Urban schools as urban places: school reputation, children’s identities and engagement with education

Drawing on empirical data from a project exploring the experiences and identities of London school children who were identified by their schools as being ‘at risk of dropping out ’ of education, this paper highlights schools as important local spaces in urban children’s identity constructions. It is argued that the way in which schools and local areas are materially and discursively constructed can impact on children’s identities as learners and their engagement with education. The paper shows that urban children’s relationships to their school and local area are complex and contradictory, generating feelings of attachment and positive identification, but also fear and disgust. It is also argued that these feelings about place impact on children’s relationships to education. both constitute (and, in turn, are constituted by) urban young people’s identity constructions and experiences. Previous work has looked at how home and neighbourhood are promi-nent sites for establishing a sense of belonging for children (for example, see Brannen and O’Brien, 1996; Christensen and O’Brien 2003; Reay and Lucey, 2000, Katz, 2004). We focus specifically on urban working-class pupils in London, UK, who have been predicted as likely to drop out of education, as a means of exploring how marginalisation and exclusion are complexly tied to the socio-space 1