The school, the community, and the power of local dialect: Exploring how UK education policy and its enactment in schools shape educational inequality for working-class children

This thesis presents the first ethnographically informed account of how national education policy expectations around children’s language use, and their enactment in the classroom, interact with the social, cognitive, and experiential factors shaping children’s morphosyntactic variation. It demonstrates how these expectations can reproduce educational disadvantage for working-class pupils. The research draws on a year-long ethnography at a primary school in Leicester, England, incorporating classroom and playground recordings, semi-structured pupil interviews, executive function (EF) measures, informal teacher interviews, curriculum and policy artefacts, and detailed fieldnotes. This multi-layered dataset enables a mixed-methods analysis of how policy expectations interact with children’s community embeddedness, cognitive capacities, and lived experiences.

This thesis comprises four papers. Paper I examines how standard language ideology embedded in national policy is enacted in classroom practice. Paper II evaluates gamified EF assessments to establish the reliability of the cognitive measures used. Paper III investigates children’s use of nonstandard was in semi-structured interviews, exploring how linguistic, social, cognitive, and experiential factors shape their language use. Paper IV explores children’s style-shifting across classroom and playground contexts.

The findings show that standard language expectations are reproduced in classroom practice in ways that constrain working-class children’s participation and shape learner identities. Analyses of was/were variation indicate that children’s use of nonstandard was is shaped by community embeddedness and lived experience of adversity, rather than by social class or cognitive ability. In contrast, children’s style-shifting between nonstandard was and standard were across contexts suggests a complex interaction between EF, degree of community embeddedness, and the type and severity of adversity experienced. Together, these findings show how the National Curriculum requirement that all children use Standard English, and its enactment in schools, may contribute to the reproduction of educational inequality by privileging particular linguistic norms while failing to account for variation in children’s lived experiences.