Page 126 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 119
of where each individual stood in relation to, you know, those sort of
beliefs. So it can certainly open things up.
(Interview 11)

In the context of making friends, it was generally taken for granted, and
therefore implied rather than stated explicitly, that the friendships were be-
tween people who were all middle class and generally white. Here, it was
frequently the differences between different ‘types’ of middle-class people
that matter. A key axis of difference that many of the Clapham group men-
tioned was that of class – of the difference between them and those who were
more middle class. The areas where they lived, the activities they undertook,
ensured that these were the distinctions that mattered most. However, in a
different field of practice, such as negotiating the state school system, ques-
tions of class and ‘race’ were approached in a different way.

Choosing schools
Schooling was something that the women of the Clapham group were very
aware of and concerned about at the time of the interviews as several were
at the stage of applying to schools for their eldest children. The women in
the Clapham group were intending to send their children to state schools.
For some, like Jan, this was a clear ‘ideological’ commitment. For others, it
was the favoured option, but they would consider private schooling if they
could not find a state school that they were happy with, or accepted that
they might send their children to private schooling at a later age. In the area,
primary schools had become part of a highly charged debate about schooling
and were credited, for instance, with a major impact on local house prices.
However, what emerged from the interviews is that issues of ‘race’ and class
lay at the heart of the way parents approached the question of which school
to send their children to.
Decisions about what was a good school were made on various bases.
Parents had access to Ofsted reports and school league tables. They could
also view the schools on open days. But the most important sources of infor-
mation were other mothers and the school’s general reputation in the area.
There was a total consensus among middle-class mothers as to which were
the best schools (and nearly all the working-class women in the area whom I
interviewed agreed). Despite debates at the time about unsatisfactory levels
of literacy in primary schools and ‘New Labour’s’ drive to overcome this,
the women in Clapham tended not to focus on concerns about their chil-
dren’s acquisition of concrete academic skills. This may well have been seen
as too obvious an issue to mention or, alternatively, as middle-class parents
they may have been confident of their ability to impart basic reading and
writing skills to their children. Rather than standards, the primary focus was
often on less tangible questions. Interviewees spoke of schools that were
‘nice’ or ‘felt comfortable’ and had the right ‘atmosphere and ethos’, and it