Quick, Laura; (2023) Making sense of low attainment: children's experiences in the primary classroom. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Despite continuing concern over low attainment in schools, the experiences of those children designated ‘low attainers’ are largely ignored. My thesis aims to address this gap, investigating how their designation affects their sense-making, construction of themselves and relationship to learning. As part of the UCL study, Children’s Life Histories in Primary Schools, I use innovative play-based interviews and observations to explore the stories of four children over three years, from ages 7/8 to 10/11. All were engaged in attempts to construct a self of dignity and worth as ‘low attainers’ within an attainment-driven education system: Max fears he is deficient, ‘a jigsaw with pieces missing’, and struggles to consider himself of value; Summer resists school values in favour of a relationship-based counter-discourse; Britney denies her low attainment and fabricates a version of herself as a ‘good pupil’; and Jake constructs himself as academically ‘middling’ but socially and emotionally successful. Although each of their stories is unique, they suggest underlying similarities in the challenges ‘low attainers’ face. Using Foucauldian tools, I demonstrate the enormous amount of emotional work my participants put into negotiating their designation, experiencing it as a potential source of shame. I identify three reinforcing pressures this was due to, all threatening to position them as failures. First, the dominance of attainment in schools makes ‘low attainers’ academic failures. Second, the responsibilisation of this attainment, part of a wider neoliberal responsibilisation of success and failure, makes academic failure also a failure of character. Third, the responsibilisation of emotions that has accompanied the growth of positive psychology suggests happiness is a choice, and unhappiness therefore an emotional failure. This triangle of pressures not only damages the learning and wellbeing of ‘low attainers’ but also reinforces meritocratic discourses that justify and reproduce social and economic inequalities. I propose changes to reduce these pressures on low- attaining children.

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