Geographies of supplementary education: Private tuition, classed and racialised parenting cultures, and the neoliberal educational playing field

Abstract

This paper makes two contributions to knowledge. First, it broadens geographies of education's focal reach by concentrating attention on the consumption of supplementary education. Supplementary education markets are booming as parents seek to ensure their children have the qualifications required to succeed in knowledge economies. The paper elucidates how consumption of such commercially provided tuition—which is delivered outside of school boundaries but designed to improve performance in school—is shaped by place-specific, classed and racialised parenting cultures. This shines an important light on shadow education market mechanics that have hitherto been hidden from geographical view, and foregrounds the significant role parenting cultures play in shaping children's educational experiences. Future research in geographies of education must attend to these parenting cultures, as interactions between the home and diverse formal, informal, alternative and supplementary education settings play an increasingly crucial role in confronting and reproducing educational inequality. Second, the paper advances the conceptual contribution of geographies of education to interdisciplinary debates about parents and education. It demonstrates that multi-scalar geographical research makes a unique contribution to interdisciplinary theorisations of home–school links, including those utilising Bourdieu's notion of cultural reproduction, and Lareau's model of concerted cultivation. Specifically, multi-scalar analysis demonstrates that: (i) place-sensitive research is vital as it contextualises parenting cultures, reattaching analyses of parental habitus and capital to the field, highlighting how intersecting global, national and local processes shape parents' educational practices; (ii) previously overlooked racial differences in concerted cultivation must be analysed without being naturalised, by exploring how racialised dispositions towards education are shaped in/across place, and reproduced through global/local racialised social capital; and (iii) inter-class differences that have dominated parenting debates remain important, but attention to inter-class similarity and intra-class variation, as it emerges through intersections with race and in place, is equally vital.