Stuck at the bottom with who? A diffractive ethnography of 'stuckness' in a post industrial northern town.

Aims - The project aims to reconceptualise the notions of 'stuck-ness', 'decline' and 'dis-engagement' within school and community. Utilising a diffractive lens, it will look beyond the human, into place and (affective) histories that might shape community notions of schooling. The research aims to make a significant contribution to the literature around so-called 'intractable' schools, thus trying to ensure access to fairer, more effective educational opportunities for all communities in the face of unabating neo-liberal 'policy hyperactivity' (Ball, 2018).
Background - 'At the end of August 2019, there were still an estimated 210,000 pupils being educated in stuck schools. Despite the system of support, intervention and inspection designed to improve schools, nothing has changed for these children'. Ofsted, 2020
As Ofsted point out, successions of initiatives to 'solve' failing schools by changing the practices and behaviors of school leaders, teachers and parents, have been deemed ineffective; resulting in the notion of 'stuck' schools. Despite an apparent acknowledgement of long standing policy failure, these 'intractable' schools and their communities continue to be viewed through a homogenised, deficit lens. 'Solutions' continue to be intimated, simultaneously surfacing and (re)producing pathologising tropes about school leaders, practitioners, parents and young people, which I have noticed throughout my career in schools. In response to the 'stuck-ness' of ineffective approaches, and recriminating rhetorics about parents
(assumed to have no aspirations), and their children (labelled with poor behaviour and limited horizons), this proposal takes the position that other ways of knowing exist and should be heard. This is timely, given the policy narratives advanced, and the limited range of proposed 'solutions' to
familiar 'problems' that may lead us down well worn, 'rutted paths' (Hackett, 2017). A reframing and reimagining across disciplinary boundaries hints at another future, while 'creating new kinds of knowledge with and for communities' (Pahl 2014).
Much has been written about the pathologising of parents and children in marginalised communities (Hackett, 2017; Jones, 2018; Mayes et al, 2019), and the (in)efficacy of policy responses that offer scalable, replicable 'solutions' (Ball, 2018; Gillies et al, 2017; Kuchirko, 2017). The dehumanising effect of bureaucracies and surveillance within formal education creates a 'continuous push toward the future, toward an optimistic linear "progress" that is aimed for but never achieved' (Jones 2019, pg. 109). It produces binaries of success and failure that are complicit in the (re)production of educational inequality (Ball, 2018) and 'maintain the privilege and domination of the white heterosexual male' (Mayes et. al, 2019). As a result, alternate narratives about what happens when progress stops making sense (Tsing, 2015; Thiel, 2020), are urgently required.
In response, this research will emphasise knowledge that is situated, specific to place (Mayes et. al, 2019), and thus tends to 'slip from view' (Carini, 2001), by attending to 'the tacit, experiential knowledge of place (that) shapes how communities are understood' Pahl (2014, pg. 37) , and
adopting a commitment to what Facer et al (2016) call 'living knowledge'. Recognising the value of co-production in describing different processes of knowledge creation within communities (Pahl 2014; Walkerdine, 2016), the project will extend the work of extant ethnographic studies of schools and communities that provide a counter to pathologising discourse (Gillies, 2014;Reay, 2004). In order to approach the notion of 'stuckness' from a fresh perspective, this research will adopt a diffractive ethnographic approach (Gullion, 2018). A diffractive ethnography adopts understandings of time as quantum and agency as distributed across human and nonhuman bodies.