Bridging the Structure/Agency Divide: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disadvantage and Education

Political and academic efforts to break links between disadvantage and educational success in the UK are characterised by a long-standing impasse between those who emphasise the importance of economic and social structure and those who emphasise the agency of teachers and school leaders to make a difference. In general, policy and practice have tended to be informed by 'agency' arguments, with recent years seeing an increasing reliance on identifying 'what works': specific controlled class or school-level interventions whose effects are quantified. Other forms of social scientific knowledge about the psychological, social, institutional, political and economic structures and processes that shape practice and outcomes, and that may mean interventions 'work' differently in different places, have been less influential in policy and less well promoted as a basis for practice. This is partly because such knowledge leads less readily to 'solutions', making structure/agency relationships complex, and partly because it comes from many different disciplines, and so is rarely brought together in accessible, practice-orientated forms. Links between different kinds of social scientists, and between social science, policy and practice are much weaker than they should or could be.
In a direct attempt to address these problems, this seminar series will bring together scholars from different disciplines, and from within and outside the field of education, to address the real concerns of practitioners in disadvantaged schools. We intend in-depth interdisciplinary conversation, with the goal not only of taking academic debates and research agendas to a more productive collaborative level, but of providing accessible theoretical social-scientific resources for teachers and other education practitioners. The outputs produced will complement the 'what works' evidence currently being promoted, by helping practitioners to understand and explain the structures and processes that shape learning moments such that 'what works' in one school or classroom might 'work' less well or differently in another, or be capable or incapable of scaling up.
We start with two extended workshops, one with practitioners, to identify key concerns and develop case studies and vignettes, and one with leading UK and international scholars in education, to identify the major theoretical perspectives within the field and how they relate, and to identify work outside education that could provide fresh understanding. These workshops will lead to a book aimed at ptactitioners, presenting both practitioner case studies and academic arguments e.g "Key thinkers on disadvantage and education". We then plan five one-day seminars for a wider group of academics, students and practitioners. Each will focus on one aspect of the practitioner-generated case study material, bringing to it a synthesis paper from the first academic workshop, and three new papers bringing different theoretical perspectives from within and outside education to bring new understandings and challenge. These will result in a second book e.g. "Disadvantage and education: new perspectives", and to a collection of web-based resources for use by practitioners and in continuing professional development. The final stage will be a launch of these outputs to a wider constituency of policy-makers, practitioners and researchers including those in the 'what works' paradigm

The immediate beneficiaries of these seminars will be practitioners: teachers looking for resources to help them to spend the pupil premium and narrow educational gaps, and those working towards advanced professional qualifications (including teachers and headteachers, educational psychologists and social workers). The books and web-based case study materials will provide them with wider and deeper understandings of the problems of disadvantage and education, and different ways to think about how to change their own practice or make the case for changes in policy and funding. These will principally be aimed at UK users although our experience suggests that the issues that the materials will address are internationally recognised and there is considerable international use of UK-based literature and resources. International use can be promoted by the international contributors to the series.

Another key audience will be UK policy-makers and opinion formers, including politicians, civil servants, lobby groups and think tanks, concerned with what to do about the problem of links between disadvantage and educational success.

Through its impacts on practitioners and on policy-makers this work is ultimately designed to improve educational experiences and outcomes for disadvantaged children in the UK, thus enhancing their well-being and life chances, and contributing to the UK's goal of having a better educated and more globally competitive workforce and greater educational equity. The effectiveness of state-maintained schools and of educational policy will be enhanced. Realistically, this will not happen overnight. The seminars will aim to shift the ways we think about educational disadvantage and how to tackle it, such that in ten years time the dominant paradigm will be one that incorporates different kinds of social scientific knowledge, leading scholars from different disciplines to engage actively with each other and with policy and practice. The discursive framing of problem and solution will begin to change, in academic journals, teacher training and professional development, and in policy conversations. This seminar series is well designed and well placed to start this process.