Repair-Ed project
We are delighted to be working with researchers from Oxford University on a research project linked to A People's History of Schooling in Bristol.
What is Repair-Ed?
Repair-Ed (Reparative Futures of Education) is a 5-year research project. It involves working with 10 primary schools, including state and private, and their surrounding communities across Bristol. We want to understand the nature of educational injustices within and between different parts of the city as well as how school communities understand forms of redress and repair for the future.
The project focuses on racial and class injustices in education as well as their intersections with other forms of social inequality. The idea of repair and redress requires us to understand how such injustices have been created, experienced and resisted in the past as much as in the present, to guide action for the future. Through community partnerships and participatory research, we hope to make a lasting contribution to knowledge and action for educational justice in Bristol.
The project is funded by UK Research and Innovation and based at the University of Oxford. It’s led by a team of researchers, guided by a steering group and advisory board.
Why Bristol?
There is a long history of racial and classed-based inequality in Bristol. Some of Bristol’s neighbourhoods are the most economically deprived areas in England, yet the city also ranks among the highest income per capita in the country and has one of the country’s highest concentrations of private school places. The uneven geographies of opportunity, and inequities in school provision, are arguably deepening with government schools squeezed by decades of funding cuts and rising inflation. Children in different parts of the city can have starkly different experiences of schooling.
What are the aims of the project?
Understand forms of structural injustice across 10 Bristol-based schools and their neighbourhoods
Deepen understandings of experiences of schooling, past and present, across the city’s geographies of deprivation and advantage
Build collective responsibility and shared recognition of educational injustices
Work with schools and communities to explore what reparation in Bristol’s school system might look like and how it might offer new reconstructive approaches to educational justice
What sorts of activities will be undertaken on the project?
School-based research – We are spending time in schools, carrying out interviews and focus groups, and drawing on participatory methods to explore how geographies of opportunity across the city shape educational injustices. We are engaging children (Key Stage 2, aged 7-11), head teachers, teachers, and teaching assistants.
Place-based research – Drawing on participatory mapping, walking methods and interview approaches we are researching with former school pupils and ‘community experts’ to learn more about the political economies surrounding each school (e.g. urban infrastructures, services, housing, employment, etc) and how these shape educational opportunities for children.
Creating a People’s History of Schooling in Bristol – Through reflective interviews and participatory approaches we are exploring memories of childhood experiences of primary schooling in Bristol. The People’s History of Schooling will bring together interconnected accounts of racial and class injustice in education, their intergenerational echoes, and the possibilities for reparative redress.
City-wide dialogues, workshops and events – Working with creative and deliberative dialogic approaches we are bringing different groups (teachers, parents, community organisations, students, school leaders) together to build collective responsibility and shared recognition of education injustices and co-create ideas for redress and repair.
Visit their website (www.repair-ed.uk) or get in touch via email (repair-ed@education.ox.ac.uk) to find out more!