew how to wind her up and it was funny [laughter] – I love to entertain people and I would just deliberately wind her up. But then when we were one-to-one in detention she told me that she liked me  – I thought she hated me and that’s why I wound her up – but she said she liked me because one time she locked herself in the cupboard on her phone because she was so upset and I went to Student Services to get some help, while everyone else just kept running rings around her and she said that showed that I wasn’t as horrible as I make out to be! [laughter] but now she’ll chat to us and stuff. Like talk about relationships and stuff.

Again, here it is possible to see how students are explicitly aware of the changes in status that accompany shifts through the year group hierarchy, particularly in terms of the dramatic shifts that take place between the end of compulsory education in Year 11 and entry into the sixth form. What is particularly revealing about Tanya and Keisha’s comments is the fact that they themselves also rationalise these shifts in terms of age-based shifts in identity that follow the trajectory of the year group hierarchy. That is, they acknowledge that the new kinds of relationships fostered with teachers in Years 12 and 13 are made possible by a change in ‘maturity’ that they seemingly experience after finishing Year 11. Rather than seeing the year group categories of the school as an arbitrary system of age-based organisation, as do the students in year 12 above, instead they use the structure of the year groups to naturalise and make sense of the change in ‘maturity levels’ necessary to engage in intimate, ‘friend-level’ relationships with staff. As Keisha puts it, ‘The time comes naturally anyway when there’s this change, like, especially from year 11 to Sixth Form’. Another key point made by Tanya and Keisha, then, is the fact that this shift in imaginings of age is not only directed by changes in behaviour on the part of teachers. Instead, students are also actively engaged in the process of re-imagining age in order to reconfigure their perceptions of and relationships with staff. Keisha actively re-negotiates the nature of her relationships with some of her teachers in the sixth form by giving them nicknames (‘bush baby’ and ‘babes’) and playfully ‘winding them up’ in a way that would clearly not be acceptable for younger students.

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Even with teachers ‘who you thought were strict’ she is able to negotiate new kinds of relationships predicated on an imagining of age that places them ‘closer’ to one another. Tanya, on the other hand, recognises how in the past she actively positioned herself in conflict to Miss Rawlinson because there was a social value (‘I love entertaining people’) in ‘deliberately winding her up’. While Miss Rawlinson facilitates a change in their relationship, in spite of needing to seek refuge at one point in a store cupboard, it is Tanya who recognises the shift and embraces a new kind of ‘adult’ relationship through which they are able to ‘talk about relationships and stuff’. Gender also emerges here as a key factor determining how these students are able to imagine age in relation to their teachers. The fact that Keisha describes more intimate relationships of trust and mutual respect only with female members of staff is revealing in terms of the ways in which notions like ‘trust’ and ‘mutual’ respect are themselves gendered. That is to say, what counts as ‘trust’ between a female teacher and a female Year 13 students—the former giving the latter a shoulder massage, for example—would likely be interpreted quite differently (or, indeed, as the opposite) if the member of staff were male. What is more, Keisha and Tanya describe the context for more intimate relationships with teachers in terms of ‘talking about relationships and stuff’, drawing on the same kind of gendered images of teachers as does Sophie when describing herself as embodying a ‘big sister’ role. To summarise, then, these kinds of statements, made by both students and teachers, indicate an explicit awareness of the age-based shifts in classroom interactions taking place at Lakefield, and, crucially, suggest that imagining age is an essentially relational process. These age-based shifts appear to be understood both in terms of progression through the year groups and, importantly, in the transition from Key Stage 3 to GCSEs, and on to A-Levels in the sixth form; but at the same time, they also indicate the idiosyncratic nature of how such shifts are interpreted and articulated by different individuals within these broader age-based categories. Gender emerges here as well as a factor in how shifts in imagined age are negotiated in the relationships between teachers and students.

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Conclusions In this chapter I have gathered together a number of different strands of evidence from participant-observation, conversations and interviews in order to develop an idea of how age emerges as an aspect of daily practices in the context of the classroom. The extent of ethnographic data presented here is intended to show how pervasive are performances, narratives and negotiations of age imaginaries in everyday life at Lakefield School. By looking at embodied imaginings of age as an aspect of social practice during lesson time, and at narratives about the age-based differences in classroom interactions for different year groups, this chapter has explored the multiple vantages from which age can be viewed in this context. As suggested in the introduction, the two parts of this chapter have been separated out so that they might be examined in turn, but it is also important to consider how they may be focused together in order to present a complex, multi-layered picture of age. I have argued that age is embodied in the classroom through the particular levels of discipline and control that teachers place over students according to their position in the age-based hierarchy of the school. Frequently, these practices serve to reinforce the taxonomy of age imaginaries underpinning the year group system by affording greater physical freedom to students in lessons as they move up the school. For teachers, relinquishing this physical control is associated with increasing levels of ‘respect’ for students and with a recognition of their growing independence and autonomy. For students, the successful mediation of embodied capital involves learning to ‘act’ one’s age in ways appropriate to one’s year group, as evidenced in the different approaches to lining up, answering questions and packing up after lessons. At the same time, however, I have also highlighted that this physical control is occasionally contested, and it is important to recognise the active, relational role that students play alongside staff in negotiating embodied markers of age in the classroom. While contesting embodied age imaginaries sometimes leads to sanction, as in the case of the boys in 7B, at other times it is possible for students to broker new kinds of agency in the classroom, as seen in the example of Mrs. Garrison’s Year 11 class.

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In the former example, gender emerges as an aspect of both how and why these contestations take place. For the boys in 7B, it is important to show themselves not to be a ‘boff’ or a ‘baby’, and one way of doing this is to subvert the norms of physical behaviour in lessons. This behaviour is in turn deemed ‘inappropriate’, and boys like James suffer the consequences. I have also drawn on a range of data from Years 7 and 11 to explore how age imaginaries are negotiated in the classroom both in the content and delivery of the curriculum, and in marginal contexts where the curriculum itself becomes peripheral to the activities taking place in the classroom. While particular imaginings of age are presented and reinforced in the content of the curriculum, students are also actively engaged in negotiating their own age imaginaries through the lived experience of taking part in lessons. This involves both engaging in and diverging from dominant discourses of age. In Year 7, students are obliged to conceal certain imaginings of age in order to maintain the imaginings of ‘childhood’ and ‘growing up’ that underpin their experiences of PDC. In the case of Year 11 Citizenship, students are engaged in negotiating age imaginaries under conditions where their institutionalised marginalisation significantly limits the extent to which they are willing or able to live up to the ideal (middle-class) vision of ‘youth’ and youth transitions presented to them at school (Reay 2006, 2007). Class-based imaginings of age are key here in determining how these students experience life on the margins of Lakefield. Many of the descriptions from Year 7 point to the fact that interactions and activities during class time help to reinforce ­particular ideas about age—notably in terms of how the content and delivery of the curriculum serve to develop notions of ‘childhood’ and ‘growing up’. Ms. Gibson’s approach to her Year 7 class, for example— calling them ‘boys and girls’, speaking in a higher-pitched voice and so on—reinforces the notion that currently they are children; but simultaneously she engages these ‘children’ in a discussion about the pathways out of childhood. Similarly, Mr. O’Reilly’s PDC lesson presents discourses of age that encouraged the Year 7s to think about themselves as ‘children’, but also develop the kinds of ‘sensible’ and ‘mature’ competencies required to deal with the adult themes that punctuate learning about rights, responsibilities and growing up. At the same time, often in the peripheries of lessons, other glimpses into the practices of Year 7 students

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indicate the multiple, fleeting ways in which students are able to actively negotiate imaginings of age within but also beyond the broader institutional categories that structure their lives at school. At times, these involve brief encounters with ‘adult’ content online or on mobile phones; on other occasions, students engage in identity play involving ‘grown-up’ articulations of gender and sexuality. Key to successfully negotiating imaginings of age that go beyond the notions of childhood and ‘growing up’ presented to them in lessons is the extent to which students are able to conceal these imaginings of age from teachers. As in Lanclos’ example of children’s ‘dual lives’ in school (2003), the Year 7 students here are aware that transgressing the boundaries of the dominant taxonomy of age imaginaries can incur sanctions and disapproval from teachers, and so develop strategies for managing different performances of age accordingly. Citizenship lessons in Year 11 effectively served as a means to occupy students who had been deemed less than ‘able’ and/or too ‘disruptive’ to undertake the other academic options available to them at that time in the school’s schedule of lessons—those students, like Frank, who were most adamant and vociferous about the fact that school ‘sucked’. As a result, the students who were compelled to take Citizenship as a GCSE were exactly the kind of politically apathetic young people that Crick had been concerned about. There were also some of the students in the school who were perhaps least likely to identify with the imaginings of ‘youth’ and ‘citizenship’ presented to them in the Citizenship curriculum, and those who were most willing to find other means of asserting their own sense of age-based identity through the disruption and subversion of lessons. These Year 11 students were also aware of the broader and more complex social context in which their particular imaginings of age were situated. For some, like Frank, this initially appeared to present no issues because he had already begun to construct a notion of young adulthood that was defiantly not in keeping with the ideals presented within the school; he was convinced that school ‘sucked’ and couldn’t wait to ‘get out’. Later, however, Frank also conceded that he was ‘fucking scared’ about the limited prospects facing those unable to conform to the dominant vision of ‘youth’ presented in the school. For others, like Steven and Adrian, the notion of ‘knuckling down’ in Year 11 presented a potential means to asserting, albeit somewhat belatedly, an idea of self closer to that

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sanctioned and made acceptable in school. Underpinning such assertions was an anxiety and tension about the kind of adulthood one might experience if one was unable, or unwilling, to act out one’s age according to a modernist imagining of youthful progress towards stable adult citizenship more commonly valued and sanctioned within the school. In each case, students and staff are engaged in an ongoing process of what, in their own narratives, they describe as balancing discipline, control, authority and respect for one another. This has implications for the negotiation of age imaginaries because from class to class and from teacher to teacher these ideas are configured in various ways depending on the parameters of what is considered to be ‘appropriate’ behaviour for a particular year group. While being ‘treated like an adult’ confers respect on students in some years (e.g. Year 10), ‘acting’ like an adult can at other times be reason for even more stringent physical control (e.g. 7B). Similarly, teachers who treat students ‘like people’ may win their compliance and respect, while those who ‘look down’ on students maintain authority and control at the price of mutual respect. Navigating the ‘gaps in the day’ in order to act one’s age appropriately in different contexts, across multiple configurations of different teachers and students, is a precarious and unpredictable process. In their narratives of life in lessons, teachers engage in discourses of age by recognising the fact that their relationships with students change to reflect that they are making progress towards adulthood; but older students also describe this more simply in terms of being treated like ‘people’ rather than ‘students’ and not being ‘looked down on’. In the case of the Year 13 students described above, it is also clear that teachers are not the only ones shaping their relationships with students. Particularly, as they enter their final years at school, students are able to negotiate ‘friend-level’ relationships with teachers (and especially younger teachers—an issue that I explore in Chap. 6) based on mutual respect and ‘maturity’. It is interesting that older students also draw on the discourses of age underpinning the year group structure in order to make sense of these shifts in their relationships with teachers. Trust and respect emerge again as important motifs in terms of how these relationships are managed during lesson time, as students and teachers attempt to navigate the idiosyncrasies of daily life within the broader age-­ related structure of the school. In relation to trust and respect, in the case

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of Year 13 gender also emerges as a key aspect of how age imaginaries are negotiated with particular teachers. The main finding emerging from this chapter, then, is that staff and students are engaged actively and relationally in the negotiation of multiple age imaginaries in the classroom. While the latter half of Chap. 3 showed how age imaginaries are contested and reined-in through the institutional structure of the school, here we see how staff and students are also engaged in the precarious process of balancing known taxonomies of age—the organising discourses of life at school—with lived experiences that reach beyond these taxonomies. In the delicate balance of power between them, staff and students are obliged to engage in multiple imaginings of age in order to justify and legitimate their positions in relation to one another. In the chapter that follows, I explore the intricacies of how the same balancing act is also carried out in the social lives of young people at school.

References Bourdieu, P. (1991). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. London: Polity Press. Culshaw, C., Clarke, P., Reaich, N., & Wales, J. (Eds.). (2006). Citizenship Today. London: Collins. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Jones, G., & Wallace, C. (1992). Youth, Family, and Citizenship. Buckingham: Open University Press. Lanclos, D. (2003). At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identity in Northern Ireland. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. QCA. (1998). Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (QCA, Ed.). Citizen Advisory Group. Reay, D. (2006). The Zombie Stalking English Schools: Social Class and Educational Inequality. British Journal of Educational Studies, 54(3), 288–307. Reay, D. (2007). Unruly Places: Inner-city Comprehensives, Middle-Class imaginaries and Working-Class Children. Urban Studies Special Issue on The Geography of Education, 44(7), 1191–1203.

5 Learning to Act Your Age in the Playground: Age and the Social Lives of Secondary School Students

Introduction: Growing Up Together, Apart In this chapter, I turn to look at how age is negotiated in the informal social lives of students in the school. To a certain extent I have already begun to explore this through descriptions of the peripheral, informal exchanges that take place on the outskirts of classroom practice, but here we move in to focus in even more detail on this aspect of students’ lives at Lakefield. In Part I of the chapter I consider how age and other aspects of identity are reflected in the way that students position themselves in physical space. Here autobiographical narratives shed light on how students make sense of age as part of their current, shifting sense of self by making comparisons with an idea of themselves located in the past (and the future). Part II then looks at how students negotiate and make sense of their social interactions with students between different year groups, while Part III moves on to explore the relationships between peer groups within different years. As this description develops, a number of important markers of identity emerge in the narratives of students at Lakefield in school. Gender and class—or consumption-based proxies for class—in particular emerge alongside and are intertwined with notions of age as © The Author(s) 2020 P. Alexander, Schooling and Social Identity, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5_5

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key elements in students’ negotiations of social identity. Importantly, I include where relevant in this description the presence of different adults in the informal social lives of students. I do so in order to actively recognise and problematise the false dichotomy that commonly exists in descriptions of the social worlds of adults and children. Even when focusing specifically on the interactions between students, it is crucial that these are placed within a broader social context that illuminates the continuities as well as the boundaries between adult and children’s social worlds. This is particularly important within a school setting where adult authority casts a constant, if flickering, shadow over the activities of students.

Part I  apping the Informal Social Lives of Students M at Lakefield: Formally Recognised Age-Based Social Spaces Before looking at how students actively divide up social space themselves, it is important to recognise the adult constraints placed on informal social interaction. When outside of lessons, at Lakefield students’ time was spent in a number of different areas of the school. As I discussed briefly in Chap. 4, these included the playground, the field (in spring/summer terms), the main hall and the cafeteria, ‘social spaces’ in designated classrooms, the library and spaces used for extra-curricular activities. Students between Years 7 and 11 were not permitted to leave the school site at any time, and were limited in their movements within the site by red lines painted on the ground indicating areas that were ‘out of bounds’. Similarly, for students in Years 7–11 access to most of the school buildings was heavily restricted during lunch and break times. While the broad limits placed on movement according to the ‘out of bounds’ lines were not year group-specific (but did not apply to sixth formers in practice), there were a number of other ways in which the formal age-based institutional order of Lakefield also served to organise

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access to social space. This can be seen partly in the exclusivity of the school’s sixth form centre (open only to Years 12 and 13), but also more generally in the form of ‘social spaces’ that were exclusively allocated to particular years within certain classrooms. Each year group in the school was allocated a particular classroom that would serve as an alternative social space to the playground. Room number 1, for example, next to the main hall, was the social space for Year 10; Year 11 had their social space in room 4, down the corridor, in what was otherwise normally an English classroom. Lunchtime supervisors and teachers on duty policed the exclusivity of these rooms when making their rounds, making sure where possible that only students from a particular year were using designated spaces. Because lunchtime supervisors were normally quite successful in this role, this system of organising space served to reinforce the overarching age-based categories of the school by extending their influence into social space. However, the use of social spaces only affected a relatively small number of students on any given day. Indeed, social spaces were generally unpopular among most students because teachers would sometimes stay in their rooms to work, placing an implicit or explicit limit on the kinds of activities that could take place in these spaces during breaks and lunch. Only on particularly wet or cold days would exclusive, year group-­specific social spaces indoors transform into hubs of bustling social activity. For students in Years 7–11, much more of the social lives of students was lived in the ‘open’ spaces of the playground and other communal areas of the school.

 nderstanding Patterns of Belonging and Difference U in Social Space: An Age-Based Hierarchy? The playground itself can be divided into a number of different areas, including the ‘boardwalk’, a narrow strip close to the entrance of the school; the sports area, in the centre of the school site, and the canopy, also known to some students (and some staff) as ‘the nipple’, located at the far end of the playground. As also discussed briefly in Chap. 3, there is almost no formal distinction at Lakefield in terms of which

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open playground spaces are to be used by which years, despite the fact that students from all years have the same schedule for break and lunch times. The use of sporting equipment—principally table tennis tables in the main hall, and cricket sets in the playground—was the only aspect of life within the playground that was formally organised according to age. Beyond these restrictions, however, in theory students were free to move around and socialise as they wished, and in this sense the playground represented a space that in its lack of formal order was opposed to the strict regimen of lessons, tutor group periods, year assemblies and other formal school activities organised strictly according to age and/or ‘ability’. On an informal level, however, it was possible to see how ‘open’ spaces such as the playground were organised in complex and intricate ways, according to a range of patterns of belonging and difference. On the surface it emerged, perhaps not surprisingly, that different groups of students developed relatively consistent approaches to occupying space during their social time at school, and that the groups to which they belonged were predominantly divided by year group (although some inclusion of students up or down one year within particular groups was also at times acceptable). Year 7 students and other students from Key Stage 3 could be found in the cafeteria, in the sports hall and occasionally in the sports area outside. Year 10 and 11 students occupied specific areas outside in the playground, depending on their social group. The mobility of some Year 11 students (like the male students in Year 11 Citizenship) across the space of the playground appeared to be an indication of their status within the informal hierarchy of the playground: there were limits on where most Year 7s would go in the school during break and lunch, for example, but Year 11 felt free to move about as they wished—even to the extent of breaking school rules and leaving the school site altogether in order to engage in illicit, ‘adult’ activities like smoking. Indeed, while students from Years 7, 8 and (to a lesser extent) 9 were most frequently found either in the relative safety and supervision of the cafeteria and the main hall, students in Years 10

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and 11 were more likely to inhabit strategic spaces in the open expanse of the playground. For their part, the sixth form existed in a social space that was in many ways above and beyond this socio-spatial hierarchy, partly because of the exclusivity of the sixth form centre within school, and partly because of the relatively unbounded limits of the social space that they were able to legitimately access outside of the physical limits of the school site. This system of social grouping therefore seemed to be reflective of a sense of age-based social hierarchy in the school. But there were also indications that this hierarchy was not entirely fixed or inviolate, as evidenced by the precocious movements of groups of ‘bad’ (tough) younger students, like the boys in 7B, and by the social relationships forged between years, as we shall see below. Divisions within year groups were also drawn up according to other more or less fixed subcultural categories of social belonging, with ability groups, ‘chavs’, ‘geeks’ (or ‘boffs’), ‘grungers’, ‘emos’, music-based groups in sixth form, and other less easily categorised friendship groups being distinguished from one another. This group of students were associated with what might be considered a ‘pro-school’ subculture. They were considered to be conscientious students who developed positive relationships with teachers, worked hard in lessons and did well in examinations. While not all of students considered to be ‘geeks’ or ‘boffs’ were actually high achievers academically, they were associated with this label in opposition to other groups of students, primarily those known as the ‘chavs’. ‘Boffs’ in particular were likely to be less ‘popular’ and socially active, while the term ‘geek’ had positive social connotations that overlapped with the category of ‘popular’ students. The label ‘grunger’ was applied in particular to male students with long hair who were interested in heavy guitar music, many of whom were also in the school’s Guitar club. This term relates to the ‘grunge’ genre of American guitar music made popular by bands such as Nirvana in the mid-1990s. Those known as ‘grungers’—particularly female ‘grungers’—were also at times considered to be ‘emos’. At the time of writing, ‘emo’ was a term commonly used in popular discourse to describe young people interested in heavy American guitar music, a particular ‘goth’ style of dressing and the stereotypical tropes of teenage

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‘­emotional’ issues. Emos wore mainly black clothes, clothes with fluorescent colours or clothes with skull motifs. Some had body piercings or dyed hair, and most of the female ‘emos’ wore heavy, dark makeup. Despite the potentially negative social implications of being an ‘emo’, most of the ‘emos’ in the school were considered to be quite well-behaved, well-adjusted students who were popular within their social groups, if not generally in the school. Having said this, some students who were considered to be ‘emos’ were also members of more socially ‘mainstream’ groups, such as the ‘geeks’ and ‘popular’ crowds. In popular discourse, as at Lakefield, most ‘emos’ hail from relatively middle-class, suburban backgrounds. The ‘popular’ crowd consisted mainly of students also associated with the ‘geek’ label. These were generally students who were seen to be well-liked by others and who had high status because they were considered to be physically attractive, academically successful, athletic, musical or a combination of all of these qualities. These divisions seemed to be characterised by more ambivalent relationships less easily defined by a neat sense of hierarchy. The ‘geeks’, ‘popular’ crowd and the ‘emos’ in Year 11, for example, were both in socially strategic positions on the boardwalk, and seemed to have no real need to avoid the surveillance of teachers (indeed, they sat not far from the window of the head teacher’s office) because they were not normally involved in activities that would involve serious sanctions. On the other side of the playground, meanwhile, at the frenetic centre of the school’s social spaces in the sports area of the playground, the group of Year 11s known as the ‘chavs’ (many of whom we encountered in Chap. 5) held a different kind of strategic position because they were simultaneously located in an area of high activity and in relative seclusion from the prying eyes of teachers and lunchtime supervisors. Rather than existing in aggressive opposition, these groups maintained an ambivalent, if somewhat disdainful, distance from one another. Although all in Year 11, these groups were defined by different imaginings of what it meant to be in Year 11, as I shall explore in more detail below. First, however, let us consider in more detail the negotiation of age as part of the relationships between students in different year groups.

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Part II Imagining Age in the Social Relationships Between Year Groups Perspectives from Year 10 One lunchtime in the spring term, I sat down in an empty Drama classroom with Hannah, Emily and Katie in Year 10. I wanted to explore their opinions about how important the year group was in terms of positioning themselves in the social milieu of the school and in distinguishing who they would hang around with. While Hannah didn’t seem to think that age was in the forefront of her mind when she imagined herself, she was however aware that it had a part to play in how she conceptualised her social world at school. Similarly, Emily did not think about herself individually in terms of a year group category, but when thinking or talking about herself in relation to other people at school, the year group loomed large: Patrick: Do you reckon age is an important part of describing who you are? Hannah: Um…when I think of myself I probably don’t think of myself as aged, like, straightaway, but if I think of someone else then I would probably think about their age…like, I dunno…Yeah, I mean the first thing that that you use to talk about some would be like ‘oh, what year are they in?’ Yeah, ‘cause it’s like something that you can relate to, like you can talk about the same things that you’ve been generally doing, like, yeah… … Emily: I don’t think I’d ever label myself with one of those [age categories] but like, us as a year group, I’d probably label us as a year group, I think, like not individually… Hannah: Yeah, like ‘Oh, we’re all Year 10s…’ Emily:…and those are other years…they’re the other ones, the smaller ones, the inferior ones! [laughter]

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These comments led on to a discussion about the significance of the year group interpreted as a social category. Perhaps not surprisingly, they described how it was socially advantageous to align oneself with students in a higher year group, while associating with people in a lower year group was considered a mark of unpopularity—of not being able to make friends one’s own age. Hannah suggested that they ‘looked up’ to people in Year 11 and above, but were also intimidated by them. This changed, however, once they got past the collective identifier of ‘Year 11’ and got to know people as individuals: Patrick: What about people who are older than you in school? [pause] Emily: We sort of look up to them…a bit more… Hannah: Mm…it sort of depends on how well you know them…cause I mean like Karl – Emily: You got with him! [Laughter] Hannah:…and I don’t think of him as a Year 11 as such, and Robin, cause like…I’m friends with them…I think it’s just like, if you don’t know someone you’ll think ‘Oh they’re in that year’ but once you get to know them, it’s like, well maybe…it depends who it is… Emily: When you’re friends with someone, then, like, age doesn’t really matter, you know but when you don’t know them it’s a bit, sort of intimidating, sometimes… Hannah: I think it’s like more accepted for you to be, say like, going out with someone who’s older, or being friends with someone who’s older rather than being friends with people who are younger than you, I don’t know, people are like, people think it’s really awful, like ‘Oh you’re hangin’ out with Year 9s, that is so terrible!’ Hannah: ‘You are sad…!’ [laughter] Emily: Yeah! Hannah: ‘You’re so lame!’ [laughter] Emily: Yeah but if you’re hangin’ round with Year 11 then it’s not as bad… Patrick: Why do you reckon that is? Hannah: Probably because people are like, ‘Do you not have any friends?’ and you’re like ‘Yes you do!’… Emily: You don’t have any older friends so you have to hang around with younger people…

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Hannah: Yeah! Patrick: So it’s obviously worse to hang around with younger people because you’re supposed to be… Katie: Well obviously it’s not really bad, but there are some people who don’t like them and some people who stereotype people and say ‘Why are you hanging round with them’, and that’s the same with anyone I think, but especially with younger people, I don’t know, because some times you can’t understand them… Patrick: Yeah Hannah: So you know like how sometimes people look immature, but you get to know them and they can be, like, more sensible, and maybe people only see the outside… Katie: Yeah, I think it’s the only way it’s accepted to go and hang around with someone younger with you is if they’re like family, or if you’ve known them all their lives, because otherwise people are just like ‘What?’ [laughter] Hannah [agreeing, mimicking]: ‘What?!’

It is interesting in this conversation that while the girls were aware of the powerful distinctions made between students in different year groups, and were aware of their own acquiescence in these distinctions, they were also explicit about the fact that such divisions were arbitrary and that there were occasions—as in the case of Hannah’s friendship with Karl in Year 11—where getting to know someone individually meant seeing beyond the limits of age as imagined according to year groups. And yet, frequently such social interaction between students in different year groups was made difficult by the weight of social impropriety that such friendships imply, especially when involving younger students. This was made even clearer when our conversation shifted to describe romantic relationships between students in other years: Hannah: If you hang around with another year, I mean, it’s like ‘Woah! Whoa, what are you doing!’ [laughter] Emily: Yeah, like if you go out with a Year 9! [laughter] Patrick: So that’s a big deal then, right?

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Emily & Hannah: Yeah! [laughter] Patrick: Would anyone in Year 10 go out with someone in Year 9? Emily: Hannah! [laughter] Hannah: Yeah, but he’s three months younger than me though, so it’s not much of a difference… Patrick: Right, so it’s not much of a difference then… Hannah: Well, yeah, it is… Emily: it just makes it easier… Hannah: …but like if it was someone else doing it I would be like ‘Woah!’… it’s just what you do.

The girls were obviously aware that going out with someone in a lower year was frowned upon, and yet this was still something that Hannah was willing to do—even though she recognised that if it was ‘someone else doing it’ her own reaction would be negative. With this in mind, and in the absence of another means of justifying a relationship with a boy in Year 9, given her own convictions Hannah used a different measure of age—that is, chronological age—as a means to make her relationship make sense. The fact that her boyfriend is only three months younger than her means that Hannah can justify the relationships (‘it’s not much of a difference’) without suggesting, as a rule, that social relations with people in Year 9 are acceptable. Here is an example of how different understandings of age can be used simultaneously, and intertwined with one another, where this approach suits a social purpose. Normally, as Hannah tells us, age as defined by the year group is a means of locating oneself and others in the social milieu of the school. This is the ‘default’ measure of age as an aspect of identity in school, not least because it is ingrained in the institutional categories through which the school is structured. Outside of school, chronological age has more purchase as a marker of identity, and so can also be used to negotiate age imaginaries. As Katie mentioned to me later that same day, ‘I think it’s better when you’re at …um…like outside school clubs, because you don’t tend to ask people…like you ask them their age but you don’t define them in, like [school] years…’ Hannah decided to invoke chronological age as a means to understand her relationship with

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her boyfriend because seeing him first as a Year 9 was less than palatable. It was easier for her to justify her social interaction with him by imagining him as just three months younger, rather than a whole school year behind.

Perspectives from Year 11 Another lunchtime conversation, this time with Sam and Bryan in Year 11, also provided evidence of a similar inter-year romantic liaison, and further evidence of students’ ability to negotiate imaginings of age in order to make sense of relationships with students in other years. Sam described the issues with him going out with a girl two academic years below him in school, but also made his case for why he might want to be with a younger girl: Sam: I mean, it’s like relationships…You’re in Year 11 and whatever, you’re 15 or 16 and you go out with someone who’s 14, like I am, [laughter] Sam: I’m 15 and I’m going out with someone who’s… a year and four months younger than me, but because she’s two years below me, in school years, you know, people might look at it as being a bit funny. I mean, for me, at the end of the day I don’t care what people say, I’m passed caring [laughs] to be honest, but some people might care. It’s all about image… Patrick: because she’s in a different school year as opposed to…chronological age? Sam: Definitely, Bryan: Cause when it’s at school… it’s alright, people see just over a year as bein’ OK…but at school… Sam: Like when you’re older…like my mum and dad, I think they’ve got like six years between them…but if someone was at school, they’d think ‘that’s wrong!’… [pause] Sam: It’s strange…I suppose it’s how people in their minds accept whether or not it’s acceptable…or not. Patrick: So does that go the other way as well? Sam: a girlfriend older than me…now that’s something that people have trouble getting to grips with!

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[laughter] Sam: A girlfriend who’s older…I personally wouldn’t want one, because I think if I had a girlfriend who was 17-18, she’d just wanna…go out and drink. I think that’s what girls in this area – all they want to do is go out and drink…and I don’t like that…going out and getting wasted for no reason every weekend, and that’s probably why I’ve gone for somebody younger, because I know she doesn’t do it and…it’s a lot easier. There’s a lot less stress.

As in Hannah’s case, Sam and Bryan make the point that really there was ‘not a big difference’ between Sam and his girlfriend in terms of chronological age (Bryan reinforces the idea that one chronological year is an acceptable distance in time), but that within the social framework of school two academic years was too much of a gap for many people to accept. In addition to his use of chronological age as a measure of the acceptability of his relationship, Sam also makes sense of his choice to go out with someone younger rather than older by engaging here in other discourses about age in terms of his association with older teenage girls and so-called ‘binge’ drinking. Staying with someone younger, for him, is equated with keeping things ‘easier’ and not engaging in the more complex kinds of ‘adult’ social relationships and activities that he imagined as being part of life in one’s late teens. For Janie, in Year 11, however, having an older boyfriend was desirable for exactly the same reasons that Sam eschewed relationships with older girls—that is, in terms of the opportunities that such a relationship offers for gaining access to ‘adult’ spheres of social life. Indeed, in Janie’s case her romantic life took her well away from the social world of the school, as her boyfriend was 25 years old and in full-time employment. One day in March, towards the end of a fallow, unproductive lesson with Mrs. Garrison, Janie managed to bring her informal social life into the classroom by calling her boyfriend on her mobile phone. As Mrs. Garrison was more relaxed about the use of mobiles in lessons, on this occasion she allowed Janie to carry on the conversation. Janie and her boyfriend were discussing her relationship with another man, Lee, who she would go ‘cruising’ with in his car around nearby towns. She also talked to her boyfriend about mobile phone credit: one of the markers of prestige for having an older boy-

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friend, and justification for being with someone so much her senior, was that he had money to spend on her, giving her, she claimed, 100 pounds in phone credit during the last week and taking her to McDonald’s three times. In their statements about what kinds of relationships were acceptable, and in their justifications about the exceptions to these rules, students in both Year 10 and in Year 11 provided insights into the role of age as an aspect of their informal social lives. Hannah, Emily and Katie in particular provided evidence of the existence of a social hierarchy in which people were located according to their membership within a particular year group, but also pointed out that individual social relationships were mediated in fluid ways that did not always fit neatly with these distinctions. While there were implicit restrictions about socialising with people in other years—particularly, it seemed, for girls going out with boys who were younger, and boys going out with girls who were older—it was also possible to bend these rules by enacting other understandings of age in order to mediate the social sanctions involved. For both Sam and Janie, the decision to become involved with people in other years, or beyond school age in Janie’s case, also involved making choices about the kinds of activities that they wanted to become involved with—activities that were underpinned by ideas about age and growing up. For Sam, this meant avoiding activities like going out and drinking by staying with someone younger; for Janie, an older boyfriend meant money, status and the independence of mobility. As she said about her ‘cruising’ adventures, ‘At least it’s better than just fucking sitting around here in [name of town]. It’s so boring [here]’. Once again, these descriptions highlight the importance of gender as an aspect of how age is imagined in the lives of students.

Age-Based Limits of Social Interaction Other students in Years 11 and 12 also provided glimpses of how they saw themselves in relation to student in other years. For Steven and Adrian in Year 11, ‘some’ Year 10s were considered to be within their social network; people in Year 9 or below, however, were described as being well beyond the pale of their social world. One lunchtime, while

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sitting on a bench by the music block, Adrian and Steven provided the following brief explanation: Patrick: How about people in other years then, I mean do you get on with people in Year 10, or with people in Year 12 or whatever? Steven: Some Year 10s…and that’s about it… Adrian: Yeah Steven: Don’t speak to Year 9s, don’t care about Year 8 or Year 7…some people in Year 10, yeah… Patrick: But in other years not so much? Steven: Nah, don’t know no-one [in other years]! [laughter] Patrick: And you wouldn’t have much cause to talk to them then? Steven: no.

There was a clear understanding between Adrian, Steven and the other members of their friendship group that the years below Year 10, and above Year 11, were simply not on their social radar. When I asked him to plot a visual map of lunchtime activities, for example, Robert had simply left out all years below and above Years 10 and 11 because he claimed he didn’t know them and didn’t know what they did. This was not a neat reflection of the linear model of age-based social hierarchy emerging elsewhere, in so much as the depth of their view of the social world of the school only stretched as far as one year below them. At the same time, however, there were occasions when they admitted that they were aware that younger students looked up to them as Year 11s, to the extent that they were willing, in theory at least, to acquiesce in the notion that as older students they should be setting an example: Adrian: Like, at school, they [teachers] think we’re the ones that should be setting the example… Steven: Oh yeah, I know what you’re on about Adrian: That’s what the teachers see in us to do, is like set an example for the Year 7s and that Steven: yeah and if you did do something wrong and that, or something stupid, then a teacher would say, ‘you should be setting an example’… Patrick: …and would you agree with their understanding of what’s stupid and what’s not? I mean, do you think that the rules are mostly fair…or….?

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Steven: Yeah, they are fair… Adrian:…Some of them are a bit… Steven:…you can’t be silly, because, then everyone would be silly… Adrian: You’ve got to have the rules, so… Steven:…and they do copy, I’ve noticed, they do copy… Adrian: …and like some Year 7s and 8s, what we dress in, they copy! [to Steven] Have you not noticed that? Steven: Yeah, some of them will copy style and that…but it doesn’t bother me… Adrian: Nah, I don’t mind so much…you just look at them and go ‘Oh yeah!’ [laughing] it’s just like how they look up to you and how you dress, and how you act… Steven: There’s one person in Year 10 who used to copy everything I wore. [to Adrian] D’you remember that? He used to copy everything – my shoes, my hoodies… Adrian: He was like your twin!

As in my conversations with Hannah, Emily and Katie, these comments seemed to reconfirm a sense of the traditional, hierarchical relationship between students in different year groups. They were explicitly aware of their position of authority in relation to younger students—in this case in terms of fashion and looks—and accepted that there was a need for older students to set an example within the school. They also indicated the fact that younger students acquiesced in this hierarchical order of things, and were able, in their mimicry of older students’ style, for example, to demonstrate a respect for older students. At the same time, however, they seemed to regard students in Key Stage 3 as being almost socially invisible. Beyond a vague awareness of their presence in the playground, and occasional interactions with younger siblings, there was a sense that students in younger years did not exist in their social world. These two perspectives—at once being aware of their elevated position in relation to younger years, and claims to not knowing or caring anything about younger students—did not, however, appear to be mutually exclusive. It was possible for the boys in Year 11 to simultaneously disregard the existence of students in years below Year 10, and to recognise them, when it made sense to do so, in terms of an established hierarchical order within which Year 11 were at the top. As with students’ ­manipulations

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of the differences between age as defined by year group, and age as defined in chronological years, this was a means to make sense of conflicting aspects of their perspectives about the age-related relationships between students in different years.

Perspectives from the Sixth Form Conversations with students in Years 12 and 13 suggested that an age-­ based social hierarchy also existed in the sixth form—although the manifest differences between the sixth form and the rest of the school allowed at times for more interaction between the years. Talking with Sam, Dominic and Matt at lunchtime allowed me to ask about how what appeared to be a unified social community of sixth formers was in fact divided in important ways between the years. While they were also conscious of the divisions within and across Years 12 and 13, as we shall see below, there was a sense of distance between them and the Year 13s now that they had entered the space of the common room: Matt: I think the popular group in Year 13 weren’t entirely accepting of us when we came up, and so there’s always been a sort of slight bitterness between them…because they didn’t want like anyone getting in on their act, or.. Patrick: yeah Matt: …cause they consider themselves to be top of the common room or whatever…so from that I think that pushed a lot of people into a middle group. Dominic: We got on with that group in Year 11, because they were happy to have us as like…they were six formers and were just Year 11s, you know… Matt: yeah, they were probably being treated in the same way by their Year 13s…I mean I think there should be a big responsibility on Year 13s to welcome new Year 12s. I mean when I started Year 12 I remember there were a few Year 13s who welcomed me, but it’s quite hard for a Year 12 to just go up to a Year 13 when they’ve started and just say… Patrick: So it’s not like, as soon as you’re in 6th form, you’re in the club? Matt: No, it’s totally not that at all…

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Dominic: I think that was the perception, before we started, you know, that we’d be in the common room, it’d be cool… [laughter] Matt: but it’s not like that at all really.

It was interesting to note again in this conversation how discussions about age in terms of year group were also interlaced with comments about the significance of chronological age—in this case, in terms of the broader social significance of being 18 and the distance that this placed between students in Years 12 and 13. The sixth form Christmas pantomime, for example, had been a moment of collaboration and cooperation between the years through which they were able to develop a closer sense of informal social interaction with students in Year 13; and yet, when it came to extending this social interaction beyond the limits of school life chronological age became an issue quite simply because most of those in Year 13 could get into pubs and clubs, and the younger Year 12s could not. These kinds of distinctions, which of course are tied into broader legal frameworks related to imagining age, served to highlight the sense of difference between them: Patrick: So would you say that you think you see the Year 13s as different in terms of…I don’t know… do you see them as…older than you, or is it not really that much of a big deal? Matt: I think it is, because it’s like, because they’re turning 18, and so obviously that’s quite a big…boundary, quite a big stage to reach in your life, and you can do more things, so like if we go out for a meal or whatever, they stay out and go to clubs and stuff, but obviously we’re not…we can’t do that…so in that sense age is quite vital… Patrick: Is that a big deal? After the panto I think it was Joe that invited me to come out with you guys to…what’s it called, The Grove? Matt: The Prince of Wales? That was really nice, because we all just went to the pub and just…and that was when it seemed like one big team…but a lot of the time…especially when, like – Sam’s alright, because he looks… he can get away with being 18, but some of us don’t look so much [older]… so yeah, it’s a boundary; I wish it wasn’t, I wish there was more of a sixth form, completely, and that was it.

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On one level, chronological age was ‘vital’ in establishing a sense of difference in the informal social lives of sixth formers at school, because those who, for reasons of being over- or under-age for drinking (or looking ‘18’), did not spend time together outside of school were less likely to spend time together socialising in school as well. At the same time, however, the boys in Year 12 also recognised that there was more to the chronological age difference between them and Year 13 than the ease with which they could get into a pub. Turning 18 was included as one aspect of a broader social change that they recognised as part of reaching the end of secondary school and moving further through the transition towards adulthood. Rather than seeing 18 as a natural milestone at which students miraculously became more ‘adult’, they instead described the ways in which the legal rights and increased access to ‘adult’ spheres afforded to 18-year-olds instead provided the impetus for acting out or imagining a more ‘adult’ notion of self: Patrick: …and do you feel that when you hit 18 there’s any difference in terms of who you are as a person, I mean is that…? Matt: No Dominic: Adults would like you to believe that, but no! [laughter] Matt: I mean that’s the thing though – how relevant age is to your progression as a person, like we talked about last time…so in some kids it won’t be that important because it’s like how you mature obviously isn’t completely ruled by your age. Just because you’re 18…well, it means you can drink, but there’s still gonna be a hell of a lot of people who drink irresponsibly, not just because they’re 18… … Dominic: But it seems so contrived in some people, you know, they’re like ‘well I’m an adult, I’ll act like this!’ and it’s like a second crisis of identity, like the first one is when you arrive at secondary school and you feel like you’ve got to be like everybody else, just fit into the crowd, and then that’s like overcome when you get to Year 11 or 6th form, but then, yeah, for those people maybe they think ‘yeah well I’m 18 so I better, you know…’

From the other side of the common room, in Year 13, other students confirmed that there was a marked sense of difference between Years 12

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and 13, but for their part the more ‘adult’ characteristics of students in Year 13 were more to do with the increasing seriousness of their studies and the responsibilities that this involved. During a conversation one afternoon in the library, Tanya and Keisha described to me how they felt that, despite being 18, neither considered themselves to be ‘adults’ because they were still at school. At the same time, they saw their year as being much more mature and serious than the Year 12s, who still had the luxury of ‘dossing’: Patrick: So how about in school? Would you define yourselves within a year group…or…? Tanya: Like I think we’re [Year 13] all about at the same level of maturity, we’re 17 or 18, so comin’ up to 18 anyway, but you can tell the difference between Year 13 and Year 12, like earlier just a minute ago they were just play fightin’ in there, whereas…well, not even the boys in our year would do that… Keisha: …they don’t do that anymore. Patrick: So you see a big difference between Year 12 and 13? Both: mmmm [agreeing]. Patrick: When do you think that changes, when do you notice – are people hitting year 13 and thinking…? Keisha: Yeah, I think people also realise that you have to think about university and stuff and you start working a lot harder. Tanya: It’s harder to doss about Patrick: So it’s more to do with work and responsibilities and things? Tanya: yeah, and you realise in Year 13 how much you mess up in Year 12!

Using their own narratives of identity in order to make sense of the differences between Year 12s and Year 13s, both Tanya and Keisha pointed to ‘maturity’ as a marker of difference between them and students in Year 12. Again, this serves as a means for reinforcing the idea of linear hierarchy between the years in terms of a progression towards a more ‘adult’ way of being as one moves up the school. Their social interactions with students in Year 12 are in this sense limited by the assumption, on the one hand, that Year 12s behave less maturely or less ‘adult’ than they, and, on the other—in the view of the Year 12 boys—that this assumption is

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borne out in the restricted access that Year 12 students have to ‘adult’ spheres of social interaction, like pubs and clubs.

Lunchtime Supervisors The above tells us something about the relationships between students within different years in the sixth form. But what about relationships between the sixth form and lower years in the school? As with the boys in Year 11, most of the boys in Year 12 had very little notion of students in lower years existing on their social radar. Dominic, for example, described other years as ‘generic’ groups, with Year 7s, for example, simply existing as an undifferentiated, uniform category in the school. With a few notable exceptions (Matt, for instance, who, like Hannah and Sam, had made the socially precarious step of going out with a girl in Year 11), the only sixth form students who spent extended amounts of time in the playground were those who were paid to do so as lunchtime supervisors (and therefore not strictly speaking ‘social’ time for them). John, a lanky, blonde, curly-haired student in Year 12, was one of five or six students who made up the sixth form contingent of the lunchtime supervision team. Of course, the fact that sixth form students were employed in this capacity suggests another way in which the formal structure of the school imposed in the social space of students’ particular distinctions according to age. By imbuing students in Years 12 and 13 with the power and authority to tell younger students off and report them for breaking school rules, the school was placing these students in the same institutional category as the staff responsible for lunchtime duties. Even if this change in status within the school was only temporary (sixth formers were shunted into the ‘staff’ category for lunchtime, and then pulled back into the student orbit for lessons), the existence of this role provided a further indication of the sense of hierarchy established between students in the sixth form and their counterparts in lower years. At least for those who worked as supervisors, it also reinforced an understanding of their relationship with other years within the formal limits of their post, rather than in the looser terms applied to social relationships.

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L ooking Up, Looking Down: Undermining the Age Hierarchy In conversations with other Year 11 students, another, alternative perspective of the relationships between year groups emerged that complicated the idea of an age-based social hierarchy. In another lunchtime session, this time later in the year towards the end of March, I sat down again with Sam and Bryan. When the conversation moved towards a discussion of the relationships between students in different year groups, I was surprised by Sam’s description of the different ways in which he thought the social hierarchy of the year-group system was being undermined by younger students who lacked a sense of respect for their elders. The group of boys made up primarily from members of 7B were one such group. Despite being in Year 7, this group of boys would move freely around the playground in the same way as would students in Years 10 and 11. Certain members of the group—particularly Jack and Shawn— also had no compunction about getting into aggressive shouting matches with older students. These would normally involve incitements to violence, although there was an implicit understanding that older students would not actually rise to such threats because the Year 7s were simply too small to fight without incurring both severe formal school sanctions and the social disrepute of fighting someone physically smaller or younger than oneself. Using retellings of his own relationships with students in older years when he was younger, Sam narrated the differences between the culture of respect and deference that had characterised his own past, and the current difficulties that he and others experienced with ‘chavs’— or ‘hooded youths’—in the school: Sam: At Lakefield? We’ve got a terrible culture at Lakefield, hell yeah! Our year’s not too bad, but I’d say every year below us… Bryan: they’re getting gradually worse…they’re very aggressive, and cheeky – Sam: definitely, definitely, I’d say we’re one of the last years – cause when we started, for like four, five years, we’ve had, like, a respect for the older generations Bryan: we always respected the year above

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Sam: Yeah, and, you know, chavs – hooded youths – weren’t even a problem then, and it was…we would respect…and if we didn’t, we’d expect punishment, you know! Nowadays, you’ll get people who are 11, 12 coming up to us and abusing us, and yet, we wouldn’t have even imagined doing that! Patrick: What, sort of in the playground and stuff? Sam: Yeah, but we don’t do anything about it, because we’re not that kind of people, and I think that’s what they’re going to grow up to be like. They’re not growing up to be like us at the moment. But they might change, you never know! Bryan: We’re probably one of the last years that’s not… Patrick: So there’s a lot of back and forth between the year groups, like that? Sam: Yeah, it’s worrying… Bryan:…especially when you get some little Year 7 abusing you! And you’re like twice his height and twice his weight! Sam: Yeah [laughter] Sam: You get Year 7s taken into the police station for underage drinking at age 11 or 12, and that’s just insane Bryan:…and you see them smoking outside school as well, like and that’ll be Year 7! Patrick: Really? So you feel like that’s changed a lot since you’ve been here? Sam: Yeah. Patrick: That’s interesting. So you think compared to when you were in Year 7, you were younger, more innocent, kind of thing? Sam: Yeah, you were always looking up to people not down on them, even if I was taller than them, it’s like my brother, he’s older than me, and I’m taller than him, but I’d never look down on him. It’s respect I suppose. Patrick: and that’s become less and less? Sam: Definitely. Without a doubt about it. Patrick: So you think even in the five years that you’ve been here you’ve seen a difference in terms of how, say, a 12 year-old would act? Sam: yeah, definitely Patrick: And do you think that’s got something to do with things more generally, or people in the school…or…? Sam: It depends, I mean the school doesn’t attract people from the best areas, to be honest, I mean, but that’s no excuse. I mean, yeah, area is a big

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influence, but you can’t just act how people expect you to act. Most of the people who come ‘ere – I’d say 50% – are from lone parent families, to be honest. Their dad just walked out, or they live with a step-dad, or whatever – they don’t respect their step-dad, and the step-dad don’t feel like he can’t do anything because he’s not the real father, and then they stand up against their mums and they can’t do anything about it…I think nuclear families have a better chance of raising their children…

These younger students were not only transgressing the order of social statuses in the playground, but were also acting in a way that went against the ‘natural’ physical order of informal social space. As Bryan remarks, it is particularly galling to be ‘abused’ by ‘some Year 7 who is half your height and half your weight’, not least because the Year 11s refuse to respond with physical violence (‘we don’t do anything about it, because we’re not that kind of people’). At the same time, Sam’s metaphor of ‘looking up’ to people, even if you are taller than them, neatly describes the moral framework of respect and deference for ‘older generations’ that for him superseded any kind of physical hierarchy. It was interesting to me in this sense that Sam and Bryan also drew heavily on popular discourses of age—particularly class-inflections notions of youth as ‘chavs’, or ‘hooded youths’—in order to make sense of the state of the school ‘culture’ in the present. In constructing a narrative of his own past in the school, Sam talked nostalgically about his experiences in terms of an implicit age-based code of respect that was inherent and inviolate (‘we would never have imagined doing that [insulting older students]!’). This traditional understanding of the fixity of age as a marker of social status was contrasted with the lawless, criminal, ‘insane’ character of current younger students in the school—or, more specifically, in Sam’s description, of those who came from the ‘50%’ of the school population who were ‘chavs’ or from ‘lone parent families’, a phrase which here seems to be used to describe so-called ‘broken’ homes in which authority and respect for elders (particularly male elders) is lacking. In this way Sam draws on popular discourse about the delinquency of contemporary young people—particularly young ‘chavs’, personified by the phantasmagoric, criminalised stereotype of working-class, ‘hooded youth’—as a means to understand his vision of the school today in contrast with ­imaginings of a traditional, hierarchical social order that existed in the

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past. While Sam’s own mediations of age in relation to his relationship with his younger girlfriend belie a more fluid understanding of how age may be imagined, his vision of the decaying social hierarchy of the school relies instead on a conservative notion of age as a fixed and unchanging facet of social identity. And yet neither Sam nor Bryan recognised any conflict in maintaining these quite different understandings of age at the same time. It was possible for them to imagine age as being both fixed and fluid. In the everyday of social interactions, it was necessary at times to adopt a more flexible understanding of the acceptable limits of age as a marker of belonging and difference in order to accommodate relationships that did not quite fit the rules; but in relation to the broader political discourse underpinning their relationships with students different to themselves—the ‘chavs’—it made more sense to rely on an understanding of age that reinforced the sanctity of an unquestioned ‘respect for older generations’ and demonised those who, as ‘hooded youths’, lacked this age-based moral framework.

Part III  he Lesser of Two Coevals: Class-Based Belonging T and Difference Within Year Groups Within Sam and Bryan’s own year, it was Steven, Adrian, Robert and their friends who were recognised as the ‘chavs’. While it was acknowledged that things weren’t ‘too bad’ in their year, there was nevertheless an element of Year 11 that they associated with this negative perception of contemporary young people. For their part, Steven, Adrian and their friends did not see themselves as ‘chavs’ at all; but they were well aware of the negative connotations of the term and knew that they were ‘looked down on’ by other students in their year for being ‘chavs’. One lunchtime I was sat again with Adrian and Steven, talking about how they perceived the different groups in their year: Patrick: So what kinds of different groups are there? Steven: Emos mostly stand over there [nodding towards the boardwalk]

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Patrick: So they’re known as that name? Adrian: They are known by that name, but we wouldn’t really say that to them, like other people might, be we wouldn’t say that to them… Patrick: What other groups would there be? Steven: Chavs, like us! [laughter] Patrick: Do you reckon that’s what other people call you? Steven: Yeah Patrick: Why do you think that is? Steven: That’s just what they do. All the emos would probably say that, cause they don’t like chavs Adrian: cause they don’t like people who dress differently Steven: They don’t like chavs, they don’t care about anybody else except themselves. I know they don’t. I seen this stuck up girl the other day, like Becky or whatever her name is [Becky was a friend of Sam and Bryan’s], she probably wouldn’t…Robert said something to her  – if I said something she’d probably say ‘Errrgh stay away you Chav!’ or something… Patrick: So what makes a chav then? Steven: I don’t know! Adrian: It’s cause you wear different clothes, like chavs wear, like, Echo1 and stuff, yeah, Steven: What’s so bad about Echo? It’s nice. Adrian: And they [emos] wear stuff like, Steven: Like dark stuff, like skulls and death or something Patrick: So it’s about the way you dress…? Steven: yeah Adrian: yeah and they’ve got long hair, like…down ‘ere, like down the neck Patrick: But you wouldn’t consider yourselves, like you wouldn’t say ‘we’re the chavs’? Both: no, no! … Patrick: So you wouldn’t be too happy about them calling you chavs, then? Steven: They probably say it behind our backs, probably, I don’t know. I never speak to ‘em. Never ever! [laughs] Patrick: Has it always been divided up like that? Steven: Yep. People I don’t know, I don’t speak to ‘em.  At the time of the research, Echo was a popular clothes brand among Steven and his friends.

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On the surface, the difference between ‘chavs’ and the students in the ‘geek’, ‘emo’ or ‘popular’ groups was, then, a matter of fashion and consumption—it was about music tastes, trainers and brands of clothing. Of course, beyond the simple issue of preference for a particular style of dress (in this case really limited to haircuts, shoes, bags and jackets because of the restrictions of school uniform) was the issue of what kinds of associations were made with these markers of collective group identity. For the ‘chavs’, there were obvious negative perceptions associated with wearing certain kinds of branded clothes that were at the time more generally linked in the popular imagination with ‘hoodies’, or ‘hooded youths’ as Sam put it—imaginings that in turn may be associated with negative stereotypes of working-class ‘youth’. Nor was this an association that was limited to the playground. Just as they saw themselves as unfairly discriminated against at school, Steven and Adrian described how they saw themselves as criminalised in other circumstances as well, mainly because of the social stigma attached with how they dressed: Adrian: Like an adult, they would like look at us and think we were hooligans, like we’re gonna cause trouble… Steven: They get scared like if you have a hoodie on. Like a hoodie…person, is like a hoodie person to them, they can’t tell, they don’t know. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain…like one hoodie person could be like…a criminal [laughs] Adrian: Like a criminal wears a hoodie to disguise themselves, and we just wear it for style. Steven: Like it’s not the hoodie, it’s the person… … Steven: I mean, you always see hooligans on the news, and… I wear hoodies…I don’t feel good, cause you see ‘em on the news, and then I always wear hoodies, and then…I’ve been arrested three times, for doin’ nothin’… Patrick: Really? Steven: Yeah Patrick: Just for being out? Adrian: Yep Patrick: So how does that make you feel? Steven: I’ve been arrested three times, and then de-arrested three times… it’s annoying, because then you feel a lot more madder –

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Adrian: You get really angry, and then you do do something, and then… Steven: Yeah, it makes you really angry and you wanna do something, but then you can’t because you’ll get arrested anyway. I really hate it. … Steven: There’s PC Fitz, he’s the worst Adrian: He’s such a dick! Steven: He’ll hit ya, as well, like if you go down then he’ll punch ya.

So there was more to the distinction between the ‘geeks’ and ‘emos’ in Year 11 and the ‘chavs’ than just fashion and consumption choices. The value judgements underpinning these distinctions were much more important than the fashions themselves, leading those considered to be ‘chavs’ to feel victimised and discriminated against, and those among the ‘geeks’ and ‘emos’ to be concerned and/or dismissive about the so-called ‘anti-social’ ‘hooded youths’ with whom they shared their school. Within Year 11 the informal social world of students’ lives were divided according to this somewhat blurry line, in this sense, not only in terms of the local politics of different peer groups in the school, but also on a deeper level according to popular imaginings of ‘troubled’ or ‘troubling’ youth that existed far beyond the school gates. Within the school, these differences were manifested in a range of ways, all of which helped to distinguish the ‘chavs’ from the ‘geeks’ and ‘emos’ in social space. This disjuncture—the rift between these different kinds of Year 11s— could be seen not least in terms of different kinds of respective imaginings that they held for their futures—which were, in turn, at least partly a reflection of their relative experiences of academic ‘success’ and ‘failure’ at school. Sam and Bryan, for example, were both intent on entering the sixth form and college, respectively, and then going to university, and getting jobs: Patrick: So if you think of you now and where you’re going, what’s out there? Sam: A-Levels, uni, then, like a lawyer or a lecturer or something…

Adrian and Steven, on the other hand, were much closer to what they saw as the end of their time as ‘young people’, as we have already seen above:

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Adrian: They’ve [adults] got a harder life, if you know what I mean Steven: yeah Adrian: Ours is a bit more…relaxed Steven: It’s easy. But you know, they always say ‘it’s gonna be hard!’ Adrian: Basically, until we get to the end of Year 11, then it’s hard! [laughs] Then you go to be one of them [an adult], basically, ‘cause you’re workin’… Patrick: So do you think that’s the point at which it changes? Steven: Definitely … Patrick: And how do you feel about that? [pause] Adrian: Can’t wait…can’t wait to work Steven: Yeah, I can’t wait to work, I did feel a bit worried, but I can’t wait for it now.

This was a rift caused not between age categories, in terms of transgressing the boundaries of acceptable social relations, either in terms of chronology or year group; it was, rather, a rift caused in age imaginaries—in how they constructed and gave meaning to different understandings of age and to their relative positions along the long road towards adulthood. Each had a positive sense of their own trajectories towards future prospects and about the best way of getting there (i.e. staying in school, contrasted with leaving school and becoming ‘one of them’ [an adult]), but the consumption- and class-based differences between them formed an important part of the distinction between different peer groups in their year.

 elations Within Year 12: Narratives of Growing R Up Together, Apart Looking back on their time so far at Lakefield, students in Year 12 provided narratives that in many ways confirmed similar levels of division within their own year. When I asked them about how different groups were organised in the school, they described the same kind of distinction, according to academic classes, being important in their early years at the

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school. For them, informal social relations within their year group had been divided as were the year groups in Key Stage 3 in the present—that is, loosely according to groupings of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ability classes: Patrick: Do you see different people marked out by different groups in the school? Matt: …like there’s like quite a big divide in our year group, there’s like three different groups in our year group…I think a lot of it’s governed by what teaching group you’re in…it was in our year anyway…because it’s like ABC, and then DEF and there’s a big divide between them, and like, those two groups didn’t get on really at all. Patrick: So earlier on you pretty much just hang around with people in your teaching group… Matt: Yeah

This pattern of informal social organisation, mapped against Lakefield’s approach to streaming, became less discrete as they entered Years 10 and 11, with smaller groups forming as the system of organising classes became more complex with GCSEs. It was interesting, however, that at the same time they recognised how the way in which social groups were formed still relied to some extent on a relationship between ‘taste’, as they described it, and ‘ability’ or academic positioning in their year: Dominic: …but that’s broken down a bit when you’re in GCSEs, because you’re no longer in…set so strictly…like it’s been mixed around, so people do stuff and mix ability… Patrick: So, would you say that’s kind of a time when people start to be in groups that are…less organised according to ability, or age, or more to do with taste or fashion or whatever? ALL: Yeah Matt: But I think that you find that a lot of the time that how academic you are often governs your tastes, and things anyway… Dominic: Ability and tastes are entirely…I mean there are separate bits, but if you enjoy talking about, sort of, novels and poems and stuff, then you’re going to hang out with people who also like doing that…It seems like there’s a sort of conflict that starts at…as soon people come to school the conflict is between trying to be like other people and trying to be

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y­ ourself and eventually, by the time you get to, like, Year 11, um, being yourself to a certain level wins out  – I mean you always…It always feels  like  people are making concessions in order to be accepted by the group…but still, people’s identities develop more as you go further up the school.

In terms of divisions within their year, the beginning of sixth form was another obvious point of departure, as a substantial number of students—people like Adrian and Steven—had decided instead to move on either to college, to do an apprenticeship or to begin work. There was in this sense a narrowing of the social groups at the beginning of sixth form, not least in the sense that all students studying for A-Levels were on a similar kind of trajectory towards university or work when they reached 18. When talking about the sixth form in the present, the boys contrasted their choice to take this particular path towards adulthood with their now departed contemporaries who, in Year 11, had decided instead to leave school and enter the world of work: Matt: yeah I can’t get my head around that. I mean I’d hate to go to work at 16…because education is like a minor form of dossing! I don’t feel like I’m completely ready to face the real world, there are things that I haven’t figured out yet, I’d like to think about everything, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how the world works, and I don’t think by 16 I know everything! [laughter] I want more time to sort of understand things. I’d say for a lot of people who leave at 16, like… Dominic: …they haven’t got that inquisitive attitude… Matt: No, but also they might be, like going into a life where…like a lot of them are happy to be ignorant, aren’t they? So, like if they leave at 16 and go and work as a builder, then they’re just gonna go and continue their lives, but just go and pick up bricks everyday, and so life doesn’t change that much for them…I suppose if they’re happy to lie to themselves about what’s actually happening around them, then their life’s still quite simple, and so for them I suppose work is just providing an alternative to school… Dominic: Basically, the government has given us this time to think and learn about whatever we like, instead of having to conform to this big machine, this big economic machine where we have to go out everyday

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and do something that you don’t necessarily want to do in order to carry on living.

Here both Dominic and Matt seem to make sense of their decision to stay in school by seeing it as an opportunity to extend the period of time of ‘youth’ before they would have to enter the ‘real world’ of adults and ‘conform to this big machine’ (i.e. work). Matt makes sense of his decision to study for A-Levels in terms of still needing ‘more time to sort of understand things’; he also considers it a ‘minor form of dossing’, a caesura before the serious business of growing up really begins. Dominic, for his part, explains how they have been ‘given time’ by the government to expand their minds and experience a kind of independence of thought before being subjected to the confines of adult working life. In each case these final years of their time at school are presented in a positive light, in contrast to their understanding of why other students—the students with whom they were not socially affiliated in Year 11—might decide to move on from school at 16 instead of remaining in the sixth form. Both Matt and Dominic associate such a trajectory towards adulthood with ignorance, simplicity and narrow horizons—imaginings of young adulthood that are starkly opposed to the relatively positive descriptions of leaving school provided by Adrian and Steven above.

 hange and Continuity: Negotiating Age and Social C Relations Online What, we might ask, has changed in these practices and perspectives since 2008? A clear shift in the social relations between young people since 2008 is the profound shift towards social life online. This is reflected in contemporary concerns about children’s increasing access to ‘adult’ c­ ontent online, mental health and wellbeing issues (exemplified by the Instagram-related suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell in 2018), and the rise of online bullying, harassment and trolling. By 2008, of course, social media was already a vital part of social interaction between young people: Bebo and Facebook were already important parts of social life for teenagers and young adults at Lakefield. However, the teenagers of 2008 did not have

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access to a 4- or 5G network or to the smartphone technology that has since allowed mobile-based social media apps to infiltrate the everyday of social life in the present. As a result, at the time of conducting the research, platforms such as YouTube were far less significant as a means of performing and projecting social identity online. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have since take their places as staple contexts for negotiating everyday ideas about social life, and therefore also about age as well. In scope and scale, then, social media are much more important now in the negotiation of age imaginaries than they were ten years ago. Social media has allowed for the convergence of virtual and ‘real’ social worlds, opening up new opportunities for conjuring age in increasingly imaginative ways. Virtual spaces offer the opportunity for imagining, performing and narrating age beyond the limits of age as a quality limited in its expression by its embodiment. What’s more, imaging technology and so-called ‘filter culture’ on apps such as Snapchat and Instagram afford the convergence of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ representations of self that expand how age may be imagined online and concurrently in real life. This suggests a hyper-reality of age imaginaries (Baudrillard 1994)—a mediated negotiation of how age is experienced that makes it extremely difficult to disentangle representations of age (e.g. ‘adult’ or sexualised representations of self online) from an experience of age that is somehow more ‘real’ (e.g. an ‘essence’ or pure experience of childhood free from mediated discourses of age). Such a shift lends further weight to the picture of age imaginaries emerging at Lakefield School in 2008. The proliferation of smartphones and app-based social media make for ever-more frequent and creative means of articulating complex and over-lapping imaginings of age among children and young people. While the nature of the online interaction has shifted significantly, in some ways its principle function in relation to age remains very much the same in that it facilitates complex, multi-layered age imaginaries. There was clear evidence of negotiations of age online already taking place at Lakefield, albeit in a more limited way. Phones of any kind were banned in the school, limiting their use to negotiate social relations between students. The school also implemented a severe firewall for all school computers, meaning sites like Facebook, Myspace and even Gmail were

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blocked. Students found inventive ways to interact through social media in spite of these limitations. School email accounts, for example, were co-opted as an alternative to MSN Messenger, a popular messaging platform at the time. In most cases, interactions through emails seemed to reinforce rather than undermine a sense of coherent age-based social identity thin the year group. Students were much more likely to sending surreptitious email messages to each other within the same computer room and in the same teaching groups than they were use this as a way to contact persons in the distant reaches of the years below or above. Instead of interacting on Bebo or Facebook, some students found their way onto other fledgling social media sites not year on the school’s radar for blocking. One such platform was Hi-5. Unlike other age-specific platforms, such as Bebo, Hi-5 was entirely open, meaning that ironically the school’s firewall prohibited ‘age-appropriate’ social networking while driving students towards online contexts that would allow interaction with other persons of any age. On some occasions this certainly allowed young people to interact with adults located all over the world while they were in school. Such interactions represented a clear, early indication of the power of social media to break down traditional imaginings of age-based barriers to social interaction. Popular concern about online grooming was already well established at the time and sinister interactions between young people and adults were a legitimate concern on platforms like Hi-5. An archetype of this concern was the fear of predatory adults performing age online as young people or children in order to groom their juvenile targets. Interesting, at Lakefield young people also used Hi-5 to imagine age in different ways. Some girls, for example, posted images of themselves attempting to look ‘older’, wearing makeup or posing, while also registering their age as slightly older than they were. Others were much more experimental still: Janie, for example, on a number of occasions laughed to me about impersonating an older man while online (as she once chuckled, ‘Last night I was Steve, 42, and I had two kids!’). Across these cases, it is interesting to note how means of digital communication in schools (such as email) did not trouble the established age-­ based order of social life. External platforms similarly did not undermine the primacy of the year group as a locus for socialisation while in school;

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but like other out-of-school contexts, social media like Hi-5 offered a means for more unconventional interactions with adults. In the intervening years, the social lives of young people have been radically changed by social media and smartphone technology: now more than ever before, young people bring the social networks of their school lives home with them, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It is telling of the enduring power of the age-based hierarchies written into life at school that this marked shift in social life for young people does not seem to have brought with it a breaking down of traditional categories of age-­ organised social interaction, or of difference in social groups based on class (North et al. 2008; Pew Research Centre 2018). The narratives presented above clearly suggest that gender and class, alongside age, were of profound importance in defining the social lives of young people at Lakefield.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have explored the informal social world of students at Lakefield school and, in so doing, have considered the different imaginings of age that are mediated and negotiated in the organisation of students’ social lives. The descriptions of students’ lives above point to the fact that age is indeed an important aspect of the informal lives of students at Lakefield. The structure of the year group system provides an important and powerful framework for organising age-based social relations, and there are significant restrictions placed on the acceptability of interactions between students in different years. However, we have also seen that age is not simply figured according to one set of values that exist statically and unchanging, as does the formal institutional year group structure of the school. Instead, students develop active means of negotiating multiple imaginings of age in order to make sense of their ongoing, developing social relationships with other people in the school. Potentially contradictory imaginings of age are made to make sense in this way as students—like Hannah, Sam and Matt—resort to other, parallel notions of age (e.g. chronological age) in order to side-step or circumvent these rules.

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The first part of the chapter suggests that the primacy of the year group in students’ social lives also involves the physical embodiment of age in terms of the ability of older students to dominate particular spaces in the school and to control, in this sense, the movements of younger students as well. At the same time, such physical and spatial embodiments of age do not necessarily always respect institutional categories of age according to year group, as can be seen in the case of the boys from 7B, described above. The notion of a hierarchy of age-related identities is important, then, not only as a means of understanding what students consider to be the ‘normal’ social order of things, but also as an ideal, imagined measure of age-based identity against which to gauge the messier realities that sometimes exist in the relationships between students in different year groups. Sam’s lament about how traditional relationships of respect and reverence between students in different years have been undermined draws on these discourses in order to make sense of what he sees as a reversal of the ‘natural’, modern order of the school. It is also important to recognise that other imaginings of age are also frequently at work in the playground—some of which transcend the divisions between year groups, and many of which divide up year groups internally. These categories can be perceived through observations of how students informally organise themselves in school space, but they are also present as structuring forces in the narratives of identity that students develop to make sense of their position in trajectories through childhood and youth, towards adulthood. Age and other categories of identity— principally gender and consumption-based proxies for class—are not only embodied physically in the appearance of students or reflected in their use of social space in the school, but are also enacted and negotiated in multiple ways through the fragmented narratives of self that students build together in the day-to-day of their social lives. Crucially, the age imaginaries that students draw upon when weaving these narratives are not used homogenously, but are instead employed contextually, in different ways, in order to shape particular notions of self and others. In their discussions of ‘chavs’ and ‘hooded youths’, Sam and Bryan draw on discourses of age that place them in opposition to other students in their year, and in other years in the school, who they see as embodying a different (and less favourable) kind of ‘youth’ to their own. These age imagi-

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naries underpin divisions between peer groups within years, just as the categories of the year group system and, less frequently, chronological age, are also enacted to establish notions of belonging and difference across the years. For the boys in Year 12, their narratives of growing up through the school are also divided into different kinds of ‘youths’. As in other school ethnographies that highlight the inherent class-based divisions in English comprehensive schools (Lacey 1970; Willis 1977; Mac an Ghaill 1994) in this case the notion of ‘ability’ and the system of setting and streaming at Lakefield serve as a means for articulating and making sense of different imaginings of age. In each case, these different negotiations of age are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but instead overlap and interweave with one another in complex ways. The main finding emerging from this chapter, then, is that known taxonomies of age imaginaries have a powerful influence on the informal social lives of students, in terms of the enduring structure of the year group system and its underpinning ideologies; in terms of discourses of gender and age; and in terms of discourse that connects class and consumption to particular imaginings of ‘troubled’ or ‘troubling’ youth. Students engage with these discourses, and in so doing are complicit in reproducing ideas about the fixed, linear nature of age as an aspect of self-­ making in modern society. But they also imagine age in novel, complex ways relative to their own lived experiences. By interlacing these different threads—these different fibres in the tapestries of their social lives—students are able to make sense, in small ways, of the social process of growing up together, apart, in school.

References Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra & Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lacey, C. (1970). Hightown Grammar: The School as a Social System. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham: Open University Press.

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North, S., Snyder, I., & Bulfin, S. (2008). Digital Tastes: Social Class and Young People’s Technology Use. Information Communication and Society, 11(7), 895–911. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180802109006. Pew Research Centre. (2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/ teens-social-media-technology-2018/. Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House.

6 Learning to Act Your Age in the Staffroom: Age Imaginaries in the Lives of ‘Younger Teachers’

Introduction In this final ethnographic chapter, I concentrate on the ways in which age is imagined among the staff at Lakefield School. Focusing primarily on chronologically younger teachers, I describe how imaginings of age play a part both in the negotiation of social relations between staff and in teachers’ perceptions of their relationships with students. In Part I of the chapter I establish how age is imagined between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ members of staff—how younger teachers learn to ‘act’ their age in relation to older teachers. In Part II, I move on to consider how age is imagined among the younger teachers in the school. This involves exploring the experiences of different younger teachers attempting to negotiate age imaginaries that are commensurate with what it means to be a ‘younger teacher’ in the school. In Part III of the chapter I then move on to consider how chronologically younger teachers in particular negotiate imaginings of age in their interactions with students. Here I continue to develop the argument that age imaginaries are an important aspect of identity for members of staff at Lakefield because teachers are engaged in

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reconfiguring age as part of their identities not only in relation to pupils but also in relation to other staff members and to the broader social and cultural landscapes in which their lives are situated. To lend some balance to these accounts, I also consider students’ perceptions of age as a factor in how they interact with these younger teachers. I conclude by returning to the argument that age imaginaries are an important but under-­ researched aspect of the experiences of teachers at school, particularly for chronologically younger members of staff beginning their careers. Here again, issues of ‘respect’ and ‘authority’ emerge in the narratives and performances of age put forward by younger teachers. Gender is also highlighted as an important element of how ‘younger teachers’ imagine age.

Part I: Uncertain Adulthoods Let us begin by briefly returning to how the category of ‘adulthood’ is framed in contemporary society. As in our discussion of childhood and youth in Chap. 1, it is my proposition that contemporary adulthood is an age-based category of self-making characterised by the tension between traditional notions of certainty, fixity and completeness, on one hand, and, on the other, by the same uncertainty and instability that is traditionally associated with youth. The age-based hierarchy of schooling privileges the former framing of adulthood, building on a genealogical model of how knowledge is transmitted and status gained (Ingold 2017): adults have grown to be wise; they should be respected inherently as such, and should be obeyed by their youngers. However, the lived experiences of teachers, and particularly younger teachers, seem to offer a more complex picture characterised by uncertainty. As suggested in Chap. 1, traditional psychological and sociological research on youth transitions has regarded as relatively static the stages of the life course through which young people travel on the journey to adulthood (Hall 1904; Parsons 1954; Furlong and Cartmel 1997). In more recent years, literature on youth transitions has challenged this linear approach, particularly in relation to the complex and individualised ways in which the social identities of young people are constructed during early adulthood and beyond (Woodman and Wyn 2015; Beck 1992). A contemporary shift away

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from the ‘traditional’ (but also historically anomalous) twentieth-century pathway to adulthood—via formal education, permanent employment, marriage, starting a family and owning property—has troubled the categories of the life course that once gave structure to ideas about youth transitions. In late modern Western society, transitions to adulthood may be characterised instead by an overlapping of qualities associated with ‘adult’ and ‘youth’ identities—a mercurial sense of temporality that as yet remains to be fully theorised in relation to personhood and social identity. This may be framed as an enduring adolescence that extends into life beyond the teenage years (Cote 2000), or as an ‘emerging adulthood’ that takes many years of challenge and experimentation before a concretely ‘adult’ sense of self emerges (Arnett 2004). Others describe the ‘yo-yo’ effect of transitions that involve shifting from more- to less-‘adult’ roles, and back again (Walther et al. 2006)—a notion that is particularly pertinent for young teachers who may do so daily. Lee (2001) points principally to the shifts in the social and economic conditions of late modernity when characterising the current ‘age of uncertainty’ for adults. Lee argues that contemporary adults can not necessarily expect to follow uninterrupted, linear career paths or experience traditional, unchanging family structures as did previous generations (in theory, at least). This also implies that the transition to adulthood itself is neither fixed nor easily navigated. Instead, transitions to adulthood have become extended, changeable and uncertain in their nature and form, to the point where the very concepts of ‘transition’ and ‘generation’ are perhaps better understood as idiosyncratic rather than universal categories through which age is made sensible (Woodman and Wyn 2015; Alexander et al. 2019). Like young people, for example, adults also actively participate in patterns of consumption, and beyond the legal restrictions on certain practices of consumption (watching ‘18’ rated films, e.g.) it is arguable that there is today no clearly defined line that distinguishes ‘adult’ spheres of consumption from those of ‘young’ people—not least in the context of converging, deregulated digital media. Indeed, it is possible to argue that ‘youth culture’ itself or at least the markers that are traditionally associated with this particular age imaginary are available to and consumed by people of any age (Lee 2001: 8). It is important that this conceptualisation of the uncertainty of adulthood is also i­ ncorporated

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into an understanding of how age is configured and negotiated in the day-to-day life at school. Jeffrey Arnett provides an interesting and more explicitly defined conceptual frame for thinking about how constructions of early adulthood have changed in recent decades, particularly within developed, complex contemporary societies. ‘Emerging adulthood’ is the term Arnett uses to define a period of uncertainty, exploration and opportunity that takes place roughly between the late teens and late twenties (2004). As Arnett puts it, ‘(y)oung people of the past were constricted in a variety of ways, from gender roles to economics, which prevented them from using their late teens and early twenties for exploration. In contrast, today’s emerging adults have unprecedented freedom’ (2004: 7). For many younger adults (like the younger teachers described below), recent social and economic changes in societies like Britain have delayed entry into the social roles and relationships traditionally associated with ‘adult’ identity. According to Arnett, these changes allow ‘emerging adults’ a greater amount of time to explore a more diverse range of experiences before entering into more stable circumstances. But this period is also uncertain and unanchored; ‘emerging adults’ must negotiate and renegotiate their identities in relation to multiple social positions. While Arnett’s notion of emerging adulthood still relies on the fundamentally problematic notion of linear progression through discrete points of transition towards stability or ‘emergence’ as part of the process of social and psychological development towards adulthood, the notion of shifting boundaries between the frayed edges of ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ is certainly a useful one. As neither an extended adolescence nor a young adulthood, emerging adulthood defines a distinct, novel and uncertain imagining of age that obliges us to question the fixity of ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ as social categories. Whatever the trajectory, it is clear that contemporary transitions into early adulthood are now increasingly complex. This is not least because in the present they occur in a time of considerable political and economic uncertainty, making identities-in-transition even more precarious. As suggested in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3, it is noteworthy that the age-based hierarchy of school life—and therefore of professional life for teachers—remains largely unchanged in the face of contemporary conditions of uncertainty and fluidity. In what Baumann (2000) has described as ­‘liquid’ modernity, the age hierarchy of schools remains defiantly solid, and this has profound implications for younger teachers who must negotiate professional and age-based notions of self accordingly.

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School ethnographies often (and quite rightly) portray school life as a time of age-based self-making and transformation for young people—as a principal setting in the turbulent saga of ‘coming of age’. But it is seldom that the experiences of teachers are included as part of this same continuum of ongoing shifts in age-based identity. While research into the lives of teachers has explored the significance of age or the ‘life cycle’ for teacher identity, accounts that link the age-related practices of self-­ making for both students and staff in school as part of the same relational process—those who focus on how the experience of teaching provides a context for various imaginings of age—are notable in the literature by their absence. Some school ethnographies tend to underplay the presence of adults as part of the ‘social worlds’ that schools represent. As Forsey suggests (2000), it is a shortcoming of some school ethnographies that portrayals of teachers suffer in depth because, in an attempt to provide positive representations of student participants, ethnographers are at times tempted to paint teachers as ‘the baddies’. Or, quite simply, school ethnographers’ interests in the lives of students mean that teachers are pushed to the margins of ethnographic accounts. Accounts of teacher’s lives at school have been given detailed treatment by researchers interested in teacher identity (see Huberman et al. 1993), but there appears to be little dialogue between such accounts and those focusing on the lives of students. In terms of the study of age in school settings, ignoring or downplaying the presence of adults in the social world of schools has created a significant gap in research, not least because the meanings implicit in the category of ‘adulthood’ are, like ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, unstable and prone to change and flux. Moreover, if age is to be considered as an aspect of identity that is imagined and negotiated relationally, then it is imperative that adults (and adulthood) are included as part of how this process takes shape in school for young people. These issues are particularly important to consider when thinking about the age imaginaries of younger staff members in the first few years of their teaching careers, and still making ‘transitions’ into adulthood through the uncertain terrain at the end of youth. Huberman et  al. (1993) have pointed to the significance of age in this respect as an aspect of negotiating processes of self-making in the careers of teachers—and particularly for younger teachers. After all, if it is possible to question the

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fixity (or even celebrate the uncertainty) of adulthood, then we must also question the fixity of the notion of childhood against which ‘adulthood’ is opposed—not least in the context of compulsory education. In the process, we are obliged to contest the conceptual boundaries that separate adults from children or young people, and, by extraction, students from teachers. More generally, Hargreaves (1994) has argued that traditional, modernistic understandings of what it means to be a teacher—in terms of professional roles and responsibilities, pedagogical approach, social status, authority and so on—are made increasingly untenable by the uncertain conditions of later  modernity. In the same spirit it is possible to consider how the notion of ‘uncertain’ adulthood also makes uncertain our understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Indeed, Huberman et al. argue that ‘Young teachers see themselves first as being young rather than teachers. This necessarily results in a conflict associated with these distinct social roles’ (1993: 196). Huberman et al.’s assertion signals a tension between a modernist imagining of teacher identity that is inextricably linked to a sense of stable sense anchored in adult authority, and the lived experience of many teachers who must reconcile acting as ‘adult’ teachers while also feeling the profound uncertainty of being young in the present. These are issues that have significant implications for our understanding of the professional and personal lives of teachers, particularly given the youthful profile of the pression in England (Cambridge Assessment data from 2016 places the average age of a secondary school teacher in England at 39) (2016). Contemporary adulthood in Western societies can, then, be framed as a time of ‘uncertain’ practices of self-making, particularly during the ‘transitional’ years of early adult life. The lives of younger teachers at Lakefield reflected this uncertainty. Some younger adult teachers were still living at home with parents, unable to afford their own homes. They anticipated getting married and having children later in life than previous generations of adults. Some remained financially dependent on parents. Some experienced uncertainty of professional identity, not feeling like ‘real’ teachers because they did not feel like they had reached the accepted markers of adulthood. Of a Friday or Saturday night, some younger teachers existed in social worlds very close to their older pupils, bumping into one another in local pubs, clubs, and music festivals. In the case of Lakefield, the reconciliation of the tension between attempted performances of traditional adulthood and the uncertain realities of living as a young adult is an important part of the professional lives of younger

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teachers. How, we might ask, do they manage to navigate complex, multiple age-based imaginings of self both in their relationships as teachers to teenage students, and in their interactions with younger and older members of staff? How do students perceive their relationships with younger teachers, well-versed as students can be in these issues through years of observing young teachers learning to ‘act’ their age? With these kinds of questions in mind, let us turn to the evidence emerging from the ethnography. To begin to consider age as an aspect of everyday life for the younger teachers in the school, it will be useful to put them in the context of the staff as a whole and to consider the ways in which imaginings of age serve (or do not serve) as markers of belonging within the staffroom. In order to do this I provide an overview of the social dynamics of the staff at Lakefield and indicate the relative importance of different imaginings of age as loci of belonging for staff members. I then move on to consider the particular characteristics of the younger teachers in the school, and perceptions from students, in relation to the issues explored above.

Part II  ge-Based Divisions in the Staffroom: The ‘Jetset’, A the ‘Almost-Retireds’ and the ‘Younger Teachers’ McGregor (2003) has highlighted the importance of seeing the workplaces of teachers as spaces that are inherently relational and socially derived—as ‘both producing and a product of interconnecting social practices’ (2003: 354). Here I understand spaces inhabited by the staff at Lakefield in the same social terms in order to incorporate the social and political dimensions of teachers’ uses of space in school alongside the physical reality of where they are located. On one level, staff at the school were located institutionally within academic disciplines, departments and faculties, and the nature of interactions between staff was therefore influenced by their departmental positionings and by their relative professional statuses in the school. While this kind of positioning was to do with a sense of staff sharing a common academic

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specialisation or disciplinary identity, and with the fact that most teachers were obliged to work in their departments rather than socialise for most of their ‘break’ times, the significance of departments or faculties as a locus of belonging was also, quite simply, to do with physical space. Science, for example, was located on the other side of the school from the staffroom and the Science teachers had access to ample social space in departmental offices and common rooms. This allowed them to develop social and professional bonds away from the main focus of the staffroom. In this respect age was by no means the only influence on how teachers were positioned in relation to one another. This having been said, however, imaginings of age did emerge as significant markers of belonging among the staff, in addition to the institutional categories of belonging described above. Imaginings of age were important as part of delineating the exclusivity of certain spaces for staff within the school, particularly in the staffroom. This was especially evident in the mornings before registration and, to a lesser extent, during lunchtimes. Through my ongoing participation in these regular moments of social interaction it was possible to observe how age-based notions of belonging and difference were imagined not only in terms of discourses of chronological age, ‘youth’ and ‘old age’ but also in relation to an imagined sense of ‘generation’ within the school. Importantly, these different imaginings of age as a locus of group identity were not always easily aligned, meaning that staff at times were obliged to negotiate different but simultaneous imaginings of age in order to position and re-position themselves in relation to one another. Let us explore these ideas in more detail by considering the regular positioning of a number of different groups in the staffroom, specifically during the period before morning registration. During these morning sessions the staff were informally divided up into a number of smaller groups in different seating areas of the room. In the top left-hand corner of the staffroom sat the group of teachers that during the course of the year became commonly known as the ‘younger teachers’. This group was made up mainly (but not entirely) of teachers aged between 23 and 30, and included Sophie, Kristie, Barbara, Sara, Cheryl, Melanie (Ms. Gibson) and others such as Robert Simspson, a new Geography teacher, and Richard, a maths PGCE intern. Two ­chronologically older teachers, Victoria and Ellen, sometimes sat on the

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peripheries of this space, but were not recognised as part of the core group of ‘younger teachers’. Similarly, a number of the NQTs, including Jeff, Lucy and Ellen (of whom we shall see more below), would also occasionally sit on the outskirts of this group, but were less eagerly welcomed as additions to this seating area. In the middle of the staffroom an alcove of seats was normally occupied by a group of teachers known to others by the nickname ‘the jetset’, in reference to the fact that they were a well-established clique in the school and wielded a significant amount of power and status as members of the senior management team. This group included Lee, the head of Year 11, Greg, the head of 6th form, members of the PE department, the Head of History, and occasionally the deputy head teacher and the head teacher as well. All of those in the ‘jetset’ were in their late thirties to early fifties. The fact that these teachers would almost always make up the staff members who went on the annual school ski trip to France was symbolic of their ‘jetset’ status. As Sophie put it, somewhat laconically, ‘they think a lot of themselves as the high-flyers’. While not the oldest teachers in the school, in effect they represented the ‘establishment’ and the power brokers at Lakefield, and as a result maintained a certain level of seniority relative to other younger and/or less well-established teachers in the school. On the other side of the staffroom, along the windows of the room, sat the oldest teachers in the school. These teachers, referred to occasionally as the ‘old’ teachers or the ‘dinosaurs’, and described by Sophie as the ‘almost-retireds’, were staff ‘who had been teaching forever, like since before you needed a qualification to be a teacher’ (Sophie). These teachers were also the longest-standing members of staff in the school. Some had positions of status as department heads, but none were in the senior management team. Particularly among the ‘younger teachers’, this group of ‘almost-retireds’ were considered to be eccentric, ­old-­fashioned and out of touch with the teaching profession (as Sophie’s comment about qualifications above implies). One teacher, Diane, represented the stereotype of a matronly, disciplinarian Food Technology teacher, often carrying a wicker basket of knitting under one arm, while another, Nick, was reviled by the younger female teachers for being lecherous, for invading personal space and having poor personal hygiene. Older teachers were also associated with what Sophie described as ‘old

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school’ teaching methods (a traditional, detached, disciplinarian approach to pedagogy) as opposed to a ‘new school’ approach (adopting a more child-centred, open, friendly, interactive approach to teaching and learning). They were also seen to be old-fashioned in their perspectives of what kinds of topics were appropriate in the classroom. As sex education coordinator for her year group, Sophie on a number of occasions complained that the older teachers were ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘stuffy’ because they felt uncomfortable addressing issues of sex and relationships with their tutor groups. While she was careful to point out that this was ‘about attitude, not about [chronological] age’, these framings of the older teachers—as harmless, bumbling and out of touch; as matronly, grumpy and reactionary; as lascivious or inappropriate; or as reactionary—and in each case lacking any kind of significant institutional power or status—were in keeping with broader popular negative stereotypes about older people in general (Featherstone and Wernick 1995). Imagining the age of the ‘almost-retireds’ in this way helped to establish a particular kind of relationship between this group and the rest of the staff. The space at the front of the staffroom was less clearly delineated according to particular age-related groups of teachers. Closer to the door a number of staff from the English and French departments would sit, along with the small number of PGCE interns in the school. Near to the kitchen area of the staffroom a similarly diverse group was located, normally including members of the Maths department, cover staff, occasional teaching assistants, newer teachers including Jeff, an English NQT, visitors to the school and, at lunchtimes, myself. Sophie described this area as ‘the awkward crowd next to the kettle [laughter], which is like Beth [a notoriously eccentric “goth” teacher in the school], some of the maths department [including a woman who suffered regular fits of narcolepsy], “cover” people like Lisa, and then some visitors or something there’. While not seen as ‘awkward’ to those sitting there, the ‘miscellaneous’ and transitory nature of the staff in this area meant that the boundaries of this group were much more porous and open to change. While, then, there were some areas of the staffroom that were occupied by a more fluid population of teachers, there were other areas over which group members were particularly territorial. The strong territoriality of both the ‘jetset’ and even more so the ‘younger teachers’ was related to a

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‘generational’ imagining of age that anchored the members of these respective groups both within the history of the school, in relation to one another, and in relation to their shared experiences of teaching. That is, one locus of identity for teachers in these groups was their belonging to a loose ‘generation’ of teachers who had begun their teaching careers, and begun teaching at Lakefield, at roughly the same time. Part of learning to act one’s age in the staffroom was in this sense about locating oneself in this generational hierarchy of positioning. This was implicitly reinforced through a number of different practices. The PGCE interns, for example, had in their first weeks made the mistake of sitting in the seats normally occupied by the ‘jetset’, only to be moved on to ‘lower status’ seats by force of raised eyebrows and occasional dirty looks. Longer-standing teachers who normally located themselves in particular seating areas were similarly unlikely to inhabit the spaces of other groups. As Sophie suggested to me, ‘we’re quite territorial about it. I mean, even if I was the only one there I would never sit with the “jetset”’. The staffroom represented a ‘backstage’ space at Lakefield, but the ‘backstage’ space of the staffroom was also further delineated into smaller ‘backstage’ spaces according to the positioning of particular social groups. Hammersley and Atkinson make the important point that ‘backstage’ contexts do not always correspond neatly with physical places, and that ‘staffroom behaviour’ in this sense might also be seen in other school contexts as well (2007). Following the same argument it is also possible to see how certain ‘backstage’ behaviour was permissible in the confines of certain spaces within the staffroom (‘younger teachers’ complaining about the senior management, for example, as described below), rather than in the staffroom as a whole. These implicit ‘backstage’ spaces within the ‘backstage’ of the staffroom served to further emphasise a sense of age-based difference between particular groups in relation to age. Indeed, while the teachers in these separate groups were mostly on good terms with each other, a sense of age-based separation was reflected in other social contexts as well. In the local pub, The White Horse, for example, it was common for the ‘younger teachers’ to sit in an area of tables on one side of the bar, while members of the ‘jetset’ would sit at a table on the other side. Most of the PGCE interns, on the other hand, were rarely invited to the pub at all.

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 egotiating Age-Based Belonging and Difference N Through the Narratives of Students Interestingly, one way of reinforcing imaginings of generation occurred through the re-telling of students’ narratives of ‘becoming’ while at school (normally in terms of either ‘growing up’ and ‘maturing’ or ‘going off the rails’) relative to the teachers’ own narratives of self-making during the same time period. One student who was an example of someone who had ‘matured’, and a particular focus of conversation along these lines, was Shane, a student in Year 11 at the time. Shane had been a notoriously difficult and acerbic student when in Years 8 and 9, at the time when the core of the ‘younger teachers’ had started their teaching careers. By the end of his time in Year 11, however, the ‘younger teachers’ referred to him in overwhelmingly positive and affectionate tones, as although he was not academically successful he was seen to have ‘grown up’ through the process of doing his GCSEs. Shane was training to be a hairdresser after Year 11, and he often engaged female members of the ‘younger teachers’ in conversations about their hair, and these conversations were then shared and relayed back in conversation in the staffroom as examples of how Shane was ‘just brilliant’ now, whereas he had been a ‘little shit’ in Year 9. One morning, for example, Kristie told a story about how Shane had mockingly put his head around her classroom door and, seeing that she appeared fed-up, remarked: ‘Miss, just remember, men are such a waste of time’. This had made her laugh, but also prompted her to compare this behaviour with her experiences of him when she had begun her teaching career. Victoria responded by saying that Shane was always touching her hair and commenting on it when he saw her in the corridor, relating this in turn to her own experiences of teaching Shane in different years. Ellen then recounted a conversation with Shane, during which they reminisced about a school trip on which he had been particularly difficult (I had also been in the lesson with them when they had this conversation). They had laughed about the fact that he used to be ‘a right little shit’ (his term) and that Ellen had to sit with him on the bus all the way home from Thorpe Park (a nearby amusement park) to keep him under control. Ellen commented on how nice it was to share a conversation with him now that he

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was more ‘mature’. She finished by noting how much he had changed, saying that she thought he was ‘lovely’ now. Sharing these kinds of narratives of students ‘coming of age’ was one way to locate the teachers at particular points in the school’s historical trajectory—to give their own imagined sense of age in the school a sense of historical depth anchored in the lives of the students that they had seen grow up. Another means of locating oneself in the history of the school was the association of teachers with particular tutor groups. As mentioned in Chap. 3, tutors were in some cases paired up with tutor groups in Year 7, and then would follow them up through the school until Year 11. In Sophie’s case, she had been given a Year 7 group in her first year of teaching, and they were now reaching Year 9. She therefore measured her own development and generational positioning as a teacher in the school alongside her tutor group’s passage through the year groups. As a consequence, she had also developed a strong bond with her tutor group because, in her words, ‘they’ve seen me change as a teacher as much as I’ve seen them grow up through the years’. These re-tellings of the narratives of students could also at times serve as one among a number of subtle means of reinforcing a sense of hierarchy and difference between teachers located in different generational groups. On several occasions the ‘younger teachers’ would be discussing a student and, overhearing these conversations, more senior teachers would join in to comment on older generations of the same student’s family—as if to ‘trump’ the younger teacher’s knowledge and historical perspective. As suggested in Chap. 2, many of the families living in the area near Lakefield had been there for generations, meaning that in some cases children, parents and even grandparents of the same family had attended the school. For the older generations of teachers, such as those in the ‘jetset’, it was therefore possible to place the narratives of certain current students in even longer historical trajectories. On one occasion, for example, the ‘younger teachers’ were discussing Caroline Welsh, a student then in Year 11 who was an example of a student who had ‘gone off the rails’ since beginning in Year 7. As the ‘younger teachers’ discussed rumours about Caroline’s recent indiscretions with an adult member of the crew of a fair that had recently visited the town, Ainsley, an older teacher and member of the ‘jetset’, leaned over the seats to comment sagely that

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older generations in her family had been even worse. In this way older teachers could reinforce a sense of difference in terms of generation by re-­emphasising their tenure and seniority in the school, through the narratives of pupils present and past.

 egotiating Age-Based Notions of Difference Through N Discourses of ‘Youth’ and ‘Old Age’ In order to further bolster the age-based markers of difference teachers also used broader discourses of age to frame interactions with each other. Age in this sense became a means of brokering subtle power relations between different groups, often through joking and banter that played on particular representations of age. Hockey and James have argued, drawing on Geertz, that discourses of age can serve as a compelling means of reinforcing power relations (1993). In relation to dependency in childhood and old age, they suggest that ‘discourses of infantilization’, however well-intentioned or subtly applied, can have the effect of reaffirming asymmetrical relations of power relative to one’s (imagined) position in the life course. Similar ideas can be applied here to consider how imagining age in particular ways allows staff to attempt to assert positions of power in relation to one another. I have already noted the ways in which conversations about older members of staff often included references to stereotypically negative characteristics of old age. Similarly, members of the ‘jetset’ would joke with the ‘younger teachers’ about being ‘hip’, ‘down with the kids’ or ‘up-to-date’ with the latest trends in technology or fashion followed by students. On multiple occasions such jokes focused on media consumption, and on social media in particular, playing on popular stereotypes about the precocity of ‘young’ people in the spheres of media and digital technology (Buckingham 2000). Such comments were made ironically, emphasising the presumed flippancy of the younger teachers’ interest in things that were ephemeral, fashionable and trendy, rather than indicating a respect for their engagement with the ‘cutting-­ edge’ of culture and/or technology. It is worth noting that this was perhaps particularly marked in 2008, when social media platforms like Facebook were still very much the preserve of young people and young adults (as also suggested in the previous chapter), and smartphone

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t­echnology was just about to become a part of everyday life for younger and older adults alike. Almost every morning, conversation among the ‘younger teachers’ would at some point turn to activity on Facebook. Chatter about status updates, newly uploaded images, postings and so on were a common aspect of settling into the working day. Overhearing fragments of conversation related to Facebook, members of the ‘jetset’ would at times joke about how they didn’t understand anything to do with social networking and all that ‘new-fangled stuff’ that ‘young people’ were into—purposefully playing up to a stereotype of ‘out-of-touch’ old age in order to emphasise a youthful, technologically savvy stereotype of the ‘younger teachers’. For their part, the ‘younger teachers’ could also engage in these symbolic, age-based assertions of power by playing on stereotypes of older teachers being ‘out of touch’ or past their prime, not least in terms of a lack of knowledge about current trends in media consumption or digital technology. Mocking older teachers for having out-of-date mobile phones, or ‘bricks’, was one example of this kind of subtle power play. Other topics of conversation also served as ammunition in this age-based contestation of power between teachers of different ages. During a Friday lunchtime, for instance, Pam, one of the chronologically older teachers, used the theme of ‘going out’ (i.e. going out drinking at night) to reinforce a sense of difference between the ‘younger teachers’ and the older end of the age spectrum in the staff. A number of the ‘younger teachers’ were discussing going out together to a pub that evening. When Pam asked who was going, and Cheryl listed some of the ‘younger teachers’, Pam responded by saying ‘Oh, all the younger ones, eh, all going out to hit the town! Well, us oldies’ll just stay in!’ Similar jokes were made when it emerged that some of the ‘younger teachers’ were going on a trip to Cornwall during half-term. Pam and Steve, another chronologically older teacher, remarked jokingly that all the ‘younger ones’ were ‘jetting off together’ upon hearing about the trip, before making comments about the ‘oldies’ (them) staying at home in their ‘rocking chairs’. Again, here Pam and Steve were playing on stereotypical imaginings of younger teachers as energetic, sociable and adventurous, in opposition to their tongue-in-cheek caricatures of what it meant to be ‘old’.

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The Significance of Chronological Age On a few occasions during the year, comments were also made about the significance of the differences in chronological age between older members of staff and the ‘younger teachers’. Interestingly, however, these remarks seemed on the one hand to reaffirm a sense of age-based difference while at the same time highlighting an apparent lack of awareness between staff about each other’s actual chronological age. That is, teachers seemed comfortable engaging in general discourse about age-based difference—about symbolic differences, often couched in terms of the kinds of popular stereotypes described above—but when real differences in chronological age were revealed, the relatively large age gaps between them seemed troubling, particularly to older members of staff. One lunchtime in particular, the ‘younger teachers’ were discussing their relative chronological ages, as Cheryl had recently celebrated her 25th birthday. Overhearing this conversation, the ‘jetset’ engaged the ‘younger teachers’ in lively and well-meaning chatter about the fact that some members of the ‘younger teachers’ were young enough to be the children of some of the older members of staff, or were actually equivalent in age to their adult children. Comments such as ‘you’re the babies of the staffroom’, ‘I’m old enough to be your father!’ and ‘my son must be about the same age as you’, and retorts of ‘alright Grandad!’ were passed back and forth in a light-hearted fashion. Some, like Simon, the Head Teacher, were genuinely surprised to be reminded that the chronological age gap within the staff was quite so large. Infantilising or patronising the younger members of staff was not done in a malicious way, but it did allow the older members of staff a means to re-assert their seniority and primacy, in theory at least. Among the ‘younger teachers’, reflections on these conversations also served to reinforce a sense of age-based identity. A few days after the above lunchtime exchange about the relative ages of different members of staff, Cheryl made the following comment to the others: ‘Wasn’t it funny the other day when Simon [the head teacher] suddenly realised he was old enough to be my father! I never thought I’d actually get to be twenty-five’. She  then started a conversation about how 25 seemed like a much older age than 24 now that she was in her mid-twenties rather than her

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early twenties, and that she didn’t ‘feel that old’. While being 25 had meant that she was positioned as being particularly young in relation to the older staff (young enough to be the daughter of the head teacher, and therefore young enough to unsettle his imagining of the age of his fellow members of staff), to Cheryl being in her mid-twenties had an altogether different significance. For her, instead it signalled the end of her early twenties and a milestone on the way to ‘growing up’. Bearing in mind the intersecting imaginings of age wrought through locally meaningful notions of ‘generation’, ideas about chronological age and broader popular discourse about ‘youth’ and ‘old age’ described above, in the next section of the chapter I begin to explore the different imaginings of age that served to distinguish between those teachers who were able to actively develop a sense of belonging among the ‘young teachers’, and those who, despite being chronologically young, were unable to do so. Evidence from morning and lunchtime conversations between the ‘younger teachers’ will provide a means for thinking about how new, chronologically younger teachers learned (or failed to learn) how to ‘act’ their age in particular ways in order to become part of the ‘younger teachers’.

Part III Imagining Age Among the ‘Younger Teachers’ It is possible to see from the above exchanges that while ‘generational’ imaginings of age served on one level as a means to establish a sense of belonging, it was also the case that broader discourses of age were employed in order to emphasise notions of age-based belonging and difference between staff members. This was as much the case between the ‘younger teachers’ and other groups as it was within the ‘younger teachers’. Sara, for example, was an NQT at the time of the research and was the youngest member of full-time staff at 23. She was therefore several years younger than the generation of ‘younger’ teachers who had started together as NQTs in 2004/2005. And yet by the middle of the first Autumn term, she was an important member of the ‘younger teachers’, as was evidenced by the fact that she was invited to go on holiday with them during the

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May half-term holiday. While she was recognised as the ‘baby’ of the group at 23, relative to the older ‘younger teachers’ (the oldest ‘member’ was 29), Sara nevertheless became an established part of their smaller community within the staffroom. David, one of the PGCE interns, was similarly not of the ‘original’ generation, but was able to negotiate a peripheral place in the ‘younger teachers’. In no small part because of my chronological age, I was also able to position myself within the group—at first on the margins, and then as a more integrated member, despite my ‘strange’ status as a non-teacher in the staffroom. On the surface it might be argued that Sara, David and I were able to establish ourselves in the territory of the ‘younger teachers’ by simple virtue of being chronologically young in the staffroom, and therefore subject to the same discourses of age that characterised much of the banter between older and younger teachers. But there was more to our belonging within this group than this. That chronological age was not on its own a criterion for belonging was made evident by the fact that certain newer, chronologically younger teachers were not warmly welcomed into the territory of the ‘younger teachers’. Jeff, the new 23-year-old English teacher, for instance, made repeated attempts to sit with this group ­during the course of the academic year, but was seldom greeted with complete acceptance from the other ‘younger teachers’. Similarly, Lucy, another younger NQT new to the school, was not considered to be a ‘younger teacher’ despite (and, as we shall see, in part because of ) being one of the youngest teachers in the school.

Rebellion, Banter and TV On one level becoming part of the ‘younger teachers’ was predicated on the relative ability of chronologically younger teachers to engage in a number of particular social practices associated with being ‘young’, namely: complaining about the shortcomings of the school; discussing ‘escape’ from teaching; and particular forms of media consumption. Early morning conversations among the ‘younger teachers’ in the staffroom primarily revolved around these recurring themes throughout the year. Almost every day began with a discussion of being tired and overworked.

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They would also share a (normally quite light-hearted) moan about the senior management, or about something that was not working well in the school. Escape was another common theme, both in the morning and at lunchtime. Conversations about impending holidays (‘getting out of here’) and chatter about the idea of changing profession or moving overseas (the ‘international’ section of the Times Educational Supplement job pages was often open on a table, ready for speculative job searches) were frequent, but seldom serious in tone. While there was a generally negative undertone to such discussions, it was clear that sharing this collective grumble was something that the ‘younger teachers’ enjoyed, as it served as a means of situating them in the working day and as a way of establishing a generally light-hearted if somewhat cynical approach to the real challenges and issues that faced them in the messy realities of the classroom. It was important in this sense to talk about escaping the school, for example, even if there was no real intention of leaving. Being able to take part in this collective moan was an important part of belonging within the ‘younger teachers’; Barbara, for example, was well-known and well-­ liked among the ‘younger teachers’ precisely because of the direct, sharp, acerbic nature of her plaintive comments and her willingness to ­transgress the ‘backstage’ of their seating area by making these remarks in the presence of senior staff. Of course, the ‘younger teachers’ were not the only staff to complain about the school or about the strains of teaching. But their position as staff who were both lower down the hierarchy of the school and yet well-established enough to feel confident in their complaints afforded them the opportunity to complain in a tone perhaps slightly more irreverent, vociferous and light-hearted than that of more senior staff. Those new teachers who were incorporated into the ‘younger teachers’ were also adept at joining in with this topic of conversation. Sara regularly added her own complaints to the ‘morning moan’, but was also sensitive to the extent to which, as a new member of staff, she could align herself with the ‘younger teachers’ through complaining about the senior management without over-reaching and alienating herself from her superiors. Jeff and Lucy, on the other hand, were reluctant to engage in such conversations when they sat with the ‘younger teachers’. By not acquiescing in the more vociferous, plaintive chatter in this sense they failed to embody this particular irreverent, rebellious, stereotypically

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‘youthful’ quality of what it meant to be a ‘younger teacher’, and this made it difficult for them to become part of the group. As a result it was possible instead for members of the ‘younger teachers’ to revert back to a ‘generational’ imagining of age, referring to Jeff and Lucy as the ‘new’ teachers or as NQTs, rather than as part of the ‘younger’ teachers. Light-hearted complaining was not the whole substance of interactions between the ‘younger teachers’, however. As with the daily ‘moan’, the ability to talk about relevant aspects of popular culture and to engage in chat about media consumption was also key to belonging among the ‘younger teachers’. Particular musical artists and television programmes emerged as themes of conversation, including the programmes Eastenders, Strictly Come Dancing and T4 Mobile Act Unsigned (a ‘Battle of the Bands’ competition popular at the time), among others. On Wednesday mornings and afternoons in particular, the ‘younger teachers’ would discuss Spooks, a BBC espionage drama that was at the time aired on Tuesday nights. The female members of the group would frequently debate whether or not particular actors were ‘fit’ (attractive), which would lead on to more general banter within the group. On one occasion, for example, Kristie and Sara were discussing the attractiveness of their favourite actor in Spooks, before moving on to talk about Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Miami. Michael, a chronologically older member of the generation of the ‘younger teachers’, butted in at this point and said ‘Aren’t these guys’ shows? Shouldn’t you be watching girlie shows like X Factor?’ Kristie and Sara took the bait along with Sophie to argue light-heartedly with Michael about what classed as a ‘girlie’ show and to jokingly question the ‘manliness’ of what he watched on television. Sophie, on the other hand, was not a follower of this programme and so would sometimes engage the other ‘younger teachers’ in tongue-in-cheek banter about how ‘rubbish’ the programme sounded, again with the aim of initiating a lively and light-hearted discussion. It was in this sense not so important for being a part of the group that one liked a particular television programme or aspect of popular culture, but rather that one was aware of these media texts and could engage in trivial but socially very important conversation about them. Sara was capable in this respect too, and developed a sense of belonging as a ‘younger’ teacher because she was able to talk about the kinds of

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media that other members of the ‘younger teachers’ shared as a common point of reference. As he did not watch the same television programmes or consume the same kinds of media as the rest of the ‘younger teachers’ (he was a fan of opera, and not X Factor), Jeff, on the other hand, was at a major disadvantage because he was unable to engage in these conversations. Not being able to participate in idle chat, jokes and banter either about popular culture or about the pitfalls of life as a teacher in the school were equated with particular imaginings of age by the rest of the ‘younger teachers’. Despite being chronologically young, teachers like Jeff were in this sense seen as being old-fashioned or ‘out of touch’, particularly in relation to patterns of media consumption. For Lucy, however, a sense of age-based difference was imagined between her and the ‘younger teachers’ in relation to her reputation as a very ‘serious’ teacher. Older members of the staff had commented that she had ‘sucked the life out of the History department’ because she approached her interactions with students in a stern, detached manner, and very seldom ‘had a laugh’ with the students as some other younger teachers might do (this is an interesting point that I will return to shortly). This particular performance of teacher identity seemed to be reflected in the way she acted ‘backstage’ in the staffroom as well, as she appeared too stern and serious to take part in the usual light-hearted back and forth between the ‘younger teachers’. Lucy’s inability to perform of act her age differently between the classroom and the staffroom—that is, to leave her more ‘severe’ imagining of her teaching persona behind and engage in more frivolous or occasionally reckless chatter with the ‘younger teachers’—meant that she was eventually considered to be ‘boring’ or ‘old-­ fashioned’ and ‘uptight’ like Jeff, but for different reasons. There was, then, a definite sense of difference between chronologically younger members of staff, and this was connected to the different ways in which their age was imagined, relative to one another. ‘Generational’ imaginings of age served in some ways to foster a sense of belonging among the ‘younger teachers’, but the ‘younger teachers’ were also able to draw on other broader discourses of age in order to position chronologically younger teachers in different ways. Interestingly, for both Jeff and Lucy, being chronologically younger did not mean that they were excluded from the ‘younger teachers’ because they seemed ‘too young’,

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but, on the contrary, because they were seen to be  attempting to act ‘older’ than their chronological age. At the same time, however, they were also excluded for being part of a ‘younger’ generation of teachers in the school. Still learning the implicit rules by which an ‘authentic’ performance of a ‘young (adult)’ teaching persona was negotiated, as much in the staffroom as in the classroom, both Jeff and Lucy were in this sense less successful than Sara at imagining age in a way that was commensurate with the age imaginaries of the rest of the ‘younger teachers’.

Balancing Acts: Concealing and Camouflaging Age The above discussion of how age was imagined in order to position Lucy in relation to the ‘younger teachers’ raises a number of interesting questions about how the process of teaching itself served to frame age imaginaries for younger staff members. Despite the different ways in which younger teachers imagined age as a means of positioning themselves in relation to one another, in terms of their experiences of teaching they also shared a number of similar issues when negotiating age imaginaries. On the one hand, younger teachers were at times engaged in performances of age that were aimed at accentuating the difference between them and their students, principally because of their perceptions of the relatively small gap between them in terms of chronological age. On the other hand, they were also aware of the various ways in which imagining themselves as ‘young’ allowed them to play on the idea of having a shared common ground with their students (and particularly older students). While different younger teachers approached these issues in various ways, all were engaged in negotiating this complex balance as part of their identities as teachers. The fact that younger teachers at Lakefield in general were quite cautious about revealing their chronological age to students suggested from the outset that age was an important aspect of the social interactions and power relations taking place in the classroom. Particularly among the younger teachers, there was a sense that if students were able to find out one’s chronological age, this would serve as a benchmark for making judgements about them relative to students’ imaginings of what that

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chronological age embodied. For Richard, the Maths PGCE intern, for example, revealing his age presented a potential threat to his authority in the classroom because it revealed the small number of years between him and some of his older students. During an interview one lunchtime he explained how ‘distinguishing the gap’ between himself and students involved a difficult process of trying to manage how they imagined his age: Richard: I think I have found it quite hard, like, distinguishing the gap, because to some extent I want to be quite pally with them, but, you know, at the same time, I found that people have tried to take advantage of me if I’m too nice, and now I’m gonna try and be a bit harder…see with the older classes they’re kind of more mature so you can generally have a more…relationship with them, but again because of the age gap…because the age gap’s not that different…not a bigger difference…you know, there’s a danger of them pushing the boundary…and my Year 11s found out how old I am last lesson, so…I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not! Patrick: What happened? Richard: Well, they were just in a class and they were like [teenager voice] ‘Oh how old are you sir?’ and I thought ‘well, I’m not telling you that!’ and they were like [teenager voice] ‘Oh, are you 22?!’, and I am 22, so…I didn’t really know how to hide it, so I was just like ‘aahhhh…anyway! [changing the subject]’ and then I said ‘yeah, OK, I am 22’ Patrick: So what do you think they made of that? Richard: I don’t know, I mean, basically they knew I was around 22-24, and…they still call me ‘sir’, they do what I tell them to, so I suppose they still see me as a teacher… Patrick: So it doesn’t really matter that much…but at the same time you’d be careful about telling them [your age]? Richard: Yeah… Patrick: So why do you think that is? Do you think it’s more an issue for them, or for you? Richard: I think to some extent it’s to do with personal information, like I want to keep a professional distance, but…I think with the age thing, my worry comes in if like they’ve got brothers of a similar age, then, you know, do they suddenly start seeing you not as a teacher and more as like…? …I mean if they see you as a teacher then they just see you as someone older, and they don’t really think about your age, but all of a sudden if you start asking how old you are, then they start thinking ‘well that’s

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actually not that much older than me’, so then they don’t see you as a figure of authority or responsibility

Richard was typical of other younger teachers in his attempts to conceal his age from students for fear that revealing his relative youth would undermine his ability to maintain authority in the classroom. It is interesting that Richard recognises that ‘age gap’ between him and his older students is at times ‘not that different’, and that while this can result in ‘pally’ relations with students, the ‘levelling’ effect of a closeness in perceived age can also be problematic because it undermines traditional notions of ‘adult’ authority. As a means of attempting to re-dress this balance, Richard also described how he purposefully discussed his impending marriage with students in order to reinforce an imagined sense of his identity as a ‘grown up’. Among the younger teachers in the school marriage was an unlikely prop to be used in this way; indeed, Richard was one of only three members of the teaching staff under 30, including the PGCE interns, who was married or planning to get married during the course of the research. Marriage is of course a traditional ritual marker of transition into adulthood, but the average age at first marriage in England has steadily increased since the 1970s, when a majority would have married in the 18–22 age range. More recent figures (ONS 2016) suggest an average age of 33.4 for men and 31.5 for women in opposite sex couples at first marriage in England (ages are higher for same sex couples). This reflects an interesting disjuncture of almost a decade between the age when some younger teachers begin their careers and must begin to perform ‘adulthood’ as part of their professional role, and the average age at which they will undergo one of the public rituals traditionally associated with adult social status. Perhaps because of his exceptional status as a ‘fiancé’ among his agemates, for Richard, talking about marriage was a ready means of associating himself with an image of an ‘older’, more established teacher: Patrick: Does the fact that you’re about to get married make you feel older? Richard: yeah, I think it does, it makes me feel a bit more responsible. I mean, even though I’m still a student it’s not like I do what other students do, you know I don’t just lie around all morning, I’ve got to wear

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a suit. So yeah, it’s a part of feeling older. It’s something that I’ve kind of…unsubtly dropped into my classes to kind of give the impression…so that kind of in their heads they go ‘oooh, he’s getting married’…you know, sort of emphasising that I’m the grown-up, you know. I think I’ve mentioned it to all my classes now – except for my Year 7s. They see me as a teacher anyway.

It is also revealing to note that here Richard makes the link between being seen as ‘the grown up’ and being ‘seen as a teacher’, underscoring the fact that for him the former category is vital to the authenticity of the latter. While he is eager to appear more ‘grown up’ by virtue of his impending marriage among his older students, he feels confident that this image has already been established with younger students in Year 7: they see him ‘as a teacher’ already. In a contrasting example, both Sara and Cheryl mentioned on a number of occasions that they were careful to keep hidden from their classes the fact that they still lived at home with their parents, because unlike getting married this was associated with still being ‘young’ and therefore ‘not really grown up’ and ‘not a real teacher’. While in the ‘backstage’ of the staffroom it was acceptable for both to complain about not having their dinners cooked for them when their mothers were away, to complain about substandard packed lunched prepared by their mothers, or to complain about the infringements on one’s private life that came with still living in the parental home, these were not topics for discussion in front of students. As with concealing chronological age for younger teachers, it was perceived as important for Cheryl and Sara never to reveal the similarities between themselves and their students in terms of this aspect of their home lives. While it was considered beneficial to highlight shared tastes that might ingratiate a younger teacher with her students, recognising a similarity in terms of dependence on other adults was anathema to retaining a sense of adult authority in the classroom. In the comment above Richard also mentions ‘wearing a suit’, alluding to the significance of particular forms of dress as a means of ‘camouflaging’ youth for chronologically younger teachers. Greg, the head of sixth form and the professional development mentor for the PGCE interns, was explicit in telling the male trainee teachers to wear a suit in order to ‘look older’ and to therefore establish presence and authority with stu-

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dents. He had also talked to me about the advantages of ‘looking old’, or being chronologically older, for NQTs ‘because if you’re older, you might be seen as new, but you’ll never be seen as new to teaching’. Greg argued that students associated chronologically older teachers with teaching experience and authority—something that Tanya in Year 13, for one, agreed with: Tanya: yeah and you can tell with authority, like, they’ve got more authority if they’re older. Patrick: really? Tanya: Yeah I think so. Yeah like what’s his name? Mr. Trenter, he used to always send us to older teachers like Mr. Jenahir or Mr. Adrians. You knew you were in trouble if you got sent to an older teacher!

Dressing ‘older’ was another means of achieving this effect. Accordingly, all the male PGCE interns wore suits to work, as did all but two of the other chronologically younger male teachers (one of whom was a PE teacher). The significance of dress as a means of camouflaging youth—as a costume for acting an age appropriate to performances of teacher identity (Alsup 2006)—was made apparent on non-uniform days, when teachers would wear their own clothes. Ironically, wearing casual clothes had the effect of making some younger teachers more uncomfortable in school because it removed an important element of their performance of age and instead revealed an aspect of a ‘backstage’ or ‘outside’ representation of self (Goffman 1956). On a November morning, on the first non-­ uniform day of the year, for instance, Ellen and Jeff sat on the outskirts of the ‘younger teachers’, gloomily discussing the day ahead. Both were concerned that non-uniform would result in ‘carnage’ and that they wouldn’t be able to enforce discipline to their normal standards because students would not respect them in their own clothes. Ellen said, ‘I just can’t tell people off in trainers, I need to be wearing heels!’ to which Jeff replied, ‘I know, it’s weird. I don’t feel right in my jeans, I’d much rather be wearing a suit!’ Several months later, at lunchtime on the next non-uniform day, the PGCE interns were discussing the issues involved when they did not have their ‘teacher clothes’ on. They began by talking about how it was unfair for schools to impose a dress code on staff, particularly for female

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teachers. But these comments were quickly countered by Nadine, who argued that she would not wear certain clothes on the simple grounds that she did not want to be mistaken for a sixth former. Relating the conversation to Ellen, she said, ‘like I would never wear jeans and a T-shirt, I’d just blend in with the 6th form! Like Ellen—she never wears flat shoes or jeans’. Paula, another female intern, replied by saying, ‘When I become a teacher I’m wearing heels all the time!’ At this point, Cheryl leaned over the chairs and chimed in that she was ‘always’ mistaken for a sixth former because she ‘looked young’ and wore sportswear to school (she taught Dance), and so was not easily distinguishable as a teacher by a ‘grown-up’ form of dress. Like younger male teachers in suits, in this way the younger female teachers and interns revealed the significance to them of looking ‘older’ or ‘grown up’, as symbolised by wearing high-heeled shoes. The markers of age are in this sense clearly delineated here according to gender, with the female PGCE interns having to tread much more carefully in their representations of self for fear of appearing too sexualised (the issue of being told what is ‘appropriate’ to wear to school) on the one hand, or as too youthful (‘like a sixth former’) on the other, as opposed to ‘grown up’ or adult. Male teachers were never confronted with the same challenges in terms of performing age and gender.

 ccentuating Difference Through Classroom Practice: A Discipline, Authority and Respect Beyond these attempts at concealment and camouflage, younger teachers at times adopted more general approaches to teaching that were also aimed at accentuating the distance between themselves and their students in terms of age. As suggested above, Lucy was regarded among the staff in her department and among the ‘younger teachers’ as an example of a teacher who adopted a ‘stern’ approach to teaching as a means of making up for the presumed lack of authority implicit in the fact that she was chronologically younger. The students in her Year 9 history class often also recognised she was too serious or ‘harsh’ for a younger teacher. Andrew, a lively, spiky-haired boy in the class, summed up this feeling when, while lining up before a lesson, rolled his eyes and said to me, ‘Sir,

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Miss Holme’s well harsh. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile! History’s well boring!’ Nor, apparently, was Lucy alone among the younger teachers in adopting this approach during lessons. Bryan and Sam, in Year 11, also suggested that over the course of their five years in the school they had seen how younger teachers would compensate for a lack of experience by adopting a disciplinarian approach, or, as they put it, ‘following every single rule’. During a lunchtime conversation they discussed the relative approaches of younger and older teachers, using Miss Stone, their Maths teacher, as an example of the latter: Bryan: it’s also the new teachers as well, like the ones who’ve just started at the school, they follow every single rule on everything, like young teachers, they find it ‘ard to cope… Sam: Miss Stone…she’s been going for a long time! [laughter] and she teaches her own way, she knows what she’s doing I suppose. I mean… Bryan: you know it’s the older ones that talk to you more and treat you like adults, rather than like a child… Sam: Yeah, and…if you think about it they’re [chronologically older teachers] are the ones who’ve matured more than the younger adults, who think they’re so mature, but they’ve still got so much to learn. Like us. You’re always learning ‘til the day you die, I suppose. Like what’s that quote…. um… ‘It’s strange, by the time I was 21 I realised how much my father had grown up in 10 years’ That’s on the wall in Miss Stone’s classroom! Bryan: That Mark Twain poster… Sam: I mean that sort of says it all, really…teachers just starting now, they’ll look back in thirty years’ time and think of all the things they did wrong, but that’s a good thing.

It was very revealing to hear their insights about how younger teachers still had ‘so much to learn’. Before having this conversation with Bryan and Sam it had not occurred to me that students reaching the end of compulsory education would in fact have much more experience of teachers ‘acting’ their age than would the younger teachers themselves. After years of observing younger teachers negotiating new imaginings of adulthood in the classroom, they were able, in this case, to adopt a sage perspective of how younger teachers were actually ‘like us [them]’ in that they have ‘still got so much to learn’. Chronologically older teachers (in

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this case Miss Stone, who was in her early fifties), on the other hand, were described by them as the teachers who offered students more respect and treated them ‘like adults’, in stark contrast to the popular notion of younger teachers being more attuned to the perspectives of young people, and therefore more likeable and respectful of them as ‘equals’. They also saw this as something that had changed over time, with teachers showing them more respect ‘as adults’ the closer they came to the end of compulsory education. As they put it, Bryan: it’s like the way Miss Stone used to talk to us, like she didn’t talk to us like we was little kids Sam: Yeah Patrick: So how did she used to talk to you? Sam: Like we were like her, like…adults, or…you know like, if you treat people more like adults, they tend to act more like adults…instead of treating them like children…even though they are children! [laughter] Patrick: And is that the exception, or is it more, like, the rule? Sam: As we come to the end of it [Year 11] they’re starting to treat us more like adults, but she was like that from the start, like from Year 10 Patrick: That’s interesting what you said about you being able to see that younger teachers aren’t at that stage… Bryan: you’ve got more respect for older teachers. Sam: Yeah, you’ve got to respect your elders.

The final comments made here by Sam and Bryan are telling both in terms of what they suggest about perspectives of younger teachers, and in what they say about the implicit ‘respect’ conferred to older teachers by virtue of their chronological age. Just as Greg and Tanya above suggested that age was a factor in maintaining authority in the classroom, so too were students aware of the ways in which younger teachers would try, and sometimes fail, to gain this authority by engaging in performances of ‘adulthood’ that were contingent on strict discipline and a detached manner. Ironically, it was because this imagining of age was incongruent with how certain chronologically older teachers (like Miss Stone) would act, that this particular imagining of age was unconvincing for students like Bryan and Sam. For them, then, it was instead the older teachers who they respected more, precisely

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because these teachers conferred a greater degree of respect to students by treating them as ‘adults’, rather than feeling that they had to ‘follow every rule’.

 ard Acts to Follow: Younger Teachers Struggling H to Negotiate ‘Convincing’ Performances of Age Comments from new, chronologically younger teachers confirmed the difficulty involved in navigating between being ‘young’ and embodying the authority and confidence necessary to perform ‘convincingly’ as a teacher and adult capable of winning the respect of students. Just as some of the newer younger teachers found it difficult to fit into the imaginings of age associated with being a ‘younger teacher’, so too did they struggle with performances of age in the classroom. Jeff, for example, had during the year become increasingly disenchanted with the idea of following teaching as a profession, precisely because of the difficulties involved in managing different kinds of performances of self with students. After observing a Year 7 PDC lesson with Jeff I spoke to him about his ­experiences of teaching and his feelings about reinforcing a sense of himself as an ‘adult’ teacher to Year 7 ‘children’. At this point, in March, he had already decided that he was not going to pursue a teaching career, partly because he found it difficult to maintain the ‘act’ of being a teacher, particularly with younger students: Jeff: Yeah, I think that you sort of settle into the idea of performance as a kind of way of operating, and I think that I’ve actually struggled to… become…comfortable with that for a lot of the time of the day…because… obviously you know that I’m thinking of leaving the profession anyway, so… Patrick: Yeah Jeff: You know…I think I can perform and I do perform, but…it feels sort of unnatural…and… I think…er…I don’t think I’m very good at keeping the consistency of that performance…I sort of break out into something different… [laughter]

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Jeff:…which I think sometimes can be OK you know, if the kids laugh and they can see that you’re not just this sort of boring, serious, shouty kind of teacher and you’ve got a bit of a sense of humour, so sometimes it can work in your favour, but …as a twenty-three year-old I haven’t had much experience with kids: I haven’t got kids of my own, I haven’t got little brothers and sisters, or, you know, I haven’t got cousins that I have much to do with, so the experience, sort of…of working with kids and knowing what appeals to kids and drives them and motivates them and can be used to get them to behave has…was very much a learning experience for me, so…I suppose it’s because you want to fit in with the culture of a school, or with the education system itself, you want to be seen that…you know ‘I’m acting like a teacher’

Jeff went on to mention how he felt more comfortable teaching older students, because this involved less of a ‘performance’ in terms of treating them in a ‘childlike’ way, or acting out a particular version of authoritative teacher identity in order to get them to behave. And yet, still, there were exceptions to this rule: Some of the Year 10s I teach, I think, I find that it’s easier to have the sort of relationship that I’d like to have with all the people that I work with, which is, you know, being quite relaxed and have mutual respect and not having to shout at people…and I think I find it easier with Year 10s, because they’re that bit older, although there are some of them that are not quite ready for that dynamic yet, but I try to impose that and try to say, you know ‘you’re mature enough to do this and it’s your responsibility to do these things, etcetera’, you know, and not treat them in such a childish way…it’s a hard balance to strike, and I think you have to…You change the way you are with the different year groups…you modify the way you are, and your sanctions according to the age of the people that you’re teaching… …Yeah, so I think that’s one thing that I think is most exhausting about it, is that, you have to be on the ball…what you decide to do each minute—because none of it’s planned out really, I mean you’ve got your lesson plan and everything so you know what you’re doing, but in terms of how you respond to kids in the class and what they say and how they behave, you know that…everything you do shapes the image of you as a teacher in their mind

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For Jeff, then, the process of ‘acting like a teacher’ with younger students, and having to be aware of maintaining and adjusting various performances of this ‘teacher’ identity depending on the age of the student, was exhausting to such an extent that he had decided to move on from teaching. Here he provides evidence that he is made explicitly aware of the shifts in how he acts as a teacher, mainly because he feels uncertain that some of these performances are carried out in a convincing way. For him this is in part because of his age: ‘as a twenty-three year-old’, he feels like he lacks the kind of experience with ‘kids’ that might allow him to interact with them in a way that would allow him to feel confident that he is being seen as ‘acting like a teacher’. Failing in this performance seriously undermined his idea of himself as a teacher. Other more established younger teachers, like Sophie, had with experience become more comfortable with the balancing act inherent in being both ‘young’ and ‘teacher’, to use Huberman et al.’s phrasing (1993). And yet Sophie was still very aware of the fine lines that she had to tread when positioning herself in relation to students. Again, as with Richard and Jeff, this was an especially complex issue when imagining age as part of her identity as a teacher to older students with whom she felt she had a lot in common. This emerged in the comments that Sophie made in her research journal. Over the course of the school year I had asked Sophie to keep a research journal so that she could note down ideas of significance to the project. As with other teachers this particular means of gathering data was not very successful in Sophie’s case because the often unforgiving pace of work left little time for ruminating on issues of age imaginaries. But Sophie’s journal did offer some fascinating insights into how she imagined age as an aspect of her relationship with her sixth form students. She began by making points both about the ways in which teachers encouraged sixth formers to imagine themselves as independent, responsible learners—characteristics that, as we saw in Chap. 3, the school encourages in the sixth form as part of their development as ‘young adults’. Interestingly, however, she then makes the point that she sees herself as being close to the sixth form both in terms of chronological age and in terms of lifestyle:

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I have a completely different relationship with my sixth form that [sic] I do with any other year group. This is because of the following: –– they have chosen to continue their education of this subject [sic] –– teachers are encouraged to allow students to be independent. Therefore there is less mothering and nagging as I always make it very clear that their actions are down to them and they need to start thinking for themselves. –– They are closer to my age (there was only 5 yrs. Difference in my 1st year of teaching). Now it’s 8 yrs. but when it comes down to social life and similarities in music taste, sharing ambitions to travel and not being married or a mum, I still feel in some regards there is very little difference between us. I feel more like a big sister with some of the students, especially some of the girls as I have had endless conversations with regarding their relationships which has resulted in me sharing personal information about love and sex as an effective way of guiding them. E.g. I spoke to one of the girls recently about taking contraceptive precautions whilst on a holiday but I was careful not to preach as I don’t think it’s going to achieve anything and I’m pretty sure if I did then it would ultimately be discouraging the student from confiding in me, which would do more harm.

Gender is clearly an important issue here in terms of how Sophie sees herself as ‘not that different’ from her older (female) students. As in her comments in Chap. 4, Sophie sees herself as a ‘big sister’ to younger women, and shares particularly intimate relationships with a number of female students because she is able to talk to them about sex and relationships, among other things. It is telling that Sophie does not mention similarly intimate relationships with male students; indeed, during the course of the year she talked about how she actively avoided such relationships because of the potential issues (or perceived issues) that this could raise when a teacher is only a few years older than her (male) students. The similarities that she sees between herself and her female sixth form students are also gender-related—like them, she has aspirations to ‘travel’ rather than ‘being married or a mum’. These shared priorities, along with similar tastes in ‘social life and music taste’, and the fact that

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she is ‘careful not to preach’, mean that ‘there is very little difference’ between Sophie and her students. In support of this, Sophie also suggests that with sixth formers, she ‘forgets’ to ‘act as a teacher’: It’s probably quite significant that the nature of my conversation regarding both academic and personal issues is again very different with the sixth form. This is not particularly deliberate, instead I feel I’m more myself as I’m talking as I would not as a ‘straight teacher’ that’s supposed to be an adult role model. This includes slang and swearing, although the latter is still minimal as I wouldn’t want to encourage this. In all honesty, I simply forget how I’m supposed to act as a teacher according to what the majority of teachers believe is the correct way. It is something that I think will change quite significantly as I get older and become someone who they much sooner place in the ‘parent’ generation, who’s perceived as ‘settled’, ‘responsible’ and therefore far away from who they [students] are.

In the final lines of this excerpt from her journal Sophie again highlights the fact that for her the intimacy of these relations is contingent on imaginings of age. As a younger teacher it is possible for her sixth formers to imagine her (in contrast to Richard, above), as the opposite of ‘settled’ and ‘responsible’; as a teacher who doesn’t ‘mother’ or ‘preach’, who shares their taste in music and who can sympathise with the dilemmas and challenges facing them as young women. There is, of course, nothing to say that a chronologically older teacher could not also do these things; but for Sophie, the kind of relationship that she has with older students is inextricably tied to her experiences as a young or ‘emerging’ adult. While, again, she is clear to emphasise in her journal that ‘it’s about attitude, not age’, it is also about age. While she may very well retain the same engaging approach to her students when she is older, she thinks that they will imagine her to be a ‘settled…responsible’ member of the ‘parent generation’, and therefore keep their distance. For the time being, however, Sophie’s Year 13 students were clear that they felt a sense of intimacy with younger teachers. One lunchtime Tanya and Keisha talked to me about how they felt particularly close to Sophie

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and Cheryl, the Dance teacher, because they (i.e. the students and these younger teachers) ‘were like the same age’: Tanya: And, like Miss Leckford, for example, another one! At Truck Festival we [Tanya and her friends] were all drunk out of our heads, and I’ve been talking to her about Truck this year and like they just completely let the barriers go when you’re out of school – Keisha: yeah, and they tend to swear…a lot! Like even in school she’ll say ‘will you girls shut up you’re really pissing me off!’ [laughter] Tanya: We could do a lot of impressions! [laughter] Patrick: [laugher] The teachers that you’ve mentioned cover quite a range of chronological ages – do you think that has something to do with it? Tanya: I think that the older ones are more stricter, whereas the younger ones are more relaxed, they’re more on your level, really. Patrick: What do you mean by ‘on your level’, like…? Tanya: Well, we’re still at like the same age so we still have the same interests, so like when you’re older – like Ms. Hepburn and Ms. Rawlinson are both mothers, so they’ve got that motherly role and that strictness about them, anyway, and they seem to apply that to their teaching, whereas Ms. Leckford and Ms Jackson [Cheryl] – Keisha: Oh yeah, that’s another one! Tanya: They’ll just sit on the floor with us, or whatever, Patrick: So I assume if you’re talking to them you’re not just talking about school work… Keisha: yeah we talk about problems and stuff.

Here a more traditional view of the distinction between ‘relaxed’ younger teachers and ‘strict’ older teachers is reinforced through the contrasts that Keisha and Tanya make between Sophie and Cheryl and Miss Rawlinson and Miss Hepburn. Unlike Bryan and Sam, above, they make a direct link between age and particular approaches to relationships with teachers. Gender is again an important issue here as well, as the latter teachers are described as ‘mothers’ who embody a ‘motherly’ strictness in their relationship with their students. Sophie and Cheryl, in contrast, are examples of ‘younger ones [teachers]’ who are more relaxed and ‘on their level’. As in Sophie’s description of her relationship with older students, Keisha and Tanya also focus on the fact that ‘younger teachers’ swear and

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are willing to talk about ‘problems’ as a means of articulating the very specific kind of relationship that they have with these younger teachers. We can also see here that Tanya and Keisha imagine the age of ‘stricter’ older teachers in terms not dissimilar to those used by Sophie above: it is the ‘motherly role’ of Miss Rawlinson and Miss Hepburn that make them part of what Sophie calls a ‘parent generation’—a generation with whom they have (or perceive to have) less in common and with whom they are unable to develop the kinds of intimate relations described above.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have concentrated on the ways in which age is imagined in the lives of teachers at Lakefield School. Focusing primarily on younger teachers, I have described how age plays a part both in the structuring of social relations between teachers and in the relationships between teachers and students. In the first part of the chapter I showed that the staff at Lakefield is divided in important ways according to age. At different times teachers use notions of chronological and ‘generational’ age, as well as broader discourses of ‘youth’ and ‘old age’ as means to imagine age as a marker of difference between groups. In Part II of the chapter I argued that among the chronologically younger teachers age was also an important marker of belonging and difference, but that chronological age on its own was not a characteristic of being a ‘younger teacher’. Instead, being part of the ‘younger teachers’ involved negotiating imaginings of age through anti-school discourse, conversations about escape and discussions of media consumption. Ironically, a number of chronologically younger teachers were positioned as being outside of the group of the ‘younger teachers’ because they were unable to engage fully in these practices. The final section of the chapter is entitled ‘Balancing Acts’ because it deals with the precarious process of younger teachers negotiating imaginings of age aimed either at accentuating age-based difference (establishing younger teachers as ‘adults’) or at emphasising ‘youth’ as a means of connecting with students. In this sense this chapter has eschewed a straightforward portrayal of younger, enthusiastic teachers who are popular and ‘in-touch’ with the

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young people that they teach, opposed to the old reactionary guard, as on its own such an analysis would play into broader discourses that reify a particular kind of relationship between age and the identities of teachers. Instead, I have argued that younger teachers construct narratives of age in order to grapple with the performative process of learning to ‘act’ their age ‘convincingly’ as teachers. This involves considering the issues that are raised for young teachers attempting to reconcile the ‘grown-up’ nature of their professional identities with the fact that they have not yet reached many of the markers traditionally associated with becoming ‘adult’, such as moving out of the parental home, owning property, becoming financially independent, developing a confident sense of professional identity, getting married, or having children. Some attempted to account for not ‘feeling like an adult’ through performances of stern, disciplinarian, ‘adult’ teaching personas in lessons, with varying levels of success. Others actively recognise that they do not feel all that different from students—particularly sixth form students with whom they may share interests, aspirations and tastes. With this in mind the ‘younger teachers’ mentioned here recognised the potential benefits that this ‘common ground’ could bring for interactions both inside and outside the classroom, as did some of their students. Authority, mutual respect and social intimacy were key issues in how younger teachers chose to imagine age as part of their approach to teaching. In the case of Sophie in particular, gender emerges as an important aspect of the kinds of relationships that could be developed with students. Emphasising ‘youth’, or proximity to students—letting down the barriers of a more ‘adult’ teaching persona—lent itself to social closeness, to mutual respect and to popularity. But it also meant that students were able to more freely challenge the authority of younger teachers, because they had shown themselves not to be adults in the traditional, ideal sense of the term. Somewhere in the balance between these two imaginings of age, students and staff were able to negotiate their relationships with one another. As with the relations between young people, some important shifts  have occurred since 2008  in the experiences of young adults, including young teachers. When this research was conducted, only the younger teachers were regular users of Facebook and other social media platforms. For most older teachers, life online was a discrete world for young people, to which they had little access. Chronologically

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younger teachers in 2008 were some of the first to have to negotiate the delicate balance between public, private and professional personas online. Now, it is much more likely that many teachers of varying ages within a school have some presence online; indeed, platforms such as Facebook are increasingly associated with older generations (the ‘younger teachers’ of 2008), in contradistinction from other platforms such as Snapchat (Pew Research Centre 2018). This comes with an interesting shift towards the performance of adult notions of self online, often in relation to young people—for example, the widespread practice of sharing images of one’s own children online, or ‘sharenting’, often without the consent of the children in the images (Blum-Ross and Livingstone 2017). Generally, teachers are now much more strategic about how they share/present themselves in online spaces because of heightened awareness of how one’s online presence may interfere with the coherence of one’s professional identity in the classroom. Professional bodies for the teaching profession (e.g. the General Teaching Council for England) now provide clear guidance in their code of practice about limiting interaction between teachers and pupils in shared social spaces online. The pervasiveness of smartphone technology now also challenges even further the divide between staff and students and between public and private lives. Perhaps most importantly still, younger teachers and pupils alike now all share the experience of not knowing a childhood and youth without digital media. While each generation or microgeneration is encouraged to define itself in opposition to the last (through, for example, shifts in social media production and consumption), and without resorting to the oversimplifications of a digital ‘native/immigrant’ divide (Prensky 2001), collective membership in the digital age represents an important shift in the shared experiences of children, young people, and younger adults in today’s schools. It is also important to reflect on impact that broader socio-economic shifts have had on experiences of adulthood in the last ten years. The financial crisis that began in 2008 heralded in a new era of intensified uncertainty, not least for young people at the beginning of their working lives. In keeping with Arnett’s (2004) assertion that emerging adulthood

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is a time of changing trajectories and opportunities, after 2008 young adults have experienced greater uncertainty of employment and outcome in terms of links between education, training and employment. Amidst this uncertainty, teaching remains anomalous in its modernist framing as a vocation and professional identity ‘for life’—a prospect that is increasingly alien to the lived experiences of young people who may be inclined to become teachers in early adulthood. At the same time, the educational landscape in England has experienced a continued shift towards discourses of marketisation and managerialism in the last ten years, bringing with it the precarity and volatility that a market-oriented approach to education can bring. The slump in recruitment to the teaching profession in the UK in 2017–2019 may in part be linked, with this in mind, to the incongruence between the seeming certainty of teaching as a professional future and the lived experiences of uncertainty that are more familiar to young people in 2019. Many young adults in 2019 are not marrying, moving out of the parental home, or becoming financially independent until they are in their early to mid-thirties. Given that schools remain organised at a basic level around an unchanged, age-based hierarchy of adult control, where all adults irrespective of chronological age and experience take up positions of total authority, those who enter teaching in their twenties today may find the ‘grown-up’ prospect of teaching even more challenging still than did the younger teachers described above. The main findings emerging from this chapter are, then, that age is negotiated on three different levels for ‘younger teachers’ at Lakefield. Between staff members, imagining age involves engaging with local-­ known taxonomies of age in terms of ‘generational’ positioning within the school, alongside broader discourse about ‘youth’ and ‘old age’. Similarly, relations between chronologically younger teachers are in part configured according to their ability to act their age according to the practices recognised as characteristic of the ‘younger teachers’. Finally, younger teachers must negotiate between potentially contradictory imaginings of age with students in order to navigate between ‘disciplinarian’ imaginings of ‘adult’ teacher identity and imaginings of ‘young’ teacher identity that focus on the common ground shared with students. These remain pressing issues in professional and personal lives of younger teachers today.

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References Alexander, P., Loewenthal, J., & Butt, G. (2019). ‘Fuck It, Shit Happens (FISH)’: A Social Generations Approach to Understanding Young People’s Imaginings of Life after School in 2016–2017. Journal of Youth Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1704406. Alsup, J. (2006). Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum. Arnett, J. (2004). Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumann, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. London: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage. Blum-Ross, A., & Livingstone, S. (2017). ‘Sharenting,’ Parent Blogging, and the Boundaries of the Digital Self. Popular Communication, 15(2), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1223300. Buckingham, D. (2000). After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity. Cambridge Assessment. (2016). The Average Age of Teachers in Secondary Schools. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://www.cambridgeassessment.org. uk/our-research/data-bytes/the-average-age-of-teachers-in-secondaryschools/. Cote, J. (2000). Arrested Adulthood: The Changing Nature of Maturity and Identity. New York: New York University Press. Featherstone, M., & Wernick, A. (Eds.). (1995). Images of Ageing: Cultural Representations of Later Life. London: Routledge. Forsey, M. (2000). Review Article: The Anthropology of Education: Cultural Critique or Ethnographic Refusal? Anthropological Forum, 10(2), 201–221. Furlong, A., & Cartmel, F. (1997). Young People and Social Change: Individualisation and Risk in the Age of High Modernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Doubleday. Hall, G. S. (1904). Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. New York: Appleton. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Taylor & Francis.

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Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teacher’s Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. London: Cassell. Hockey, J. L., & James, A. (1993). Growing Up and Growing Old: Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course. London: Sage. Huberman, M., Grounauer, M., & Marti, J. (1993). The Lives of Teachers. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology of/as Education. London: Routledge. Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty. Buckingham: Open University Press. McGregor, J. (2003). Making Spaces: Teacher Workplace Topologies. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 11(3), 253–278. Office for National Statistics (UK). (2016). Marriages in England and Wales: 2016. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/bulletins/marriagesinenglandandwalesprovisional/2016. Parsons, T. (1954). Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe: The Free Press. Pew Research Centre. (2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology. Retrieved September 24, 2019, from https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/ teens-social-media-technology-2018/. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816. Walther, Andreas/du Bois-Reymond, Manuela/Biggart, Andy (Hrsg.). (2006). Participation in Transition. Motivation of Young People for Working and Learning Across Europe. Frankfurt/Main u.a.: Peter Lang. Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2015). Youth and Generation: Change and Inequality in the Lives of Young People. London: Sage.

Conclusions

Introduction In this final section, I gather together the salient points of the arguments that I have made in this book. In so doing I also want to point out some of the challenges presented in the research, and indicate areas for potential further investigation. In Part I of the conclusion, I summarise how age is negotiated in the various different contexts covered in Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 6. A number of key themes—the importance of rigid age-based taxonomies for the project of modernity; the contradictions and concurrences of age imaginaries in lived experience; the relational nature of age imaginaries; the configuration of age in relation to other aspects of social identity (particularly gender and class) and the language and ideas used to make sense of these complex interactions (notions of respect, authority, trust, control and responsibility and metaphors of ‘looking up’ and ‘looking down’, for instance)—are considered here. Building on the findings from these chapters, I then turn in Part II to reflect in more detail on the strengths and limitations of age imaginaries as a conceptual frame for understanding age at Lakefield School. Finally, I conclude by considering areas of emerging and future research about how age, modernity, and the future of schools. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Alexander, Schooling and Social Identity, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5

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Part I  nderstanding How Age Is Negotiated at Lakefield U School To begin with, the findings presented in Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 6 indicate that there is no straightforward answer to the question of how age is negotiated at Lakefield School. In the context of my ethnography of Lakefield, the idea of age imaginaries has been used to capture the multiple, shifting and overlapping notions of age that staff and students negotiate within the different social contexts of school life. I have shown that at times these processes of negotiation lead to dialogue and reciprocal exchange, while at other times they lead to conflict and discord as the contradictions of one imagining of age grinds heavily against another. Still at other times, I have described how students and staff are capable of mediating multiple imaginings of age, revealing their awareness of age as a social category that is contingent, contextual and that can be performed and narrated in various and sometimes conflicting ways. In so doing, I have shown that there is no set of universal laws that govern how age is negotiated at Lakefield; nor are diverse and potentially contradictory negotiations of age necessarily mutually exclusive. It would run counter to the empirical evidence presented, and to the theoretical perspective adopted here, to suggest that ‘age’ is negotiated according to one clear set of parameters at Lakefield, clearly articulated and understood by all persons at the school. Rather, age imaginaries are conjured in the gaps between these understandings. However, the mercurial quality of age imaginaries also allows for the reproduction of a modernist framing of age as a stable, static framework against other aspects of social life can be trained and measured. Socialisation at school—the very reproduction of knowledge and culture as framed by the ‘genealogical’ model of schooling (Ingold 2017)—relies in profound ways on the reification of taxonomies of known age imaginaries. The challenge here is to show how imaginings of age are diverse and divergent in similar ways—to unearth the common ways in which a balance is struck between known and novel age imaginaries. I have used the notions of performance, narrative and negotiation

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to track these threads throughout the ethnographic chapters of this book. While each chapter maps different means of negotiating age imaginaries, I have used these concepts within the broader notion of age imaginaries to uncover the continuities in the processes of imagining age as it is negotiated in different school contexts. I have also suggested continuities between the recent past at Lakefield School and the conditions that shape age imaginaries in the present, highlighting factors that may complicate further the ways in which age is now figured in schools. Let us now turn our attention to exploring these continuities.

Multiple Age Imaginaries: Making Sense of Contradictions One of the most interesting findings emerging from this research is that at Lakefield, processes of negotiating age imaginaries are characterised by what at first appear to be contradictory, but concurrent, imaginings of age. Year 7s, for example, engage in imaginings of age that at once position them as ‘children’ but also reveal their ability to act out imaginings of ‘growing up’ and of ‘adulthood’. Year 11 students make sense of the strict age-based hierarchy of their informal social relationships by relating to the ideological underpinnings of the year group system; and yet at the same time they are engaged in social relations that undermine the logic of this hierarchy. Younger teachers also make sense of their interactions with students by drawing on the hierarchy of year groups, but they are at the same time aware that their position of power in this hierarchy is precarious because their ability to act ‘convincingly’ as adults is balanced against the fact that they are still ‘young’. What appear to be seemingly incompatible couplings are made sensible through performances and narratives of age—through processes of meaning-making—that conjure consistency from incongruence, and therefore legitimate particular disciplinary practices and power relations within specific contexts. Or, on the other hand, students and staff actively recognise incongruence and uncertainty as an inherent part of their experiences of age—an uncertainty that is made all the more evident by the seeming rigidity of the institutional structure within which it is figured. In this respect, part of the usefulness of the concept of age imaginaries is that it allows us to capture these con-

246 Conclusions

tradictions and glimpse how students and staff make sense of them concurrently as aspects of their lived experiences of age. The contested nature of age imaginaries at the level of discourse—that is, the interplay between ideas of age—is in this sense reflected in the negotiation of age imaginaries as it is manifested in the mundane, momentary to and fro of relationships between students and staff. Here I want first to consider the interplay between discourses of age imaginaries (at what is being negotiated), before looking more closely at how these discourses are articulated relationally between students and staff.

 e Concurrence of the Known and the Novel: Negotiating Th Age at the Level of Discourse As suggested in Chap. 1, theoretical framings of age as an aspect of social life are too frequently hampered by a rigid binary distinction between the strict imposition of structural age-based categories on the one hand (on neat processes of social and cultural reproduction), and, on the other, on ‘post-modern’ notions of identity that privilege the free role of individual agency in developing a sense of self unanchored in these categories (Hockey and James 2003; James and James 2001). Along these lines, the discourse underpinning ideas of age—what is being negotiated in the process of imagining age—is also presented in terms of this binary opposition (e.g. children’s resistance of ideas of ‘childhood’ versus the adult imposition of these categories; or ‘deviant’ youth opposed to the mainstream of adult society). In order to attempt to account for this shortcoming, throughout this book I have argued that age imaginaries at Lakefield are not defined so much by the contrast between individual agency and structural constraints, but by the concurrence of the two—in the existence of both as essentially more than the sum of the parts of one or the other (Miller 2009). What is more, I have argued that the notion of agency itself does not capture enough of the complexity of action and outcome that occurs when persons interact with one another to reconcile shared, but not necessarily equivalent, ideas about how age shapes their relationship with one another. The homogenising force of the school’s institutional categories, and the imposition of broader popular discourses

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about age—what I have termed taxonomies of known age imaginaries— is mediated by the diversity of the individual experiences of students and staff. This means that age imaginaries can be articulated, contested and actively negotiated within and around these dominant categories, but also subject to the constraints that an age-based structure inevitably imposes. Age is experienced and imagined in novel and wholly unique ways between individuals, relative to their specific social, cultural and historical trajectories; but as these experiences of age are formulated they must also be subjected in certain ways to a known, modernist taxonomic framework through which they can be articulated, made sense of and ordered. Certainly, the age hierarchy of schooling demands that adults attempt to impose age as a technology of discipline, just as older students will attempt to enforce the docility of their youngers. And yet, as I have tried to show, the very process of reproducing known taxonomies of age reveals how prone are these taxonomies to being transgressed in the everyday weft of school life—in the conversations, confessions, laughter, lies, stern words and fond memories forged between pupils and teachers. This results in the emergence of concurrent imaginings of age that, while seemingly paradoxical, allow students and staff to make sense of age on a day-to-day basis as part of life at Lakefield. In Chap. 3, I suggest, for example, that the taxonomy of the year group structure and the modernist discourses of age underpinning it—notions of gradual, irreversible progress, of accumulative personhood, of growth, of emerging self-­efficacy, of rationally, logically, becoming adult—exist alongside a vision of children and young people that recognises their active, already-agentic role in society as persons in the present. The head teacher, Simon, was explicitly aware of the difficulty of marrying such conflicting perspectives of the community of the school. As his speeches in assembly suggested, he struggled to reconcile the dominant view of ‘growing up’ into young adulthood with a recognition of students as empowered individuals in their own right. In the end, the influence of the year group system was much more extensive than any formal recognition of the agency of s­ tudents, and as a result this was by far the dominant of these two concurrent imaginings of age. The institutional structure of the school made it difficult to put ideas of active youth participation fully into practice; but this did not preclude them from

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existing as deeply embedded threads in the formally legitimated ‘vision’ of the school. In Chap. 4, the concurrence of seemingly paradoxical age imaginaries in the classroom is also evident. In the example of Year 7 PDC I considered how students are imagined at once as children, positioned statically in an ‘innocent’ time of childhood, and as children on the cusp of ‘growing up’ to be young people and adults. Stasis and progress compete as ideas that drive their formal interactions with their teachers, with one another, and with the curriculum. In the case of Year 11 Citizenship the contradiction lies in the fact that the school is capable of presenting students with an ideal modernist vision of civically engaged ‘youth’ in the Citizenship curriculum, while at the same time doing so under conditions that illuminate the true extent to which these particular young people are marginalised and made incapable of achieving this ideal. The uncomfortable truth of these conflicting but concurrent imaginings of age is borne out in the frustrations, outbursts, retrospective justifications and raw fears that students like Steven, Adrian and Frank express as they come closer to the end of compulsory education, and to the beginning of an uncertain adulthood. The narratives of teachers and pupils alike reveal their awareness of how known taxonomies of age are forged in the day-­ to-­day schooling, and their own complicity in this process (Mrs. Garrison’s ‘gaps in the day’, for example). They also reveal a heightened reflexivity about the complexity of age as part of their interactions with one another. In Chap. 5, I argue that concurrent but sometimes contradictory imaginings of age emerge as students make sense of their informal social relationships with one another. The powerful influence of the year group structure is evident in the age-based limits and restrictions that are placed on social interaction between years (and particularly with younger students); but students are also capable, when necessary, of imagining age in alternate ways to account for relationships (like those of Sam and Hannah) that do not fit neatly with this structure. Simultaneous to this, however, students like Sam also show how it is possible to engage with broader discourses of youth (in his case ‘hooded youths’) in order to make sense of other transgressions of the year group hierarchy, such as the actions of the boys in 7B, that are not considered to be favourable. In this way stu-

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dents show that it is possible to maintain an imagining of age in school that is predicated on the inviolability of the year group system, while at the same time engaging in practices that fundamentally undermine its hierarchy. Class plays an important role in shaping how age is understood as the lens through which social order is viewed. At Lakefield, older students identify ‘chavvy’ younger students as those most likely to undermine the sensible order of the year group system. The challenge of younger pupils is used to reflect on wider concerns about the apparent crumbling order of society. Similarly, students within year groups live different lives and progress towards different outcomes after schooling based along classed lines that also reflect different experiences of educational success and failure. Those in Year 11, anticipating adult life just weeks away, are obliged to imagine age in ways very different to their age-mates bound for Sixth form or college. The way that the school and the curriculum are organised facilitates this experience of living together, apart. In Chap. 6, I show that in the lives of the ‘younger teachers’ at Lakefield there are also concurrent but contradictory imaginings of age that must be reconciled. These can be perceived most readily in the ‘balancing acts’ that characterise imagining age for younger teachers in the classroom, in terms of convincingly ‘acting out’ the qualities ascribed to their ‘adult’ roles (maintaining authority, control and respect) while also recognising that their status as ‘younger’ teachers affords them particular kinds of relationships with students (and particularly chronologically older students) based on an alternate but concurrent imagining of their age (their ‘friend-like’ status as almost-equals). Finding the delicate equilibrium between these two imaginings of age is for some younger teachers (like Jeff) one of the more challenging parts of their professional lives. One way, then, in which age is negotiated at Lakefield School, is through the ongoing process of reconciling concurrent but sometimes contradictory imaginings of age for young adult teachers living in the visceral uncertainty of later modernity. Rather than seeing this interplay in terms of a straightforward binary of imposing or resisting known age imaginaries, I want to suggest that the true complexity of negotiating age in this school context lies in the occurrence of both, at the same time, all the time.

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 egotiating Age Relationally: Mutual Respect, Trust, Authority N and Control It is important to emphasise, however, that I am of course not merely discussing age imaginaries as ideas that exist only in the abstract, or in the imaginary. Because these concurrent and contradictory imaginings of age are also being negotiated between real people it is crucial that our understanding of age imaginaries remains grounded in daily social practice (Strauss 2006). Making sense of contradictory but concurrent ideas of age in this sense is inextricably tied to the relational processes through which staff and students interact with one another in order to imagine age. This involves a give and take between students and teachers that is often articulated in relation to notions such as respect, responsibility, trust, authority, control and, ultimately, power—of ‘looking up’ and/or being ‘looked down’ on. The degree to which particular imaginings of age can be reconciled within different school contexts is reflected in the extent to which teachers and students feel able (or unable) to gain trust and responsibility, to balance authority or control, and in the ways in which they frame mutual respect. In an institutional context predicated on discipline (Foucault 1977), pupils and teachers are regularly engaged in the hard work of finding common ground. Performance and narrative emerge as the means through which these notions are mediated in daily social practice. On one level the relational nature of negotiating age imaginaries is limited by the levels of authority and control that adults exercise in a school setting. In the final analysis Lakefield is like many other schools in terms of its hierarchical structure, meaning that staff have total and ultimate power at an institutional level. This power is invested in them both as teachers and as adults; and the former status is inseparable from the latter. As seen in Chap. 3, the structure of school life regulates and constrains imaginings of age by limiting the temporal and spatial dimensions of how students experience their lives as children and young people. This power also emerges in very real terms in the guise of the Ladder of Consequences, which despite the rhetoric of inclusion and active participation is designed and implemented in order to maintain the total con-

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trol of staff over students. More recent policy shifts towards ‘reasonable force’, isolation and exclusion (DfE 2017) reflect an entrenching of the power of adult teachers over the bodies and minds of the young people in their charge. The power of teachers to rein-in (and reign in) age imaginaries can also be seen in the extent to which students acquiesce in the systems of control imposed on their physical comportment during lesson time. However, the latter example also suggests that while in theory the authority and control of teachers is unyielding and total, in the mundane reality of daily life in school students occasionally exercise a considerable amount of power themselves. Moreover, individual teachers adopt different approaches to their exercise of power, and in significant ways this is related to imaginings of age. In Chap. 4, for example, this is made evident in the contestations of embodied age imaginaries during lessons. While some, like the boys in 7B, were sanctioned for transgressing the limits of ‘appropriate’ behaviour for Year 7, others, like Mrs. Garrison’s Year 11 class, were successful in forging new parameters for physical comportment. In the latter example, this was in part due to the fact that Mrs. Garrison imagined her Year 11s as being on the cusp of adulthood and therefore beyond such forms of control: instead, she was ‘on the level’ with them. Even more poignant examples of the relational negotiation of age can be seen in the similarities between Mrs. Garrison’s description of ‘gaps in the day’ and Hannah’s comments about how students must reconfigure imaginings of age depending on the approaches of different teachers. While teachers like Mrs. Garrison are using the gaps between lessons as moments in which they can shift between different performances of age for classes in different year groups—what I term moments of performative caesura—students are similarly using the interludes between classes in order to reposition themselves relative to how different teachers imagine age for their year group. So, while some teachers treat Hannah and her Year 10 classmates ‘like adults’, others are ‘disciplinarian’ and ‘look down’ on them, and it is important that students learn to act their age accordingly in different lessons if they are to avoid admonishments about ­‘appropriate’ behaviour (‘you’re Year 10 now!’). Equally, while some Year 7 classes interact with teachers in a way commensurate with dominant imaginings of age for their year group, others are willing to subvert and contest these

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categories and teachers (especially younger teachers) must steel themselves for the challenge that this represents to their own imaginings of age. In Chap. 4, we also see the importance of learning to act one’s age in the example of Year 7 PDC. Unlike the students in 7B, students in 7GB are actively aware of the ways in which they are expected to negotiate age in their interactions with teachers (either as innocent children or as nascent young people earning respect through displays of ‘maturity’ and ‘responsibility’) and so work hard to conceal moments when they act out age beyond the limits of these expectations. This can be seen in the forays of 7GB into ‘adult’ spheres online during their lesson on charity work. Digital media consumption is important as a means of allowing imaginings of age to take shape beyond the limits set by formal teaching and learning, but without explicitly transgressing the boundaries set by teachers. Ironically, by showing that they can act ‘responsibly’ and ‘mature’, students are able to make room for performances of age that are ‘adult’ in other ways. Students are able to (sometimes narrowly) avoid confrontations with teachers by contesting age imaginaries on the peripheries of classroom practice. On the other end of the spectrum, students in Year 11 Citizenship are frequently engaged in aggressive confrontations as a means of re-negotiating the boundaries by which age is imagined in their lessons. Here the lack of power afforded to these students because of their marginal position in the school is mediated in some ways by the control that they wrest from Mrs. Garrison in lessons; but in the end they are also conscious that their inability to act ‘appropriately’ with other teachers has significantly limited their educational outcomes for the future. In Chap. 6, the relational nature of age imaginaries is particularly evident because of the imagined social proximity between ‘younger teachers’ and their older students. The concurrent and potentially contradictory imaginings of age described above are therefore not only negotiated in the approaches to teaching adopted by younger staff members, but also in their reception by younger and older students. Students like Tanya and staff members such as Greg point out that authority is often conferred upon staff who are seen as ‘older teachers’, but this is not always because

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they adopt ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘disciplinarian’ approaches to relations with students. On the contrary, as Sam and Bryan suggest, it is the confidence of experience rather than a preoccupation with following ‘every rule’ that allows some older teachers to treat students more ‘like adults’, and therefore command authority and respect. Ironically, younger teachers are sometimes seen to fail in establishing mutual respect or authority in the classroom because they attempt to act out imaginings of ‘adult’ teaching personae based on a ‘disciplinarian’ stereotype. Sam’s and Bryan’s sage perspective of the ‘growing up’ that younger teachers still need to do in this respect is indicative of how older students are empowered, like ‘older teachers’, by virtue of the knowledge and experience that they have of negotiating age imaginaries in school. On the other hand, younger teachers are engaged as well in developing mutual respect and trust with students through performances of teacher identity that emphasise their ‘youth’. In order for such imaginings of age to work, younger teachers and older students must strike the delicate balance of trust and mutual respect that exists between ‘having a laugh’ and being ‘treated like an adult’—of developing ‘friend-like’ relationships—without transgressing the boundaries that ultimately structure student-teacher interactions. Within the staffroom younger teachers are also involved in negotiating age relationally with other members of staff who position them, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, within parallel frameworks of authority, control and respect. Just as younger teachers must navigate ideas of age in order to establish relations with students, so too must the ‘younger teachers’ negotiate positionality in their relations with older and chronologically younger members of staff. For some, this process establishes a strong sense of belonging; for others, it is a process of alienation. With these examples in mind, I want to argue that the interplay between different discourses of age is manifested in social practice through relational, negotiated processes of self-making between staff and students. Because of the concurrent but sometimes contradictory nature of age imaginaries, often this occurs through contestation—that is, through processes of negotiating the fit between different imaginings of age that do not always neatly match. While the structure of Lakefield places teachers in a position of inherent power, on a day-to-day basis this power— often articulated in terms of control or authority—is also mediated by

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the active participation of students in the life of the school. Trust, responsibility and respect are terms that are used to describe the processes by which power is brokered and shared between teachers and students. Age imaginaries are crucial to these processes because they provide a framework through which trust and mutual respect are figured and articulated. Students consider themselves ‘grown up’ or ‘mature’ enough to merit the trust and mutual respect of their teachers; or, alternatively, they equate being ‘treated like an adult’ with being shown appropriate respect and trust. Age imaginaries are in this respect a profoundly important element of the social interactions that make up the daily lives of students and teachers.

Multiple Imaginings: Negotiating Gender and Class The relational negotiation of age, however, does not occur evenly across all students and staff in the school. Age is also mediated by other factors, principal among which are gender and class. Throughout the thesis it is possible to see evidence of the ways in which age imaginaries are gendered. As Thorne suggests, it is important to recognise the active role that children (and young people) play in mediating what he calls the ‘active and ongoing process’ of socially constructing gender in school settings (1993: 4). As suggested in Chap. 1, Thorne’s use of the metaphor of ‘play’ to understand how children figure gender as part of daily life at school is also useful in the context of this study because the notion of ‘play’ is linked to the idea of self-imagination—of gendered imaginaries—and to the idea of ‘dramatic’ performance (1993). Just as the boys and girls in Thorne’s research ‘play’ with different notions of gender in order to position themselves in relation to one another, so too do students and staff at Lakefield negotiate performances of gender in order to imagine age. In Chap. 4, we are presented with clear evidence of the relationship between age imaginaries and gender in the example of the boys in 7B. In their attempts to counter the physical restrictions placed on them as Year 7s, the boys engage in discourse about being ‘bad’ as opposed to being a ‘baby’, and in so doing demonstrate the ideas of masculinity that drive their ideal vision of ‘growing up’. Negative associations are made with

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what they see as the ‘childlike’ qualities of being in Year 7—being helped with one’s clothes, being looked after or ‘mothered’ by teaching assistants, being helped with academic work—while behaviour associated with the profane world of adults—swearing, violence, sexual references—is ascribed positive meanings as a marker of social status within their peer group. Heterosexuality is privileged here as well, as being a ‘baby’ is also associated with being ‘a faggot’ (homosexual) by some of the boys. Imagining themselves as ‘bad’ by engaging in performances of ‘adult’ masculinities, the boys gain respect and admiration within their peer group, but the fact that these masculinities are transgressive within broader imaginings of age and gender for Year 7 (those that focus on childhood ‘innocence’) means that they also face sanction and punishment from teachers for acting ‘inappropriately’. Elsewhere in Year 7 gender also emerges as a theme. In Chap. 4, the girls in 7GB show that they are aware of the kinds of imaginings of ‘adult’ femininity would not be ‘appropriate’ to perform in front of adults, and so instead play with ideas of gender on the outskirts of lessons when they think their teacher is not looking. In their curiosity about ‘boobs’ and the process of searching for images of ‘adult’ femininity online, the girls in 7B show that imagining age is inextricably tied to imagining the shifting parameters of gender. But they also show that gender (and sexuality) is actively negotiated by students (Montgomery 2009a): they are capable of presenting themselves as ‘innocent’ (childlike) girls when talking to Ms. Gibson, but reveal their ability to entertain more ‘adult’ imaginings of gender when her back is turned. In this sense gender is not only something that students ‘learn’ at school in a unitary or linear fashion. It is instead something, like age, that they learn to act in multiple and concurrent different ways (Thorne 1993; Butler 1999; McRobbie 1991). In the relationships that I describe between students and staff in other years, gender and sexuality emerge again as key factors underpinning age imaginaries. In Chap. 4 and in Chap. 6, I describe how Sophie makes sense of her relationship with younger and older students in terms of a shift from the role of ‘mother’ to ‘big sister’. This indicates the extent to which her narratives about age as an aspect of relations with students are also narratives about gender. By imagining herself in terms of the qualities associated with ‘mother’ and ‘sister’, Sophie anchors her imaginings of age within discourses of

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f­emininity and traditional ‘female’ roles in relation to children and younger people. Particularly with her older students, gender is a crucial factor influencing the kinds of imaginings of age that are possible. With older female students, Sophie is able to engage in ‘friend-like’ interactions that involve a social intimacy predicated on the gender exclusivity of ‘girl talk’ (‘talking about relationships and stuff’). Sophie recognises that the same levels of social intimacy are difficult if not impossible to maintain with male students, not least because of the issues that this raises in relation to current discourses of child protection. That is to say, Sophie finds it socially and professionally acceptable to develop strong personal relationships with older female students, but considers the same kinds of interactions with male students to be viewed as socially transgressive and imbued with sexual implications. While I do not put forward evidence for the case here, the same kinds of issues can be imagined in the relationships between younger male teachers and older female students. There is certainly room for further investigation on this theme. In Chap. 5, gender plays a key role in the imaginings of age negotiated between students. In the specific context of ‘going out’ with other people in school, for instance, gender is crucial in defining the age-based limits for social interaction. For male students (like Sam and Matt), it is more acceptable to go out with a younger girl than someone older—although going out with a girl two years below (i.e. too young) does present problems for them both. Arguably this dynamic is reflective of discourses of masculinity in terms of the power relations implicit between older male students and younger female students. The implication in Sam’s case is that having a younger girlfriend is ‘easier’ because she has not yet engaged in the kinds of activities—so-called ‘binge’ drinking, or going out at night—that he finds threatening and morally suspect about older girls. Janie, on the other hand, is involved with a much older man (not a student) because he embodies a number of the positive qualities associated with a particular masculine ideal (that school boys cannot achieve), relatively speaking: he is financially independent and takes her to McDonald’s and buys her phone credit; he has his own accommodation; and he has a car to take her away from her ‘boring’ hometown. While it is seemingly advantageous to be ‘going out’ with someone older for these reasons— because it marks an increase in status and a move towards the presumed

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independence of adulthood—Hannah and Emma point to the social stigma associated with a girl going out with someone in the year below (Hannah: If you hang around with another year, I mean, it’s like ‘Woah! Whoa, what are you doing!’ [laughter] Emily: Yeah, like if you go out with a Year 9!). Here again age is imagined in relation to gender because the social distance between years—in this case between Year 10 and Year 9—is in important ways figured by whether one identifies as male or female. As with the Year 7 boys above, such imaginings of age are also strictly heteronormative. Gender is also linked in important ways to class as an aspect of age imaginaries. Still focusing on Chap. 6, it is possible to see how Sam’s masculinity is threatened by the ‘hooded youths’ in other years (particularly the boys in 7B), who for him threaten the sanctity of the age hierarchy by physically and verbally challenging older male students. Here Sam is troubled by the inversion of the year group order, and, in turn, of the order of physical dominance between younger and older male students; but he is also troubled by the kinds of male students who make these incursions. Sam describes them as ‘hooded youths’, ‘chavs’ and children from ‘lone parent families’—all of which serve as markers of a negative stereotype of contemporary working-class British youth. Just as masculinity is at stake when the hierarchy of the year groups is troubled, so too is Sam’s masculinity embattled because those troubling the year group system are imagined as a threatening and transgressive ‘other’, the image of which is based in notions of class difference. Particular imaginings of age become intertwined in this sense with ideas about class: both in his year and in others, Sam describes another kind of young person existing alongside his imagining of himself as a ‘youth’. Often portrayed through consumption-based proxies for class, this ‘other’ youth are the ‘chavs’ in the school, marked as different not only because of their hairstyles, their clothes and their taste in music, but also for what these particular patterns of consumption represent (i.e. ‘hooded youths’). The values that Sam associates with this ‘other’ youth are in stark contrast to his own: while he imagines age-relations, in this context, in terms of respecting one’s elders and always ‘looking up’ to older years, he imagines the ‘chavs’ as undermining this neat vision of respectful hierarchy. On the other side of the playground, the ‘chavs’ are conscious of their marginalisation and

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remain uncomfortable about the extent to which they should be seen in these terms. Just as Steven recognises that girls from the ‘popular’ or ‘geek’ crowd won’t talk to him because they think he is a ‘chav’ (‘I seen this stuck up girl the other day, like Becky or whatever her name is… if I said something she’d probably say “Errrgh stay away you Chav!” or something’) so too are they conscious that outside school other people (including the police) also imagine and label them according to this class-based stereotype, and treat them accordingly. While class was not an easy marker of identity to define for students at Lakefield, and never a self-identifying category for students, it is also possible along similar lines to see how class underpinned the negotiation of age imaginaries presented in Year 11 Citizenship. In Chap. 5, I show how the students in Citizenship (mostly recognised by others as ‘chavs’) struggle throughout the year to reconcile the imaginings of age that frame their experiences during lessons. By failing to live up to the (middle-class) ideal of young adulthood presented to them in the curriculum, and also in the broader ‘vision’ of the school, students like Frank, Adrian and Steven were obliged to find other ways to imagine their age. For Frank this involved engaging in exactly the kinds of negative stereotypes of working-class youth put forward by Sam, even if these were not necessarily reflective of the reality of his options for the future. When asked what he will do when he finishes school, Frank mentions ‘getting drunk’ and ‘going on the dole’ as ambitions for adult life. He does so at least in part simply to get a rise out of Mrs. Garrison, his teacher, by playing on class-­infused discourses of ‘anti-social’ youth. But here also is an indication of what futures he imagines might be expected of him (if not the reality of his options) as he enters the precarious social world of young adulthood two years before those (predominantly middle-class) students moving in to the sixth form. For others like Adrian and Steven, reconciling their marginal position involved attempting to retrospectively tell the story of their final months in terms of narratives of ‘knuckling down’—even if the reality of their experiences at the end of compulsory education, and their ultimate educational outcomes, would not reflect this late attempt to fulfil the ‘vision’ of the school. I want to argue here, then, that age is negotiated at Lakefield in relation to gender and class, and that gender in particular has a vital role to play in framing how age is imagined in ­similar and different ways by male and

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female students and staff. Class is much more difficult to pin down in the context of Lakefield, finding its most explicit articulation in narratives about ‘troubling’ youth, in the relative educational ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of students and in discourse about consumption-based proxies for class. While the relationship between class and age imaginaries is therefore more complex and difficult to unravel, it is nevertheless evident that age is imagined in very different ways relative to the notions of class, or class-byproxy, that students claim for themselves and for others. It is important to note that in this respect age imaginaries are classed not only in relation to action in the present but also with reference to imagined futures. An anticipated difference in future trajectories reflects class-based imaginings of adulthood that await ‘chavs’ or ‘stuck up’ pupils in Year 11. This takes us neatly back to the school’s vision statement which, by way of reminder, promises to nurture ‘young adults equipped to succeed making a real and positive difference in a demanding and changing world’. Whether or not a student is seen to be completing this vision is closely linked to classinflected imaginings of what the immediate future will hold for persons coming to the end of the process of schooling in modern society. To summarise, we can clearly see that a number of similar patterns cut through the diverse and multiple approaches to imagining age explored in this book: (1) I argue that students and staff negotiated multiple, concurrent and often contradictory imaginings of age in order to make sense of the simultaneity of structural forces (or taxonomies of the known) and improvised, novel, creative action in the self-making process. The negotiation of the tension between these imaginings of age at once reveals the profound importance of taxonomies of age to the organisation of modern society, and also the precarious, momentary, uncertain qualities of age as experienced in everyday life at school. (2) Age is negotiated relationally between staff and students. The language of authority, control, trust, responsibility and respect provides a means for articulating the relational negotiation of age imaginaries as part of daily practice. (3) Age is negotiated in relation to gender, class and consumption-based proxies for class. Gender in particular is a vital aspect of imagining age. Running through all of these findings are the threads of narrative and performance. In each of the social contexts described, narrative and performance emerge as the primary means for articulating imaginings of age.

260 Conclusions

Challenges and Limitations In this book I have highlighted the proposed strengths of age imaginaries as a means for thinking about the concurrence and complementarity of both taxonomies of known age imaginaries and the novel and serendipitous imaginings of age that take place in the lived experiences of students and staff. The concept of age imaginaries is particularly useful in a school context because it allows us to recognise the long shadow cast into modern society by the age-based hierarchies that structure the school, while also illuminating the ways in which these hierarchies are negotiated and contested, but never completely subverted, in the daily lives of staff and students. Linked to this is the importance of acknowledging the fundamentally relational quality of age imaginaries, and of foregrounding the active and agentive participation of both students and staff in the processes by which age is negotiated. By linking the what of age imaginaries with how they are negotiated, it is possible to firmly ground ideas of age in the social practices (primarily seen in terms of performance and narrative) through which these ideas are articulated in social practice. I argue, then, that the combination of these different strengths makes the concept of age imaginaries a valuable starting point from which to better understand age as an aspect of life in Lakefield School, and potentially in other schools also. However, it would be short-sighted to suggest that the conceptual framework as employed here does not also present certain challenges. Arguably, the main strength of age imaginaries—the ability to recognise the complexity of the social practices taking place—is also a potential limitation. In attempting to construct a conceptual framework that can deal with the multiplicities of how age is imagined at Lakefield, I have purposefully tried not to limit the scope of inquiry, beyond the common threads of performance, narrative and negotiation that run through this book. While this approach lends itself to the collection of a rich and diverse array of data, and an equally diverse range of perspectives from which to consider this data, it also presents a challenge in terms of reconciling the representation of these multiple threads of analysis. In attempting to stay faithful to the complex and contingent nature of age as an aspect of social identity, the concept of age imaginaries itself also reveals the arduousness

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of presenting the whole picture of ‘age’. Just as age must be reined-in and made sense of at Lakefield, so too does age elude tight harnessing as an analytical concept—and this is a quality that should be celebrated. It is also important to recognise that in foregrounding age as the object of study in this research I have seen other important markers of social identity, such as gender and class, through the analytical prism that age provides. In this respect gender and class become a means for understanding age, and not the other way around. While I do not consider this to be a shortcoming of the research—age is, after all, my primary concern—it is important to emphasise that a focus on age should not diminish the significance of the relationship between other factors (in this case, in particular gender and class) as they intersect in the context of schooling (Rysst 2010). With these issues in mind, there are a number of other directions in which the findings from this research can be taken. It is important to recognise, for example, that this study has not dealt with race and ethnicity as factors in how age is imagined. In school contexts where ethnicity is an important marker of difference between students and staff, uncovering the relationship between notions of ethnicity and imaginings of age lends powerful insights to our broader understanding of age as a social phenomenon (Alexander 2017). Given the significance of the physical embodiment of age as an aspect of age imaginaries, valuable further research also remains to be done in the sphere of imagining age online. While touched upon briefly in Chaps. 5 and 6, this represents an avenue for research because the embodied and spatial limits of negotiating age face to face in school are removed, meaning that students and staff can imagine age in increasingly creative ways unanchored from tradition physical markers of age. A number of studies have begun to explore processes of negotiating age and other aspects of identity online (Boellstorff 2008; Livingstone 2009; Francis 2010; Miller et al. 2019). This book is also limited in its treatment of how pupils in particular imagine life after school and, more generally, how young people are socialised to imagine a particularly modernist vision of the future (Leccardi 2012). This is a theme that is implicit in discourses about age in school and emerges in multiple conversations (not least with Frank and his friends) about what will come after school. Elsewhere (2017, 2018) I have written at greater length about how the future is imagined through schooling. Research

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exploring new configurations of social identity in relation to the future (Facer 2013; Miller 2018) presents a particularly interesting avenue through which we may better understand how young people give meaning to their experiences of imagining age as they become young adults. Exploring experiences of real and anticipated futures through the lens of age imaginaries helps to capture how young people navigate the space between normative notions of age-based identity and their lived experiences of age in the process of transition (Alexander et al. 2019). It is also a powerful means to probe the important questions raised above about the future of schooling: if ‘the future’ to which life at school is oriented must be thought about in different ways, this too would demand a radical shift in how schooling is organised—and not least in relation to age.

Part II: School’s Out…Forever? The picture presented here of age imaginaries at Lakefield School raises some profound questions about the ways in which schooling is organised in the present. Why, we might ask, do schools in England remain so persistently linked to an age-based system of organisation? Given the increasingly complex ways in which childhood, youth and adulthood are imagined and experienced, is such a model of schooling fit for purpose any longer? How else might schooling be organised, if not in relation to age? I am not, of course, the first to raise these questions. There is a rich vein of sociological research, outlined earlier in this book, that points to the ways in which institutions of mass education are organised explicitly to engineer the reproduction of inequalities and to reinforce asymmetries of power. A short answer to the question of why age hierarchies persist in English schools is that they serve an important purpose in providing structure for the broader project of the modern nation-state. Just as it has been argued (Froerer 2009; Anderson 1983) that mass education is vital to maintaining the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state, so too are age-based hierarchies of knowledge and power necessary to reproduce what Lancy describes as the ‘gerontocracy’ of modern society. As we have seen, the age-based nature of schooling in this sense remains in tension with broader discourse about the agency of children, giving rise to the

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complex imaginings of age conjured at Lakefield School. Doing away with age as the organising principle for mass education would therefore have important consequences for wider society because it would lay open to critique a host of other structures—legal, political, economic and so on—that currently anticipate the docility of children and young people to the actions of adults. As an idea that helps to give sensible structure to the project of modernity, linear models of age-based social identity are perhaps simply too important to give up. What is more, moving away from age-based hierarchies in schools might also challenge the genealogical model of knowledge and cultural reproduction—the very idea of learning—that underpins current approaches to mass education (Ingold 2017). This would demand a fundamental reframing of what education looks like in schools, along the lines advocated by Dewey in the 1920s. What, we might ask, would be left of schooling if the genealogical model were to be abandoned, along with the age-based structures that normalise such an age-based, hierarchical approach to the transmission of knowledge and culture? There are of course models of mass education across the world that are not so rigidly linked to progression through year groups linked to chronological age as are English schools. And yet many if not all models of mass state schooling rely on a genealogical model of learning to give structure to their means of instruction and assessment. What means of schooling would, instead, facilitate education as a process of ‘commoning’, as outlined in Chap. 1? Whatever the structure, it would seem logical that such an approach would involve a move away from schooling as a process of disciplining, organised around age; and also that schooling should cease to be the preserve of children and young people but rather become a focus for lifelong learning. More than 50 years ago, Ilich (1971) famously advocated for the ‘deschooling’ of society in order to undo the adverse effects of institutionalisation—what Foucault (1977) might otherwise refer to as the imposition of technologies of discipline that are enacted through institutions like schools. Certainly, Ilich’s proposition to radically move away from schooling in its current form would also open up alternate avenues for learning on a mass scale that do not create as their project the development of neophytes into fully formed adult citizens, trained, but also schooled, to take their places in wider society. Or, fol-

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lowing Ingold (2017), it may be more prudent and more pragmatic to recognise that the complexity of contemporary societies now demands systems of mass education that can provide infrastructure for persons to become socialised and to benefit from the opportunities that a globalising society offers. The challenge remains, however, to do so in a way that no longer serves the project of modernity in its current neoliberal manifestation (Harvey 2005), but instead serves the common interests of young people and adults alike forging a more equitable world in which they all wish to live (Friere 1970). Also drawing on Dewey, Diane Reay (2011) argues compellingly for a democratisation of education that would reduce the social distance between individuals. Age is certainly one of the most powerful idioms of difference that is reproduced in schools. There is no space here to elaborate such a model in detail, but this remains a task of utmost importance for future research exploring how schooling is structured, and how schools may, in the future, socialise young people and adults into imagining age in new and enlightening ways. It is also important to note that in spite of the persistence of age-based hierarchies forged in schools, children and young people continue to demonstrate their capacity to challenge known taxonomies of age. Young people are starting to demand a new shift in generational relations that recognises the importance of young people in deciding the future of society. In exceptional cases this is reflected in the narratives of youthful, game-changing captains of industry, epitomised by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who in his early twenties leap-frogged the normal age hierarchy of the corporate world to radically transform social life and, in the process, to become a billionaire. The voice of the young is reflected in political movements such as the Arab Spring; the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong and the subsequent resistance of Chinese extradition laws and state violence; in the MeToo movement; and most recently in widespread ecological activism led by children and young people. The serious voices at the heart of these movements run contrary to an imagining of age in youth as a time of frivolity, vapid consumerism or apathy—the latter a particularly important aspect of imaginings of the so-called millennial generational identity. These voices also challenge the assumption that young people must bide their time in youth before they can arrive,

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fully formed, in adulthood, with ideas that are worthy of consideration. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist, for example, owes her notoriety in no small part to the fact that she has openly challenged the wisdom and ethical positioning of the most powerful adults in the political world. In a present where young people continue to demonstrate that they are at least as wise, thoughtful and worthy of positions of power as are adults, approaches to schooling based on age-based hierarchies of discipline and  taken-for-granted deference to adult superiors will likely become less and less easy to legitimate.

Another Year Ends This discussion brings us to the end of this book. It seems fitting that the concluding statements should return us to Lakefield School, this time at the end of the school year, at a point when the processes of imagining age described above are concluding, only to begin again with the passing of the summer months. In July, with the end of term looming into sight and the summer sun creeping in through open windows, the school is preparing for an array of transitions into new imaginings of age. What were wide-eyed new students months ago are now seasoned Year 7s about to end their period at the bottom of the school’s age-based hierarchy. Having passed through the ritual of Celebration Evening, they are gearing up for the new social relations and forms of interaction ushered in with the move to Year 8. The Year 9s, on the other hand, have made their options choices for Key Stage 4 and will soon be making the move into the next stage of compulsory education. Persons in Year 11 are absent, cocooned in the post-exam summer. Some will return to school a mere six weeks later, transformed into plain-clothed sixth formers who, suddenly conferred with the respect imbued to that year group, are allowed to come and go as they please, and call their teachers by their first names. Year 12 and 13 students, on the other hand, are preparing to make their first steps out of school and into the uncertain world of young adulthood. At the end of their first year, Newly Qualified Teachers are breathing a sigh of relief, or making other plans. For all at Lakefield, this is a time for anticipating transition.

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Some of my final interviews at Lakefield were conducted with Year 13 students briefly returning to school, in the process of their transition through end of year exams and beyond. Poised on the cusp of these changes and in the throes of negotiating new age imaginaries in the final liminal period of end-of-school, Tanya and Keisha reflected on the way that their experiences of age were changing. They were talking about the extent to which they felt like ‘adults’ now that they were finishing school, and reflected on the extent to which others also expected them to ‘act more mature’ because they were making this transition: Patrick: Do you think there’s a pressure to act more mature now [at the end of school]? Tanya: Yeah! Especially from parents…[in screeching ‘mother’ voice] ‘You’re Eighteen now!!!’ Like yeah! [laughter] Keisha: Yeah! And you get this thing where you choose how you’re going to be mature, right, with parents, OK, so last week you wanted to do this, and this week, you want me to give you the responsibility to go out and stuff, like, you know, we constantly want to change, so you want to be mummy’s little baby, you know ‘Oh I can’t do anything, I can’t do any work’ and then you’re like ‘Yeah, I’m going out and I’ll be back in 8 days time!’ [laughter] Tanya: Yeah! Like ‘Mum, can I have a lift home because it’s dark?’ and they’re like ‘You walked home at three O’clock yesterday morning!’ And you’re like [whining] ‘I need a lift!’ Keisha: It’s that thing where you’re constantly changing.

What was particularly revealing about their comments—and what makes this a fitting point of conclusion—is the fact that Tanya and Keisha were explicitly aware of the performative nature of age, of the creative ways in which they could imagine age in order to suit specific social contexts and social relations. Indeed, as a description of the ‘constantly changing’ nature of imagining age on the cusp of young adulthood, Keisha’s comments are evocative of the contested nature of age imaginaries as described throughout this study. It is telling that Keisha frames the ‘constantly changing’ nature of her imagining of age in relation to convincing her parents that she is ‘responsible’ enough to be treated as an independent adult. And yet there is still a desire to enjoy the benefits of dependency. The apparent contradiction between these two imaginings

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of age is mediated through the recognition that age is not a fixed aspect of social identity (‘you’re constantly changing’); it is instead something that can be actively and strategically negotiated, even if the results of negotiation are hard to predict. In order to do so, the girls draw on a range of different markers of discourses of age (and gender)—the nagging mother; the social and legal significance of being 18; the safety of being ‘mummy’s little baby’; the dependency implicit in being unable to work; the need for protection from the threats lurking in ‘the dark’, as opposed to the independence of being off the parental radar for ‘8 days’—in order to position themselves either as young people or as young adults about to complete the adventure of secondary education. In this sense these comments are also indicative of the extent to which the negotiation of age imaginaries is shaped relationally by both young people and adults as they dress and re-dress the boundaries of their positioning in relation to one another. Somewhere in the middle of these relational exchanges age is shaped, and although elusive, it can be glimpsed and briefly captured. It is this elusive, shifting quality that imbues the notion of age with such importance and makes it one of the fundamental but ever-changing benchmarks by which, in the context of modernity, we mark the passage of time in social life. Nowhere is this process more evident than in the warp and weft of everyday life at secondary schools like Lakefield.

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Index

A

Ability, 93 Academic achievements, 93 Acting, 58 Adolescence, 7, 8, 132 Adult authority, 151 ‘Adult’ content online, 132 Adulthood, 6, 10, 30, 81, 125, 132, 180, 203, 206, 238 Age-class, 101 Age grades, 12 Ageing, 5 Agency, 20, 54, 59–61, 78, 80, 97, 98, 100, 137, 246 Age sets, 12 A-Level, 92, 103 Anthropology of education, 34 Anti-school excitement, 141

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Alexander, Schooling and Social Identity, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5

Ariés, 15, 18 Assembly, 99 Authority, 60, 111, 146, 161, 202, 227–230, 250 Autonomy, 139 B

Balfour Act, 72 Behaviour, 99, 115, 120, 146, 147, 156, 161 Biography, 56 Biological, 6, 7, 15 Biopower, 49 Bodies, 49, 111 Bodily control, 113 Body, 49 Bourdieu, P., 47, 111 Butler Act of 1944, 75

285

286 Index C

E

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), 16 Chavs, 136, 167, 183, 186, 188, 197 Childhood, 6, 8–10, 15, 18, 28, 66, 122–123, 128, 129, 132 Children, 66 Children Act, 102 Chronological age, 172, 173, 179, 196, 222, 236 Citizens, 9, 10, 67, 70, 72 Citizenship, 71, 72, 110, 133, 137 Class, xxii, 30, 72, 133, 136, 163, 185–197, 258 Classroom, 110 Classroom practices, 118 Cognitive development, 8 Collective agency, 54 Coming of age, 24 Consumption, 16, 27, 28, 163, 203 Control, 60, 111, 161, 250 Cultural (re)production, 3, 24, 26 Cultural studies, 16, 23 Culture and Personality school, 12 Curriculum, 92–95, 153

Ecological activism, 34 Educational failure, 143 1870 Elementary Education Act, 71 Eisenstadt, S.N., 11 Embodied cultural capital, 121 Embodied imaginings of age, 119 Embodied practice, 59, 109, 111–112, 251 Emerging adulthood, 203, 204 Empowerment, 102 Erikson, E., 9 Ethnicity, 261 Ethnographies of education, 24 Ethnography, xiv, xix–xx, 30 Examinations, 94

D

Dewey, John, 13 Disciplinarian, 151, 228, 251 Disciplinary control, 110 Disciplinary institutions, 72 Discipline, 9, 60, 69, 73, 84, 111, 120, 139, 146, 161, 227–230 Discourse, 54 Disruptive behaviour, 134, 138 Drinking, 174 Durkheim, Emile, 79

F

Financial crisis, 103 Foucault, M., 8, 49 Freedom, 100, 153 Freud, S., 9 Friend, 249 ‘Friend-like’ relationships, 253 Friendships, 154, 171 Functionalist, 15, 26 Functionalist conceptualisations of age, 11 Future, 16, 33, 125, 147, 261 G

GCSEs, 92, 149 Gender, 29, 30, 32, 59, 117, 132, 148, 157, 162, 163, 175, 196, 197, 202, 227, 233, 254 ‘Genealogical’ model, 3, 13, 244

 Index 

Generation, 11, 13, 68, 212, 217, 236 Gerontocracy, 69 Gerontological, 49 Growing up, 122–123, 132, 175 H

Habitus, 53 Hadow, H., 74 Hierarchy, 88, 119 Higher Education, 103 Hoodie, 188 I

Imaginaries, 50, 61 Independent, 153 Infancy, 7 Infantilising, 216 Ingold, 14 Innocence, 31 Intelligence, 73, 76, 123 Interpretivist approach, 16 Intimacy, 154, 234 J

Jobs, 125 K

Knuckling down, 143 L

Learning outcomes, 125 Life course, 15

287

M

Mannheim, K., 13, 14, 67 Marginalisation, 137, 143 Marriage, 224 Mass education, 9, 10, 33, 76, 78 Mass schooling, 67, 68, 72 Mature, 124, 129, 130, 132, 155, 254 Maturity, 161 Mead, M., 12, 24 Media consumption, 27, 129, 214, 218, 236 Media culture, 27 Mental health, 103 Meritocracy, 71, 76 ‘Millennial’ youth, 34 Misrecognition, 59, 97 Mobile phones, 140 Modernist, 33, 244, 247 Modernity, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 34, 46, 49, 203, 204, 263 Moral panics, 133 N

Narrated, 109 Narrative, 45, 56–57, 163, 213, 244, 250 National Curriculum, 92 National identity, 10 Nation-state, 32, 51, 68, 70, 72 Negotiation, 31, 45, 56, 59–61, 244 Neoliberal, 54 Neo-liberalism, 32 Neontocracy, 70 Neurology, 7 Neuroscience, 8 Newly qualified teachers (NQTs), 209, 217, 220, 265

288 Index

‘New’ Sociology of Childhood, 17–20 ‘New wave’ of childhood studies, 20 1918 Education Act, 72 Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET), 77

Power and control, 148 Practice theory, 17, 48 Primary school, 124 Progress, 82, 95 Psychology, 11 Q

O

Ofsted, 99 Ontology of determinacy, 52

Qualifications, 92–95, 144 Quantum, 55 R

P

Paediatric medicine, 9 Parsons, T., 11 Perform, 109, 230 Performance, 30, 45, 56, 58–59, 231, 244, 250 Performative, 266 Performativity, 59 Personal Development Curriculum (PDC), 110, 112, 122–123, 248 Personhood, 5, 55, 102, 247 Persons, 49 Photographs, 91, 101 Physical control, 115, 119 Physical embodiment of age, 29 Piaget, J., 9 Playground, 165 Plowden Report, 76 Political engagement, 137 Pop culture, 27 Popular culture, 80, 220 Posthuman, 21, 55 Post-modern, 48 Power, 16, 29, 47, 54, 59, 60, 79, 96, 146, 214, 250, 252, 262

Race, 32, 261 Rationality, 13 Relational, 59, 157, 250 Relationally, 52, 55, 246 Relationships, 148, 155, 161 Respect, 60, 81, 84, 99, 102, 111, 161, 197, 202, 227–230, 250 Responsibility, 81, 83, 99–102, 126, 148, 153, 250 Responsible, 129, 144 Rights children, 126 Rite of passage, 70, 94 Ritual, 86, 101 Romantic, 173 Romantic life, 174 Rules, 177 S

School ethnographies, 28–32, 205 Schooling, 9, 22, 25, 65, 66, 69, 88 Schools, 29, 65, 68 Sensible, 132 Setting, 76 Sexuality, 117, 132 Sixth form, 89

 Index 

Social control, 65 Social identity, 45, 48 Social imaginary, 51 Social lives of students, 163, 196 Social media, 194, 214, 237 Social reproduction, 65 Social spaces, 165 Social structure, 47 Social theory, 53, 61 Sociology of education, 21, 24, 70 Space, 29, 88, 164–168, 197, 207 Staff, 208 Staffroom, 89, 208, 211 State, 49, 66 Story-telling, 56 Streaming, 76 Structural forces, 61 Student Voice, 80, 95–98 Subculture, 17 Success, 33 Symbolic interactionism, 21

289

Transmission, 13 Trust, 81, 83, 100, 153, 250 Tutor groups, 90–92 U

Uncertainty, 32, 206, 239 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 126 Universalist ideas of age, 10 ‘Universality’ of childhood, 11 V

Vision statement, xxi W

Well-being, 103 Work, 127, 141 Working hard, 144

T

Y

Taxonomies, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 72, 122, 247 Taxonomy of the known, 52 Technology of the self, 49 Teenager, 16 Teenage rebellion, 34 Thunberg, Greta, 34 Time, 29, 87, 88 Transitions, 94, 133, 140–143

Year 12, 152 Year 13, 153 Year Assembly, 92 Year groups, xxi, 85, 88, 89, 170 Younger teachers, 201, 222, 249 Youth, 6, 10, 16, 17, 21, 25, 26, 189, 193, 253 Youth culture, 26 Youth subcultures, 26