The Everyday Classificatory Practices of Selective Schooling: A Fifty-Year Retrospective

The fifty-year retrospective has led to recent media interest in the comprehensive school. Bristol, located in the south-west of England, is frequently portrayed as an early provider. This article draws on documentary evidence and life-history interviews with ex-pupils to explore this claim. It finds that they were not comprehensive schools, but "selective bilaterals" that, despite including grammar and secondary modern "streams" within the same physical site, constructed, through their curricular and non-curricular practices, a rigid divide between the two. The selective schooling of the bilateral consolidated the classificatory practices that began in primary school. Framed by Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, disposition and classificatory practices, it is a study of explicit "selective" schooling that was reliant not only on key moments of selection, and differentiated curricula, but on everyday practices and signifiers of difference. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)