How to make school work for working class students
by Matt Bromley and Andy Griffith
Out now: Amazon | Crown House
Written by Matt Bromley and Andy Griffith, The Working Classroom: How to make school work for working-class students offers practical strategies and tools to help secondary schools address the needs of working-class students, including by building cultural capital and designing learning that is more engaging to working-class students.
Schools do amazing work to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But this book will enable them to do more. Disadvantage comes in many forms – one being cultural poverty, where some students have relative knowledge gaps compared to their more affluent peers. The Working Classroom explores how working-class students are disadvantaged by a flawed system and what we can do to close the gap.
The book examines how and why we must seek systemic changes but focuses on actions within the control of teachers and school leaders which will ensure that we create a socially just education system – one that builds on the rich heritage of the working class, rather than seeing that background as a weakness. It offers practical ways of enabling students and families to appreciate their strengths, building on the best of working-class culture whilst also empowering teachers, students and parents to change the system.
Backed up by practical case studies that have a proven impact in schools with high levels of deprivation, The Working Classroom will enable teachers to audit their current provision and encourage them to adopt new systems and practices so that they, and the wider school, will have a greater impact on the lives of working-class students and their families.
Suitable for both teachers and leaders in a secondary school or sixth form college setting who seek to support social change in education and anyone in the corporate or non-education world who wants to practice effective altruism or philanthropy.
For more information and to buy the book, visit Crown House.
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Bring the book to life in your school…
Matt can deliver bespoke training in your school or college on the content of this book
All the following can be delivered as conference keynotes or as half-day or full-day training courses. They can also be combined to create a package of training. All are flexible and can be made bespoke to suit your setting.
Course suggestion 1. How to make the classroom work for working-class students
Indicative content:
- Why schools are classist: systemic issues, evidence of underachievement
- How schools are classist: curriculum design (content and coverage), curriculum assessment (home advantage, content of exams, outcome of exams), the hidden curriculum (educator’s beliefs, secret knowledge/networks)
- What we can do about it: delivering the 3Es – equality, equity, extension
Course suggestion 2. How to design an ambitious, broad and balanced, planned and sequenced curriculum – for all
Indicative content:
- Why curriculum matters: the importance of planning
- How to design an ambitious curriculum: agreeing the vision and setting the destination
- How to design a sequential curriculum: assessing starting points, identifying waypoints, and using the curriculum as a progression model
- How to design an equitable curriculum: defining excellence and diminishing disadvantage
- What it looks like in practice: teaching for long-term learning and creating independent learners fully-prepared for the next stage of their education and lives
Course suggestion 3. Academic archaeology: Unearthing the hidden curriculum to equip working-class students with secret knowledge
Indicative content:
- What’s the hidden curriculum and why does it matter? Culture, corridors, and canteens.
- What secret knowledge are working-class students being denied and what can we do to help? Embedding the 4 knowledge domains in the core curriculum.
- How can we teach students to speak, read, and write like an expert in every subject: Embedding disciplinary literacy in the curriculum
- How can we talk to students’ lived experiences? Reflecting students’ experiences in the curriculum to make the abstract concrete and the new familiar.
- How can we build cultural capital and broaden students’ experiences to ensure inclusion and diversity? Bringing the world into the classroom and taking the class out into the world.
Course suggestion 4. Achieving equality through curriculum design and extra-curricular activities
Indicative content:
- The benefits of extra-curricular activities
- Overcoming challenges when providing extra-curricular activities
- Designing an extra-curricular programme to enable WC students to: meet new people, explore new places, do new things
- Ensuring fair access to extra-curricular activities for WC students
Course suggestion 5. Achieving equity through adaptive teaching and interventions
Indicative content:
- A 3 point plan for achieving equity: identify the barriers, set the success criteria, design and deliver the interventions
- Is differentiation dead? Differentiation versus adaptive teaching
- Creating a culture of high expectations: A process for making adaptive teaching work to teach to the top
- Doing more for those who start with less – making a success of visual, verbal, and written scaffolds
- The features of impactful additional interventions and how to make effective use of TAs
Course suggestion 6. Engaging with parents / carers as partners in the process of achieving educational excellence
Indicative content:
- Making parental engagement a 2-way conversation
- Making parental engagement an everyday conversation
- Utilising technologies to make parental engagement a contemporaneous conversation
- How to reach hard to reach parents
Bromley Education 