Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
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During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
This chapter is the first of three chapters which focus on research data based on interviews with staff working in schools and early years settings with food banks. The chapter explores how schools supply food to families, including where food comes from and how it is distributed to families. It is argued that schools use their knowledge of the local community to decide how food is given out, and the role of choice in affording families dignity. The ‘origin stories’ of the food banks are also explained, in order to consider in more depth why schools have decided to offer this provision. Central to this chapter is the concept of policy enactment which emphasises the importance of context. We discuss how context guides the operation of a school’s food bank, even though a policy is not being enacted in the strictest sense. Schools and early years settings can be vastly different, and this necessitates food bank provision on different scales and of different types.
The education sector has in recent years experienced significant challenges due to rising levels of need among communities, as families have struggled with poverty, including experiencing food insecurity during the cost-of-living crisis. This chapter outlines this context for the food banks in schools and early years projects by exploring existing research on the relationships between poverty and education, the impact of Covid and austerity, and how hunger affects learning and family stress. The literature on community food banks is also explored, including the key issues relevant to food banks in schools: the role of stigma, the social role of food and how food banks relate to the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for welfare.
This second chapter of findings explores the impact of having a food bank from the perspective of those who work in a school or early years setting. The impact is significant for many of the participants, but diverse, and goes far beyond an impact on children’s learning. This chapter explores how adults perceive the effect of families having regular access to free food on children’s learning, participation and motivation. The wider social impacts of receiving food and other goods, including how children are able to experience and enjoy ordinary childhood activities, are then examined. These are important in understanding the impact of food banks in schools, and can be seen as part of a school’s practices of inclusion. A third section of the chapter focuses on the impact of families, which is seen by teachers to be far more diverse than simply reducing hunger. School staff’s perceptions of families include some deficit discourses, and it is argued that these form part of a continued deserving/undeserving poor narrative that persists. This points to the complexity of food banks as a social practice, but it is argued that schools are well placed to understand and cater for these needs.
In this concluding chapter, the wider policy implications of food banks in schools are discussed. Returning to the central argument relating to the responsibilisation of schools to address the problem of child poverty, the chapter begins an exploration of staff views of food banks as a phenomenon. The impact on budgets and staff, and the lack of recognition for this work within accountability systems are also discussed. The lack of policy in this area for schools is a key point in this chapter. Tools from policy sociology relating to policy enactment are insufficient to understand this topic, and require some evolution to consider how schools act when faced with a policy vacuum. The issue of responsibility is then considered in more depth, as the focus shifts to whether the argument made in relation to public food banks and the withdrawal of the state applies to school food banks. This leads to an argument for a more nuanced understanding of how responsibilisation is operating within the neoliberal state. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how we might conceptualise educational responses to the cost-of-living crisis, and why this research matters in terms of how we view schools and welfare state.
This third chapter of research findings explores how leaders balance the advantages of operating a food bank with the additional costs, beginning with a discussion of the impact on home–school relationships. This includes discussion of how difficulties can arise in relationships. Justifications for the food banks are examined here, drawing on both moral and practical reasons. Schools offer a practical solution, in that parents attend the site regularly and there is reduced stigma. School leaders are pragmatic about their unique position as the service which sees children regularly, arguing that if they did not provide food, no one would. This chapter examines the ambiguity of feeling about stepping beyond education into welfare-related work, and the complexities of decision-making around what can and should be done by schools.
This book is about how growing levels of child poverty have resulted in schools and early years/early childhood settings stepping beyond their educational purpose to feed hungry families during the cost-of-living crisis. Schools, nurseries, nursery schools and pre-schools offer free food to families experiencing food insecurity through food banks which operate on-site, in various forms. This chapter sets out our rationale for the research, which relates to the cost-of-living crisis in the early 2020s, and some background on the primary and early years education sectors. The chapter then sets out the theoretical framework for our analysis, and discusses the key concepts of enactment and responsibilisation. The research design and methods are then outlined. A final part of the chapter sets out the structure of the remaining chapters.
The transition from full-time education to full-time employment is assumed to have become much more precarious, as the transition is not guaranteed, desires can be left unfulfilled and, in some cases, the school leaver can remain in a state of permanent childhood, or permanent liminality, living at home with parents in a state of dependency. The role of character education is to mitigate learner subjectivity as a source of disorder. This chapter examines the emergence of both the therapeutic and enterprising discourses within an educational context and suggests that with the emergence of ‘character education’ it is possible to identify therapisation as a discursive form of power. Character education is based on the assumption that the transmission of working-class parents’ cultural capital, particularly concerning school, is problematic and needs to be countered. Character education has a prescriptive ethical moral content, depriving the learner of their right to their own purposes and limiting their capacity to resist change. Attempting to take away the learners’ reasonable entitlement to decide their purposes, and limiting their capacity to resist change, is surprising, given that the word ‘resilience’ is a central feature in the rhetoric of character education.
This chapter presents three descriptive case studies of state secondary schools in affluent circumstances. Findings from the studies suggest that in effective schools, school leadership teams are geared up in the art of stagecraft and successfully present their achievements in a positive light in relation to quality benchmarks. The leadership of the schools have a clear understanding of what constitutes school effectiveness and can articulate this to an Ofsted inspection team, and support their claims with reference to relevant data. External factors for the success of the school, such as the affluence of the population and the number of graduates per head of population in the surrounding area, are not addressed by the inspection teams. Positive Ofsted inspections focus on the acceptance by learners of following the school uniform policy, and their general appearance, as evidence of a strong school culture. The ability of the school to present a convincing account showing that the actions of the school are ‘caring’ and conducive to building character is also regarded as evidence of a strong school culture. Effective schools present an image of themselves underpinned by statutory regulations, compliance, rules, and protocols in which teachers are expected to take responsibility for learners’ learning.
According to the research in the field, there are several key indicators of school effectiveness: school capacity and ability to build capacity; a strong and supportive school culture/climate/ethos; and strong leadership. This chapter presents three descriptive case studies of state secondary schools in challenging circumstances, focusing on the policies of the schools, their mission statements and contents of the school website, the Ofsted inspection reports, and any published responses to the reports. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how school inspectors report on the effectiveness of the school and the evidence they present to support their judgements. School policies may not be an accurate reflection of day-to-day life in the school, but they are organising principles that reflect the school’s goals and the assumptions the school makes about the right approach to achievement, character, and inclusion and how it would like the school community to be seen to function. The argument explored from investigating the case studies is that there is a correspondence between what is expected of schools, the control function exercised on schools, and the underpinning assumptions of much school effectiveness research and neoliberal education policy and practice.
