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From redistribution to recognition to

representation: social injustice and the
changing politics of education
a
Sally Power
a
School of Social Sciences , Cardiff University , Wales , UK
Published online: 23 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Sally Power (2012) From redistribution to recognition to representation: social
injustice and the changing politics of education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10:4,
473-492, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2012.735154

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 Globalisation, Societies and Education
Vol. 10, No. 4, November 2012, 473
492

From redistribution to recognition to representation: social injustice

and the changing politics of education
Sally Power*
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
(Received 17 June 2011; final version received 24 September 2012)
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This paper attempts to analyse current developments in education through

exploring shifts in the politics of education over time. Rather than looking
at education policy in terms of political provenance (left or right) or
ideological underpinnings (the state or the market, the public or the
private), the paper compares education policies in terms of the domains of
social injustice which they address. Based on Nancy Fraser’s theorisation
of different kinds of social justice, the paper uses examples from England
to show how the politics of education have sequentially attempted to
address injustices in economic, cultural and political domains. This has
resulted in a changing orientation from a politics of redistribution to a
politics of recognition and, in recent years, to a politics of representation.
This approach reveals the complexity of educational inequalities and
the fragility and incomplete nature of strategies to address them. It also
provides a fruitful framework for the comparative analysis of the politics of
education which can link the detail with the bigger picture.
Keywords: education policy; social justice; Nancy Fraser; redistribution;
recognition; representation

Introduction
The politics of education lie at the heart of attempts to make societies more just.
Unlike other areas of social policy, education is paradoxically situated as not
only one of the main causes of inequality, but also the solution to these very
same inequalities. Charting changes in the politics of education can, therefore,
tell us about the continuing failure of education systems to reconcile these two
dimensions. Following the changing focus of these politics can also reveal
something about the complex nature of inequalities which underpin this failure.
There are already some excellent accounts of how education policy in the
UK has changed. Jones (2003), for example, provides a sophisticated account
of the relationship between education policy and the wider socio-economic
context in the four countries of the UK. Tomlinson (2001) has sought to
provide a detailed coverage of different reports, acts and research in England.

*Email: powers3@cardiff.ac.uk

ISSN 1476-7724 print/ISSN 1476-7732 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2012.735154
http://www.tandfonline.com
 474 S. Power

And Ball (2008) has provided a compelling sociological analysis of the

changing discursive terrain of education since 1870.
This narrative does not seek to replicate or challenge these accounts. It tries
to take a slightly different approach and look beyond conventional accounts
which are structured around ‘regimes’ of policy (social democratic, neoliberal,
etc.), policy ‘eras’ (e.g., post-war settlement to post-welfarism) or political
flavour (‘old’ left, ‘new’ right, etc.).
This paper explores policies not in terms of their political provenance or
ideological underpinnings, but in terms of the different kinds of educational
injustice which they seek to tackle. In so doing, it also moves beyond accounts
of policy which see concerns with social justice as being the prerogative of the
left rather than the right, of the state rather than the market. Drawing on Nancy
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Fraser’s (2008) analyses of social injustice, this paper starts from the premise
that the majority of policies can be seen as attempts to make education less
unequal, but that the ways in which this is to be done embody different
assumptions about what counts as a socially just education system and the
obstacles which prevent this from being realised.
Approaching policy from this direction provides a different lens for looking
at the relationship between policies, inequalities and social justice. It also
facilitates comparisons across national contexts where the specificity of
political traditions and affiliations can cause ‘interference’. This potentially,
I shall argue, will make it possible to begin to link the detail of specific policies
with the bigger picture of change and continuity in the politics of education.
The next section outlines the theoretical framework of the paper and in
particular the different kinds of social injustices which the politics of education
have tried to address. It then goes on to illustrate how, since 1944, England has
seen a move from a politics of redistribution to a politics of recognition to a
politics of representation.

An analytical model of social injustices

This analysis draws on Nancy Fraser’s (2008) theorisation of the bases of social
injustice.1 Her earlier iterations of the model (Fraser 1997) were built around a
twofold distinction between cultural and economic injustices. More recently,
she has added a third kind of injustice which she argues cannot be reduced to
either the cultural or the economic domain, but which is essential if what she
calls ‘participatory parity’ is to be realised
that of political injustice.
The division of injustices into distinct domains has been highly contested,
particularly by those who would argue that they are indivisible (e.g., Young
2008) or that the cultural has been ‘reduced’ to a form of identity politics (e.g.,
Butler 2008). Fraser herself acknowledges that these different injustices rarely
exist in their ‘pure’ forms, but she contends that there are heuristic advantages
in disentangling them. Moreover, she argues that disentangling the different
domains of injustice is crucial if we are to understand the match (or mismatch)
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 475

between inequalities and strategies to address them. Indeed, she goes so far as
to argue that inappropriate political responses can compound injustices.
Economic injustices, Fraser argues, involve exploitation (having the fruits
of one’s labour appropriated for the benefit of others); economic margin-
alisation (being confined to undesirable, poorly paid work
or having access
to none); and deprivation (being denied an adequate material standard of
living). These injustices require a politics of redistribution which attempt
to reduce the obstacles caused by socio-economic inequalities through
either eliminating economic barriers or reallocating resources to redress the
deficit.
Cultural injustices, on the other hand, include cultural domination (being
subjected to patterns of interpretation and communication that are associated
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with another culture and are alien and/or hostile to one’s own); non-recogni-
tion (being rendered invisible by means of authoritative representational,
communicative and interpretative practices); and disrespect (being routinely
maligned or disparaged in stereotypic public cultural representations and/or in
everyday life situations).2 These injustices require a politics of recognition.
This can involve strategies of affirmation
whereby misrecognised groups
attempt to invert their low status and affirm the value of their previously
‘despised’ identity. Or, it can involve attempting to deconstruct the categories
which underpin status distinctions between groups and which generate the
misrecognition.
Political injustices are connected to economic and cultural injustices.
Maldistribution and misrecognition will inevitably limit people’s capacity to
engage in all kinds of civic and political activity. Nevertheless, Fraser contends
that while there are close connections between domains, political injustices
can exist over and above economic and cultural ones. These injustices reside
in ‘the nature of the state’s jurisdiction and the decision rules by which it
structures contestation’ (Fraser 2008, 278). They contribute to marginalisation
and misrepresentation (whereby political decision rules wrongly deny some the
right to participate in decision-making) and misframing (where some members
and groups are deemed outside the legitimate political community).
Olson (2008), in his analysis of Fraser’s definitions of political injustice,
argues that a politics of representation (which he refers to as inclusion) can be
developed along two directions. It can be based on a narrow reading which
includes the right to participation in terms of pursuing individual projects
(choice) and on broader readings which can include the right to pursue
collective goals (politics more conventionally defined). Olson (2008) charts
some of the distinctions between Fraser’s different dimensions of injustice as
shown in Figure 1.
The following section draws out the relevance of these domains and
remedies for education. It shows how the politics of education have tried to
tackle injustices in different domains with different kinds of remedies. If,
as Fraser (2008, 277) argues, ‘Overcoming injustice means dismantling
 476 S. Power

Domains of Conditions for Forms of social Forms of Remedies

justice participatory differentiation injustice
parity
Economic Objective Class Maldistribution Redistribution
condition
Cultural Intersubjective Status Misrecognition Recognition
condition
Political Public-political Citizenship Marginalisation Inclusion
condition

Figure 1. Fraser’s threefold schema of social justice (Olson 2008).

institutionalized obstacles to participatory parity’, then we can compare how

different kinds of policies have progressively sought to dismantle different
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kinds of institutionalised obstacles.

The analysis shows that since the Second World War there has been a slow
but recognisable shift in the politics of education. There has been a move from
attention being directed at obstacles in the economic domain through a politics
of redistribution, to obstacles in the cultural domain being tackled with a
politics of recognition, to more recent attempts to tackle obstacles in the
political domain with a politics of representation.3
In developing this narrative, I do not want to suggest that the shifts have
been abrupt. As can be seen in Figure 2, there is considerable overlap
of political approaches at any point in time. I want to argue that these shifts
have been gradual and sliding and reflect far deeper undercurrents than the
waves and tides of political party changes. Indeed, they reflect ongoing
attempts to address the deep and intractable problems within education
systems.4

A politics of redistribution
If the main obstacle to educational justice is economic maldistribution, then
it follows that this can only be adequately addressed through a politics of
redistribution. This kind of politics dominated in the years after the Second
World War when education policies designed to tackle inequalities took two
principal directions
the removal of financial barriers to provision and the
reallocation of resources.

Removing financial barriers

At the time of the Second World War, the endurance of inequalities in
education was explained in terms of social class inequalities. A particular
concern was the lack of resources which barred working-class children from
having access to appropriate secondary school provision. Proposals for
educational reconstruction were put in place whereby, ‘the nature of a child’s
education should be based upon his capacity and promise, not by the
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 477

Redistribution Recognition Representation

1944 free secondary

education

1960s educational comprehensive

priority areas schools

1970s multi-cultural
education

assisted special
1980s places needs parental choice
scheme
grant-maintained
schools
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1990s

raising
aspirations education
2000s action zones

2010 ‘Big society’

‘free’ schools

Figure 2. From redistribution to recognition to representation.

circumstances of his parents’ (White Paper 1943, 20). This resulted in the 1944
Education Act which was designed to ‘neutralise’ the impact of wealth on
educational outcomes through extending the school leaving age to 15 and, for
the first time, providing free secondary education for all.
The 1944 Education Act was radical in that it ensured that secondary
education ceased to be a minority privilege and instead became a right for all
children. However, the Act did not seek to challenge the cultural status quo
which held that different kinds of pupils needed different kinds of schools.
As the influential Norwood Report (1943, 4) put it: ‘In a wise economy of
secondary education pupils of a particular type of mind would receive the
training best suited for them’. This ‘wise economy’ involved a tripartite
arrangement of secondary grammar, technical and modern schools and the
‘types of mind’ were to be assessed through an examination at 11 years old
(the ‘11 plus’), which offered ‘a neutral means of assessing the aptitudes of
children from deprived backgrounds and of allocating them to appropriate
schools’ (Thane 1982, 204).
Thus, while the 1944 Act had addressed one economic injustice through
removing the obstacle of financial barriers to secondary education, it gave
access only to a highly differentiated form of secondary schooling. And by the
1960s it was apparent that the provision of formal equality of opportunity had
not equalised educational outcomes between rich and poor (Newsom Report
 478 S. Power

1963). Large social class differences remained in the kind of school attended,
school leaving age, qualifications and subsequent career paths.
The 1944 Education Act showed that simply removing financial barriers
was not sufficiently strong to remove the impact of economic injustices on
educational inequalities. It allowed formal access, but without tackling the
underlying economic inequalities which meant that middle-class parents and
their children would always be privileged in the race for grammar school
places. It became clear that redistributive mechanisms would have to be more
radical than simply removing financial barriers.

Reallocation of resources
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Compensatory education policies can be seen as a more radical attempt to

redress some of the economic injustices which contributed to educational
inequalities. In England, compensatory education programmes emerged out of
two highly influential reports
those of the Newsom Report (1963) and in
particular, the Plowden Report (1967).
The Plowden Report was based on substantial evidence of the impact of
socio-economic deprivation on children’s education. It drew attention not only
to poverty in the home and the neighbourhood, but also to poverty in the
schools themselves:

We noted the grim approaches; incessant traffic noise in narrow streets; parked
vehicles hemming in the pavement; rubbish dumps on waste land nearby; the
absence of green playing spaces on or near the school sites; tiny playgrounds;
gaunt looking buildings; often poor decorative conditions inside; narrow
passages; dark rooms; unheated and cramped cloakrooms; unroofed outside
lavatories. (1967, 50
1)

In order to address these issues, the Report recommended that schools serving
poor communities needed even more resources than those in advantaged
areas:

Schools in deprived areas should be given priority in many respects. The first
step must be to raise the schools with low standards to the national average,
the second quite deliberately to make them better. (Plowden Report 1967, 51;
my emphasis)

Following the publication of the Report, the first major programme of

compensatory education began. Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) were
identified in the late 1960s which led to 150 building programmes in 51 local
authorities, plus 572 schools that were recognised for giving their teachers
special payments for the more difficult teaching conditions. In this way, it was
hoped that economic deprivation in the home would be compensated for by the
reallocation of funds to privilege the disadvantaged.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 479

The decline of redistributive politics

Despite the optimism of the post-war years, the removal of financial barriers
to secondary education and compensatory education programmes had failed
to make significant reductions in educational inequalities. And as the 1970s
progressed, redistributive policies declined as the principal strategy for tackling
injustices. It would be a mistake to think that they died out altogether. The
Assisted Places Scheme (1980
1997) can be seen as a later attempt to allocate
resources in favour of children from poor families. Through providing state
funding for academically able children from poor families to attend prestigious
private schools, the Scheme removed the financial obstacle which prevented
children being able to access ‘appropriate’ secondary school provision (see
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Edwards, Fitz, and Whitty 1989). There is also a redistributive dimension in

most funding calculations used to allocate local authority and school budgets,
which contain a weighting for different dimensions of socio-economic
disadvantage. However, even these very weak aspects of redistribution have
declined. The assisted places scheme has been closed altogether and devolved
school budgets have made the local authority distribution of funding less
significant than it once was.
The general consensus is that the redistributive policies of the post-war
decades failed to make significant inroads into educational inequalities. There
are different explanations, though, as to why this might be the case. Some
argue the redistribution simply did not go far enough. Banting (1985, 291), for
example, in his detailed analysis of the politics surrounding the implementa-
tion of the EPA project, argues that its proposals ‘ran into sharp conflict with
the institutional structure of education, and in the end the proposal was
fundamentally remoulded to fit the existing contours of administrative and
political life’. It was, he concludes, ‘but a pale reflection of the original idea’
(1985, 291
2).
Smith (1987) argues that the EPA policy suffered from too many internal
inconsistencies. Our understanding of the nature of educational inequalities
became more complex
partly as a result of immigration. At the time that the
Newsom and the Plowden reports were being written, increasing numbers of
children from migrant families were appearing in schools
first from the
Caribbean (referred to as the West Indies in contemporary literature) and
followed by families from Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uganda
(see Modood and May [2001] for an account of this period).
But even though compensatory education programmes were largely
targeted at inner-city areas, race or ethnicity rarely features within the policy
discourse. As Winkley (1987, 45) argues, the challenges of immigration were
largely enclosed ‘under larger umbrellas of inner city deprivation’. Although
the Plowden Report does contain a chapter on the ‘Children of Immigrants’, it
adopts what Modood and May (2001) identify as one of the main approaches
to migrants at the time
that of colour-blindness. It claims simply that:
 480 S. Power

Most experienced primary school teachers do not think that colour prejudice
causes much difficulty. Children readily accept each other and set store by
other qualities in their classmates than the colour of their skin. (Plowden Report
1967, 69)

Another explanation for the move away from a politics of redistribution might
lie in the unanticipated and unintentional consequences of redistributive
policies. Fraser (1997) argues that the ‘surface reallocation’ of resources can
increase group differentiation and generate stigmatisation through making
disadvantaged communities the focus of ‘special attention’. Basil Bernstein
(1971, 192), in his influential paper ‘Education cannot compensate for
society’, argued that:
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The concept ‘compensatory education’ implies that something is lacking in the

family, and so in the child. As a result the children are unable to benefit from
schools. It follows then that the school has to ‘compensate’ for the something
which is missing in the family and the children become little deficit systems.

From this perspective, it is not that the redistribution was insufficient, but
rather that it is premised on a deficit view of inner-city families and their
communities. Indeed, from this angle, a politics of redistribution constitutes
in itself a form of cultural injustice.
Some critics from the left argued that far from being designed to help poor
communities, EPAs were actually about controlling them. The CCS (1981),
in a section subtitled ‘Educational priority areas and the tightening of state
planning’, claims that the, ‘EPA experiment was an early educational . . .
demonstration that increased corporate management of state facilities . . . had
necessitated finding new ways to ‘‘involve’’ the state’s neediest ‘‘clients’’, both
for its own information and its own protection’ (126).
Perhaps, it might be argued, the injustices experienced by inner-city
children, parents and their communities, needed a different kind of political
response. Perhaps the obstacles to making education a vehicle for a better
society lay not in the economic disadvantage of social class background, but in
the cultural domain.

A politics of recognition
At the 1980s progressed, there was growing awareness that the main obstacles
to educational inequality were cultural injustices. This was reflected and
reinforced by a range of studies which pointed to the ways in which different
aspects of the education system (school types, internal organisation, teachers’
attitudes, curriculum, etc.) contributed to the educational injustices. Far from
being part of the solution, schooling became part of the problem. The answer
was not to make education more widely available but to challenge its inherent
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 481

cultural injustices. And this would involve a politics of recognition rather than
redistribution.
Removing the obstacles to justice in the cultural domain can take two
forms. One strategy is to try to dissolve the categories which create the group
differentiation which leads to misrecognition. Another is to reallocate respect
to previously marginalised and stigmatised identities/groups through affirma-
tion
making visible ‘hidden’ populations and challenging negative stereo-
types of the ‘despised’.

Deconstructing categories
As we have seen, the 1944 Education Act made secondary education freely
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available to all. However, it was a highly differentiated form of provision

with those who passed the 11 plus exam going to the high-status grammar
school and those who failed, the majority, going to the secondary modern.
Although there have been many debates about the driving forces behind
the introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960s (Ford 1969), an
important factor was the need to overcome the cultural injustice created by the
early categorisation of children into educational ‘successes’ and educational
‘failures’.
Pedley (1969, 115), a keen proponent of comprehensive schools, decried
a system ‘which has automatically dashed the self-respect of the majority of
children, and for some has destroyed it’. It is not just that the tests which
children took were increasingly seen to be inefficient and inaccurate,
it is ‘the human wrong done by compulsory segregation at eleven plus,
because that is by far the most important consideration’ (Pedley 1969, 115). He
writes of the damage of failure and the ‘deep humiliation’ of those who ‘must
for ever accept that early stamp: ‘‘Inferior quality
reject’’’ (Pedley 1969, 113).
The damage of categorisation is also one of the main arguments
surrounding the reorganisation of ‘special education’ from the 1980s onwards.
Prior to the 1980s, children with special needs were diagnosed within a
complex categorisation of disability. In addition to a specified list of physical
handicaps, children were ‘delicate’, ‘maladjusted’ or ‘educationally subnormal’
(mild or severe). These different categories of children were generally educated
in segregated institutions.
The Warnock Report (1978), which was tasked to make recommendations
about the situation, complained about the stigmatisation of children which
resulted from the act of categorisation itself:

The use of statutory categories also has a number of disadvantages . . . First, their
use pins a single label on each handicapped child and each special school . . .
Moreover, labels tend to stick, and children diagnosed as ESN(M) or
maladjusted can be stigmatised unnecessarily for the whole of their school
careers and beyond . . . the most important argument against categorisation is the
most general one. Categorisation perpetuates the sharp distinction between two
 482 S. Power

groups of children
the handicapped and the non-handicapped
and it is this

distinction which we are determined, as far as possible, to eliminate. (42)

The Warnock Report argued not only that the simplistic demarcations led to
stigmatisation, but also that the language and practice of education for those
with physical and learning disabilities should affirm the positive attributes of
learners
what they can do as well as what they cannot do:

We wish to see a more positive approach, and we have adopted the concept of
SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEED, seen not in terms of a particular disability
which a child may be judged to have, but in relation to everything about him, his
abilities as well as his disabilities
indeed all the factors which have a bearing
on his educational progress. (1978, 36)
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Here we see a subtle change in the language of disability. It is no longer one of

emphasising disability but ability, not just deficiency but difference. And as the
1980s progressed, the dominant understanding about special needs shifted
from a ‘medical model’, which focused on the handicaps within the child, to
the ‘social model’, which focused on the extent to which disability and need
resided not within the child but within the social context (e.g., Ford and
Mongon 1982). Within the social model, ‘disability is not regarded as a
pathological characteristic of a person. Rather it more precisely describes
our collective negative reaction to human differences’ (Slee 2011, 69). The
growing disability movement challenged these negative reactions through
various forms of identity politics. In relation to schooling, calls for integration
became replaced with calls for fully ‘inclusive education’ based upon a politics
of recognition which involves ‘identifying, challenging and contributing to the
removal of injustices’ (Barton 1997, 234), ‘combating institutional discrimina-
tion’ (234) and ‘learning to respect our differences’ (235).

Cultural affirmation
Alongside the attempts to dissolve categories which exacerbated the cultural
injustice of organisational segregation into ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, ‘normal’
and ‘subnormal’, the 1970s saw the strong emergence of policies designed to
invert status attributions through affirming previously hidden, marginalised or
stigmatised identities and groups.
As we have seen, the politics of redistribution were based upon the premise
that the failure of the working-class child could be attributed to economic
deprivation. But as the 1970s progressed, the language of deprivation itself
became problematic. Working-class ‘failure’ (now apostrophised to indicate its
socially constructed nature) was recast as a form of misrecognition. The CCS
(1981, 141) critique of EPAs argued that within the research on educational
inequalities which informed the Plowden Report, ‘working-class practices were
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 483

judged according to their approximation to a social ideal which was in fact that
of the ideal middle-class parent’.
The injustice of misrecognition created through the imposition of middle-
class values was even more pronounced in the case of children from black and
minority ethnic communities. It is possible to argue that these children
experienced all kinds of injustices in the cultural domain. They were subject to
a form of cultural domination through the imposition of a curriculum of ‘dead
white males’ which rendered their own histories and cultures inferior or
invisible. And where aspects of their histories or cultures were represented in
books and histories, these portrayals were often negative, distorted and
disrespectful.
From the 1970s onwards we see radical attempts not only to remove
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negative stereotypes, but also to provide affirmation for different cultures

often through various kinds of supplementary cultural celebrations. This kind
of approach to multiculturalism later became characterised as the ‘three Ss

saris, samosas and steelbands’ (Troyna 1993).
More fundamental critiques, though, argued that changes needed to be
made to the curriculum itself. The Swann Report was commissioned to help
schools adjust to the multicultural context they now faced:

Therefore it must reflect the diversity of cultures in our society and demonstrate
the value to society of cultural diversity . . . We should help our pupils overcome
assumptions about the superiority of modern, Western society and culture and
teach them to approach all societies and cultures with understanding. (Swann
Report 1985, 320)

There were many attempts to interrogate and challenge the Anglo- and
Eurocentric nature of the curriculum. The Cockcroft Report (1982) on
mathematics education, for instance, invited schools to ensure that examples
of mathematical concepts were culturally diverse:

It is possible to make positive use of mathematical ideas drawn from other

cultures, especially when discussing shape and space. For example, many of the
Rangoli patterns which are used by Hindu and Sikh families to decorate their
homes on important occasions have a geometrical basis in which symmetry plays
a major part. (1982)

New subjects, such as ‘World Studies’, were proposed which would broaden
out students’ sensitivities to cultural diversity. For example, ‘Other nations and
cultures have their own validity and should be described in their own terms.
Wherever possible they should be allowed to speak for themselves and not be
judged exclusively against British or European norms’ (Hicks and Townley
1982).
As the 1990s progressed, cultural injustices were located less in the
curriculum and textbooks and more in the low expectations of disadvantaged
 484 S. Power

children held by teachers, parents and the children themselves. New Labour
policies, in particular, emphasised the psychological damage that could be
done through low aspirations and self-esteem and put in place a regime of
target-setting which would force teachers to expect more of the pupils.

The decline of the politics of recognition

Like the politics of redistribution, elements of the politics of recognition
remain in education policies
particularly in relation to exhortations to raise
expectations, heightened sensitivity to negative stereotyping, the inclusion of
literature and cultural artefacts from diverse cultures and the visible
representation of diversity in teaching materials. However, overall there
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has been less emphasis on a politics of recognition. It no longer constitutes

the principal vehicle for overcoming cultural injustices within education
policy.
As with the politics of redistribution, it is difficult to explain why. Again, as
with the politics of redistribution, perhaps it might be argued that the policies
did not go far enough. Certainly, there is little evidence of significant impact in
terms of reducing inequalities between different minority ethnic groups
and
especially between white and African Caribbean pupils. Perhaps, valorising
difference is not enough. It might be that attempting to make the curriculum
more reflective of diversity is an example of the kind of naı̈ve possibilitarian-
ism which Whitty (1985) cautioned against. Fraser’s (1997) analysis would
suggest that a politics of recognition which privileges affirmation, such as
moves towards multiculturalism, will lead only to a surface reallocation of
respect to existing identities of existing groups.
In relation to racial inequalities, it might be argued that a more
transformatory strategy would involve what she calls ‘deconstruction’ whereby
there is a deep restructuring of relations of recognition. This would involve an
unravelling, rather than an affirmation, of the discourse of difference. This
might lead to more radical anti-racist strategies rather than weaker affirmatory
policies.
However, it could be argued that the deconstruction of categories that has
been attempted in relation to segregated schooling in terms of different levels
of academic ability (comprehensivation) and special needs (inclusion) has not
been much more successful in tackling cultural injustices. In both instances,
this deconstruction appears to have occurred at a superficial organisational
level. Certainly in relation to comprehensive schools, internal processes of
differentiation ensured that children continued to be categorised as ‘successes’
and ‘failures’ albeit within one institution. Similarly, with inclusive education,
institutional desegregation has not led to full inclusion and processes of
institutional discrimination remain.
The politics of recognition outlined here have, for the most part, left the
fundamental power structures unchanged. If a politics of redistribution and a
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 485

politics of recognition have not been effective at tackling educational injustices

and achieving participatory parity, then it might be worth exploring the
dynamics of a politics of representation.

A politics of representation
The politics of ‘redistribution’ necessarily involved top-down intervention.
This rendered it vulnerable to critiques of ‘statism’ from the left (CCS 1981)
and the right (Green 1991). The politics of recognition also involved top-down
attempts to dissolve stigmatising categories, combined with affirmatory
measures to value group differences. Neither of these approaches spoke to
the political rights of the disadvantaged or enabled what we might call ‘bottom-
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up’ interventions.
Certainly in both the politics of redistribution and the politics of
recognition, the individual is almost entirely absent
subsumed within a
class or group identity. A politics of representation speaks more clearly
(although not entirely) to individual rights. It tries to remove obstacles to the
mobilisation of power at individual, group and class levels
either through
empowering individual choice or through increasing group representation.
The politics of representation attempts to remove obstacles in the political
domain. As discussed earlier, Olson clarifies this domain of justice through
identifying two dimensions
a relatively narrow reading that includes
participation in terms of pursuing individual projects (choice) and a broader
one which involves working towards collective goals (politics more con-
ventionally defined). These two paths to participatory parity can be pursued
along a number of directions, such as increasing citizen choice and putting in
place mechanisms to mobilise greater community participation. Both of these
strategies can be seen in recent education policies.

Increasing parental choice

Many of the policies discussed in this paper have complex origins and
purposes
and this is also true of moves to increase parental choice. These
measures, put in place from the 1980s, have been explained in terms of
efficiency and accountability objectives. However, the language of choice also
appeals to a form of justice based on participation. ‘Participating in decision-
making, having a voice and influence’ features in the ‘top 10’ domains of
central and valuable capabilities identified by the Steering Group of the newly
created Equality and Human Rights Commission (Burchardt 2008). Indeed,
the entitlement that ‘parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education
that shall be given to their children’ is enshrined within the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (Stanfield 2006).
Prior to the reforms of the 1980s, it might be argued that parents and
communities experienced political marginalisation and misrepresentation in
 486 S. Power

exercising choice and control over their children’s kind of education. The
allocation of children to schools was largely determined by local authority
catchment areas. The geographically defined admissions process led to
increasing house prices in areas serving the most popular schools and a
situation which has sometimes been referred to as ‘selection by mortgage’. In
order to try to balance demands with provision, local authorities often placed
artificially low ceilings on admissions to popular schools so that the less
popular neighbouring schools remained viable. Again, though, wealthier
parents were able to escape the consequences of this policy. If they were
unable to relocate to the best areas for the best state schools, they could always
send their children to private schools.
Policies designed to promote parental choice were often defended in terms
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of equalising entitlements
of making available to disadvantaged parents the

same kind of choices that were available to advantaged parents. As the right-
wing think-tank, the Hillgate Group (1987, 1), argued:

The aim . . . is to offer an independent education to all, by granting to all parents

the power, at present enjoyed only by the wealthy, to choose the best available
education for their children.

To promote this choice, a range of policies were put in place. Open enrolment
policies (introduced as part of the 1988 Education Reform Act) allowed
popular schools to attract as many pupils as possible. There were increased
appeals processes through which parents could challenge local authority
decisions. The delegation of funding to schools and the introduction of new
types of schools were designed to encourage schools to become more
responsive to parents’ choices.
And while reforms promoting parental choice are often seen as a form of
privatisation, actual levels of outsourcing from the public to the private sector
were relatively low (Burchardt, Hills, and Propper 1999). The main change
during the 1980s and 1990s was less about the transfer of funding and
provision and more about the transfer of decision-making from the local
authority to the private domain. The 1990s saw the beginning of a shift in the
locus of decision-making from the town hall to the home.

Empowering communities
In addition to promoting individual rights to choice, the politics of
representation can be found in encouragement to increase community
participation. Of course, community participation has featured in many earlier
reforms. For example, it was strongly proposed even in the Plowden Report
(1967). However, it has often featured only in policy discourse rather than
practice and has rarely been enshrined in legal entitlements.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 487

Early measures to increase the representation of parent and community

governors on school governing boards appeared in the 1980 and 1984
Education Acts. A more significant reform was the introduction of grant-
maintained schools, launched as one element of the 1988 Education Reform
Act. The policy enabled schools which were maintained by the local authority
to ‘opt out’ of its control and be funded directly from central government:

The availability of parental ballots on GM status has become a further powerful

instrument of parental choice, allowing parents to choose the form of control for
each school. (DfE 1992, 4)

For the first time, parents could decide who would control schools. If 20% of
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parents lobbied their school, it was obliged to hold a ballot and then a simple
majority vote would force the school to ‘opt out’ of local authority control (see
Fitz, Halpin, and Power 1993). A representative of the National Association of
Governors and Managers claimed: ‘We have always taken the view that this
is a great experiment in participatory public service by ordinary citizens’
(Committee on Standards in Public Life 1996, 42).
The politics of representation can also be seen at the heart of New Labour
policies as well. Education action zones (EAZs), for example, a later version
of EPAs, were to be led by forums which included not only teachers and
government representatives, but also parents, students, representatives of local
businesses, third sector organisations and the community generally. The
government also asked zones to ensure that their forums had ‘an appropriate
gender balance’ and the ‘significant minority communities within the EAZ are
also represented’ (DfEE 1998).
More radical still is the coalition government’s recent policy on ‘free’
schools. The appeal to a politics of representation is clear within Prime
Minister David Cameron’s vision of the ‘Big Society’. The concept of the
Big Society, which was designed to distinguish the ‘new conservatives’ from
previous neoliberal regimes and the outgoing ‘New Labour’ administration,
‘is about helping people to come together to improve their own lives.
It’s about putting more power in people’s hands
a massive transfer of
power from Whitehall to local communities’ (Cabinet Office 2010). These
sentiments are strongly echoed in the Prime Minister’s endorsement of ‘free’
schools:

It’s about people setting up great new schools . . . It’s about liberation
the
biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the
man and woman on the street. (Cameron 2010)

‘Free’ schools can be proposed by any group of at least three people which is
capable of putting together a business plan. At the time of writing, over 300
applications for ‘free’ schools had been received.
 488 S. Power

What will happen next?

Of course, it is unlikely that the politics of representation embodied in parental
choice and community empowerment will solve the political injustices of the
education system any more than the policies which have attempted to tackle
the economic and cultural injustices. As has already been acknowledged,
political representation may not be reducible to injustices in the economic and
the cultural domains, but it cannot be separated from them. In relation to
parental choice, for example, research on the outcomes is complex and
contested (see Gorard, Taylor, and Fitz 2003; Whitty, Power, and Halpin 1998).
However, there is general consensus that while choice policies may not have
made the situation significantly worse for disadvantaged parents and children,
they certainly did not make it any better. More advantaged parents continue
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to secure disproportionate numbers of places at the most desirable schools.

In relation to increasing parental and community representation on and control
over governing bodies, there is similarly little evidence of any notable transfer
of power. Certainly, EAZ forums were dominated by professional and local
authority interests (Dickson et al. 2001). Even the ‘free’ schools may be
captured by some of the more traditional players. Over one third of the
applications received have come from established faith groups.

Conclusion
This paper has tried to undertake a new kind of analysis of education policies.
Rather than analysing the politics of education in terms of political provenance
(left/right) or political regime (social democratic, neoliberal, etc.), it has
attempted to examine policies in terms of the kinds of injustice which they
have tried to address.
Based on Nancy Fraser’s theorisations of different kinds of social justice,
the paper has used examples from England to show how, in that country,
the politics of education have sequentially attempted to address injustices in
economic, cultural and political domains. This has resulted in a changing
orientation from a politics of redistribution to a politics of recognition and,
in recent years, to a politics of representation.
I want to argue that approaching change and continuity in the politics of
education from this perspective has a number of advantages. First, it can
facilitate comparisons across national contexts where the specificity of political
traditions and affiliations can cause interference. What counts as ‘left’ or
‘right’ can be highly contingent. The configuration and duration of political
regimes are also nationally specific. However, the challenges facing education
systems as they simultaneously contribute to and attempt to overcome social
injustices are more universal. Categorising education policies in terms of
the obstacles to social justice which they are attempting to address can enable
us to make comparisons at a level that is not only sufficiently abstract to
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 489

cross national boundaries, but also sufficiently specific to yield meaningful

distinctions between different policies.
I also want to argue that this approach avoids the perils of overly ideological
orientations to particular policies and, relatedly, attributing ‘latent’ functions to
policies which we do not like. There is a tendency, particularly with neoliberal
policies, for policy sociologists to detect ‘hidden’ purposes which are often at
odds with the policy pronouncements. It may well be that these policies have
negative consequences, but it is unsatisfactory to dismiss policy discourse as
‘mere’ rhetoric for some policies and not others. Social justice is not the
preserve of the political left. It is surely better to start from the premise that
many education policies have a social justice agenda of making education less
unequal, but that the ways in which this is to be done embody different
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assumptions about what counts as a socially just education system and what
obstacles prevent this from being realised.
Of course, taking policies at ‘face value’ runs the risk of eliciting analyses
of little more than superficial description. We should, as Ozga (1990) argues,
attempt to link the detail with the bigger picture. I believe the kind of approach
I have outlined here enables us to take the detail seriously but still show the
deeper currents of continuity and change and potentially even lead to an
explanation of such currents. Additionally, through looking at different
orientations towards the social injustices of education, the analysis can show
just how many different domains of injustice need to be confronted, how
fragile and incomplete the policies have been in removing obstacles to
participatory parity and how difficult is the task of building a more socially just
education system.

Notes
1. With other colleagues, I have used Fraser’s schema of injustices elsewhere to
explore some of the tensions within policies (e.g., Power and Gewirtz 2001) and
to critique contemporary moves to valorise the achievements of schools serving
disadvantaged populations (Power and Frandji 2010).
2. Fraser illustrates the distinction through an analysis of what she sees as the
different issues faced by ‘exploited classes’ and ‘despised sexualities’. She argues
that the working class suffers the economic injustices of exploitation, margin-
alisation and deprivation and that their disadvantaged position is determined by,
indeed is defined by, the political and economic structure of society. Although
members of the working class may also suffer cultural injustices, Fraser suggests
that these usually arise from the material hardships they experience. According
to Fraser, it therefore follows that to alleviate these injustices, a politics of
redistribution is required. This may include, among other things, redistributing
income, changing the division of labour, etc. The situation of the working class is
contrasted with that of gays and lesbians, who, Fraser contends, suffer cultural
injustices. They live in a largely heterosexist society in which their own sexuality
is either rendered invisible or routinely maligned. Although this may have material
consequences, unlike the working class, Fraser argues that they need a politics of
 490 S. Power

recognition rather than redistribution. This may involve positive affirmation of gay
and lesbian relationships, challenging the homo-hetero dichotomy, etc.
3. The range of policies that could have been selected for the analysis is vast
and
like all selections, the choice is designed to endorse the underlying narrative.
However, I have tried to ensure that all the major policies have been included and
indicated where I think significant exceptions are evident.
4. There are interesting parallels to be drawn between this kind of analysis and those
proposed by state-centred theories of the contradictory functions of the state and
the education system (e.g., Dale 1989).

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