Experiencing a ‘Special’ Education

Abstract

Parents in Britain, and indeed much of the Western world, can assume their child will be educated, and that the education provided will probably be carried out within a school. It is part of the socialisation process. For parents in this study, education provision is not a straightforward process whereby the child goes to school, engages with a curriculum and learns how to develop intellectually and conform to and manage social norms. Parents in this study have children who do not merge easily into this social world.

Educational success becomes a function of social, cultural and material advantages in which mothers’ caring within the family is transmuted by the operations of the wider marketplace to serve its competitive, self-interested, individualistic ethos. Mothers’ practical maintenance, educational and emotional work underpins the workings of educational markets, contributing to a culture of winners and losers within which one child’s academic success is at the expense of other children’s failure.

(Reay, 1998: 165)