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The poorest learners, living in the poorest areas, have through decades and across nations experienced lower levels of educational attainment than their wealthier peers. This project investigates two "odds-beating" schools – schools which secure better-than-expected outcomes for their disadvantaged pupils. It asks three research questions: 1) How do schools which appear odds-beating understand disadvantage in their local contexts and student populations? 2) How do they respond to this? 3) What is it about the nature of their response that supports their success? I begin this thesis with an overview of ways in which disadvantage ("odds") is understood, or known, in scholarship, policy and practice. I challenge functionalist models of odds-beatingness which rely solely on the redistribution of symbolic and economic capitals without disrupting ingrained systemic equities. Instead, I focus on "lifeworld use value" and the role of relational trust in setting educational agendas and deciding on valuable outcomes, considering opportunities for schools to exercise their agency creatively. I outline a view of socially just schooling based, following Nancy Fraser, on participatory parity, combining redistribution of resources with respect for difference. I propose a framework arising from the themes in the literature comprising four pillars – knowing, value, trust and agency – to construct a new version of odds-beating-ness in which subscription to normative or elite values is not the price of schooling success. Studies of odds-beating schools tend to be quantitative, necessarily imposing pre-ordained criteria about what constitutes disadvantage and what counts as successful outcomes. My qualitative study makes "odds" and "outcomes" – as they are constructed within schools – objects of investigation in themselves. I became an "embedded researcher" in two secondary schools in a large urban area in the north of England, conducting observations, interviews and focus groups. One of these schools was a Research School and the other was a Teaching School. My findings are organised around three "niches" which act as windows into the broader values and practices of each school: these are school-community relationships, vulnerable pupils, and nurture groups. I use each area to explore how odds and outcomes are formulated and addressed by the schools and elaborate empirically the four pillars from my framework. This framework is a key contribution made by my study to the odds-beating field. It places odds and outcomes in a chronologically chaotic cycle, departing from the causal or linear approach taken in previous studies. I argue that schools can shape odds rather than (or as well as) achieving in spite of them. I propose that schools which approach disadvantage in a way aligned towards social justice – combining the redistribution of capitals with the recognition of other value systems – are not only odds-beating but odds-changing. I demonstrate that schools can exercise their agency to depart from the pervasive paradigm of efficiency – where schools work only as utility-maximisers in the educational marketplace, seeking at all costs to grow their assets (such as examination results). This project paves the way for a more context-responsive, hopeful and generous approach to changing, not only beating, the odds for disadvantaged pupils.

This thesis explores the implications of cultural resources for educational attainment and socioeconomic progression among Caribbeans in Britain - one of Britain's most disadvantaged [social] ethnic groups - since the 1940s. More specifically, it offers, first, a review of Caribbeans’ experiences in education and socioeconomic domains in Britain, as have been researched throughout the decades since the World Wars, and explores, second, how cultural resources through which Caribbeans understand their social world and mediate their experiences therein impact upon their educational attainment and socioeconomic progression. Cultural resources, as implied in studies undertaken by DeGraaf (1986; 1989; 2000) in the Netherlands, are acquired in settings such as the family and schools in which individuals are socialised, i.e., learn their culture and how to live in their social world. These settings are held to be influenced by cultural and societal factors that are interrelated and are, in effect, sociocultural (Wertsch, 1994; 1995). Such settings are posited in this thesis as vital to understanding Caribbeans’ educational and socioeconomic outcomes. This is demonstrated through adopting a sociocultural approach from which analyses was undertaken into the experiences of ten families of three generations and ten individuals - all of Caribbean descent - who participated in a quasi-ethnographic inquiry that formed the empirical part of the study. The participants had a range of educational, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, which characterised a purposive sample that they formed. Their accounts of their experiences, which were the source from which inferences about their educational attainment, socioeconomic progression, and cultural resources are made, were elicited through ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and researcher’s diaries, and are presented in this thesis as family case study analyses and sociocultural settings analyses. The inquiry revealed that the participants across the whole sample were socialised in a key set of sociocultural settings that were identified in their accounts of their experiences as family, community, religion, education, and occupation. In-depth interrogation of patterns in their lived experiences in these settings revealed that their socialisation processes were diverse and, consequently, reflected in diversity in their acquisition and usage of a common set of cultural resources that were discovered and, through analyses, reified as familial influence, community orientation, religiosity, familiarity with formal education processes, and occupational aspiration. Diversity in their acquisition and usage of these resources in the various settings reflected in diverse patterns of educational and socioeconomic outcomes across the three generations. However, two distinct patterns are herein defined and discussed as a ‘trajectory of advancement’ and a ‘trajectory of urgency’. The former characterises the outcomes of participants who had attained educationally and progressed in socioeconomic terms across generations in their family, and the latter characterises the outcomes of participants who had not attained educationally and remained disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms across generations in their family. These findings are tentative, but they suggest, nonetheless, that cultural resources are salient in shaping Caribbeans’ educational and socioeconomic outcomes. Such findings are significant in that they interrupt the ways that Caribbeans’ experiences and outcomes in education and socioeconomic domains have been understood historically and, at the same time, offer the sociocultural approach as another way from which to understand these experiences and outcomes. In addition, the sociocultural approach from which these finding are derived and the concept of cultural resources are introduced, in this thesis, in an understanding of patterns of educational and socioeconomic outcomes that persist across generations. This understanding, it is herein suggested, is crucial to any debate surrounding persistently low achievement in education and socioeconomic domains among social groups - particularly among groups such as Caribbeans that are disadvantaged in education and socioeconomic domains.