Exploring teachers' views of cultural capital in English schools

Abstract

This paper aims to raise questions about the role that cultural capital might have to play in English schooling. With the term being used by both the Department for Education and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, the English schools' inspectorate) as a means of describing certain key characteristics of a school's curriculum, the authors of this paper consider what the term actually now means in this educational context. To ground this consideration in a real-world context, we present some data from a 2-year study, which evaluated an intervention programme for disadvantaged young people in one English local authority. One aspect of this programme was the development of cultural capital for disadvantaged young people, and in the course of the evaluation a number of teachers were interviewed about how they saw this role and what cultural capital meant to them. As we explore in the paper, while English policymakers' and regulators' views of cultural capital are both narrow and perhaps, in some senses, deviate from both traditional and contemporary definitions of the term, teachers take a much richer and more flexible approach to the idea. With this in mind, we explore both the term itself and what it means for these teachers.