The threat of three-fold failure: ‘low attainers’ in English primary schools

Abstract

Recent education research raises concerns about the damage low attainment designation can do to pupils’ self-worth but there has been little detailed exploration of the dynamics of this. Using in-depth interview data, this article explores how four pupils experience and respond to their low attainment, and their struggles to maintain their self-worth. It identifies three pressures they experience: the pressure to perform academically, to assume full responsibility for this performance and to maintain a positive mental attitude. I suggest that these can usefully be seen as forming a triangle of mutually reinforcing pressures that can put ‘low attainers’ in an impossible position where they feel shamed, blamed and stigmatised for their low attainment while expected to deny or overcome the distress this can cause them.

Keywords:

• Low attainment
• pupils’ experiences
• responsibilisation
• attainment labels
• accountability
• performativity

Introduction

There is a long history of educational research showing that low-attaining pupils are frequently stigmatised by staff and other pupils (Boaler, Wiliam, and Brown 2000; Hallam and Deathe 2002; McGillicuddy and Devine 2018). Studies in UK primary classrooms find them regarded with pity (Marks 2013) and as personally lacking for failing tests (Hall et al. 2004). Children dislike having a partner they consider low ability and work differently with them (Marks 2013), repeating teacher-talk such as ‘they need smaller classes to learn’ (Marks 2016, 50).

It is unsurprising, then, that low-attaining pupils often report feeling ashamed and judged (Marks 2016; Hargreaves 2017; McGillicuddy and Devine 2018, 2020; Hargreaves, Quick, and Buchanan 2022), using words such as rejected, lonely, bullied, embarrassed and sad to describe their classroom experiences (Hargreaves, Quick, and Buchanan 2019). Recent work on attainment grouping finds that low group placement significantly affects children’s self-concept (McGillicuddy and Devine 2020; Marks 2016) and self-confidence (Francis, Taylor, and Tereshchenko 2019). Pupils moved down attainment groups report being unhappy because their friends can see how ‘thick they were’ (Marks 2016, 50) with one child in Hargreaves’ (2017, 105) study saying ‘… people laughed at me every single day for two weeks’. However, low-attaining children have been found to feel this stigma, shame and sadness even when they are not attainment-grouped (Hargreaves, Quick, and Buchanan 2019, 2022).

Some studies find that pupils talk of effort, hard work and concentration, alongside or instead of innate ability, to explain levels of school achievement (Anagnostopoulos 2006; Owens and de St Croix 2020; Keddie 2016). Booher‐Jennings (2008) discusses how Texan 8–9-year-olds who had passed the test to move up a grade held those who had failed responsible for their failure, making comments such as ‘They don’t get good grades because they don’t listen’ (2008, 156). Most of the held-back boys accepted that their failure resulted from not working hard enough and so they deserved to re-take the year. Keddie’s (2016) UK study draws similar conclusions, pupils blaming ‘low attainers’ for their positioning and making comments such as ‘they don’t really see that it’s kind of good to be clever… they need to work harder’ (2016, 114).

Dweck’s (2017) ‘growth mindset’ theory tends to dominate discussion of how pupils understand educational achievement. Dweck, a psychologist, suggests that a child’s achievements can be increased with the right mindset: stretching yourself, working hard and believing in your ability to reach your full potential. Although a shift from fixed-ability practices was long overdue (Marks 2016; Yarker 2019), sociological studies (e.g. Keddie 2016; Booher‐Jennings 2008) illustrate that a simplistic application of a message that success results from effort can become just another manifestation of a crude ‘achievement ideology’, blaming individuals for structural disadvantage (Jerome and Kisby 2019).

The last few years have seen increased concern about the school experiences of low-attaining pupils (McGillicuddy and Devine 2020; Hargreaves, Quick, and Buchanan 2022; Francis, Taylor, and Tereshchenko 2019). However, there has been little in-depth exploration of how ‘low attainers’ experience school and how this affects their sense of self. This article addresses this gap by exploring in detail how four low-attaining children make sense of their attainment. Drawing on three years of interviews, I identify three pressures that seemed particularly toxic to their sense of self-worth: the pressure to perform academically, to assume full responsibility for this performance and to maintain a positive mental attitude. Of course, life will always contain experiences of pressure and failure, and developing the resiliance to deal with them is an important skill. However, I argue that these particular pressures, together, can put ‘low attainers’ in an impossible position where they feel shamed, blamed and stigmatised for their low attainment while expected to deny or overcome the distress this can cause them.

After briefly outlining the discourses within which these three pressures can be situated, I explore how my participants experienced them. I conclude by tentatively proposing an explanatory model – a triangle of mutually reinforcing pressures – that aims to shed light on the impacts of being labelled a ‘low attainer’ in English primary schools today.

Situating the three pressures

The three pressures I discuss can be situated within powerful discourses operating within English schools. The first, the pressure on schools to perform academically, affects both practice and pedagogy and has been widely and critically explored (Bradbury 2019; Ball et al. 2012). Narrow academic results, always important (McCourt 2017), have gained new significance over the last 25 years (Bradbury 2021). At primary level, pupil attainment data in maths and English can determine a school’s future and as a result, pupils are increasingly valued by how they contribute to this data (Bradbury, Braun, and Quick 2021).

This ‘pressure to perform’ (Ball et al. 2012, 521) on schools operates within a discourse of individualism; we are held responsible for the state of our lives (Lentzos and Rose 2017; Shamir 2008), with structural analyses fading out of the picture. Responsibility is ‘one of the major tools of this individualization’ (Hache 2007, 2). Individuals are – or at least seem to be – given ‘the possibility of actively participating in the solution of specific matters and problems’ (Lemke 2016, 86) that had previously been outside of their domain. However, such participation comes at a price; individuals must assume responsibility both for finding and pursuing solutions, and for the outcome, including possible failure. Being responsible becomes ‘both a set of values and a way of behaving’ (Lentzos and Rose 2017, 27); it involves not only choosing, but making the correct choice.

Such responsibilisation (Lentzos and Rose 2017) is a key technology of the self (Foucault 1988) in the creation of school subjects. That is, it encourages the individual to aspire to and acquire certain skills and attitudes necessary to become integrated into the normative society of the school. Within this discourse, those who persue academic success as a personal project should succeed, while failure to grasp this responsibility is an individual failure (Torrance 2017). As a result, lack of responsibility is added to lack of ability as a way of explaining away the ‘failure’ of whole groups. ‘Underachieving’ working-class children, for example, are no longer seen as just incapable, but as disorganised, lazy and lacking in endeavour and ambition (Reay 2017). Indeed, Torrance (2017) goes so far as to say that lack of responsibility has replaced lack of ability in explaining their educational failure in the UK, though others argue that ability remains a key organising concept (Bradbury 2021). Explanations foregrounding responsibility, or lack of it, in relation to attainment, obscure the reality that gaining positional advantage through hard work is very much more available to class and race privileged groups, with gendered effects (Keddie 2016).

The responsibilisation of emotions in relation to schooling is less discussed than the responsibilisation of attainment. However, the rise of the positive psychology movement, spearheaded by Martin Seligman (2003), has had a huge influence on current understandings of happiness, (Cabanas and Illouz 2019; Gagen 2015). Described as part of a ‘psychological turn’ in neoliberalism (Binkley 2011; Gill and Orgad 2018), this encourages the idea that an individual’s psychological state is primarily under their own control, and that cultivating a ‘positive mental attitude’ (Gill and Orgad 2018) is the way to achieve the ‘right’ psychological states. Within this discourse, emotions become a choice; being happy is a skill we can succeed or fail at (Binkley 2011; Cabanas and Illouz 2019) and negative emotions due to our failure to maintain a positive mental attitude, our own fault and our own weakness.

In English schools, the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme aims to teach pupils emotional self-awareness and the ability to regulate their emotional behaviour using the neuroscientific technologies of positive psychology. Delivered, at its peak, in 90% of English primary schools (Gagen 2015), its combination of happiness and character education is still widely taught.

Methods

This article draws on three years of interviews with four pupils – Clara, Michael, Sam and Ellie (pseudonyms) – who were part of the Children’s Life-histories in Primary Schools (CLIPS) project. CLIPS contributed to the small but growing body of work examining pupils’ own perspectives of school (e.g. Reay 2017; Hargreaves 2017), focusing on their sense-making about their attainment designation. It used in-depth semi-structured interviews supplemented by brief classroom observations.

My four participants attended two London schools, both sampled for convenience, judged by Ofsted as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ and with an above-average percentage of disadvantaged pupils (measured by free school meal eligibility). Participants were chosen in discussion with school staff. Criteria for sampling were attaining ‘below’ or ‘well below’ age-related expectations (ARE) in maths or English and not being on their school’s special educational needs register. Attainment data was collected annually and varied little for these four participants over the three years.

It is well established that the availability of academic ‘success’ is heavily influenced by a child’s intersectional position (Youdell 2006) and that schools’ role in constituting some children as ‘good’ and others ‘bad’ pupils both reflects, and reproduces, social and economic inequalities (Youdell 2006; Bradbury 2013) and we did not seek to establish this relationship further. However, readers may like to note that Michael identified as Black English, Sam and Clara as dual heritage English and Ellie as White English. All spoke English or mainly English at home, and Clara and Michael received pupil premium. All described their parents as in manual jobs or unemployed, except for Sam whose parents worked in the creative industries.

Data collection and analysis

Pupils were observed and interviewed termly between summer 2018, when the children were in Year 3 (age 7/8), and spring 2021 when they were in Year 6 (age 10/11) excluding the term schools were closed during the pandemic, totalling eight visits over nine terms.

Interviews were semi-structured, about an hour, and in a private space; most were individual although paired in Terms 1 and 5. Increased interest in interviewing children has not been accompanied by a corresponding development of good practice and we therefore drew from play and drama therapy activities (e.g. Jennings 2005) alongside methods developed for very young children, such as the MOSAIC approach (Clark and Moss 2011) that collects data, for example, through children’s photographs.

We kept interviews mostly active and creative with only short question and answer sections. Our interview activities, described in detail elsewhere (Hargreaves 2021), included: drawing the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects of school and the faces of imaginary ‘high’ and ‘low’ marks children and their teachers, accompanied by thought bubbles; role-playing conversations with plasticine models of teachers and parents; discussing short filmed sections of themselves in class; and taking photographs of places that generated particular emotions. We designed some activities to work in metaphor, providing ‘psychic distance’ (Drewes and Schaefer 2015, 39) from the subject matter with the aim of enabling the child to explore feelings they may have found difficult to acknowledge as themselves (see Pernicano 2015). For example, we introduced a ‘dolls house classroom’ on the morning of a test, with participants choosing toy animals to represent themselves and others and playing out the action. Such activities threw up new themes that proved a rich source of exploration.

All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically using NVivo, informing subsequent interview design. Analysis of interview activities that used metaphor required particular care: pupils might be expressing their own feelings or ideas and emotions they associated with a topic. Although this approach could feel untidy at times, research with children that relies only on conventional dialogue is problematic, not always encouraging reflection and sometimes eliciting answers children think adult researchers want to hear (Mayall 2008). It also risks over-representing those who are most confident and articulate with adults, potentially leading to class, race, gender and perceived ability bias.

The current paper draws most on the themes: comparing to others; indications of self-worth; anxiety; feeling happy; responsibility; and coping strategies. I found the longitudinal nature of the project emphasised continuity rather than change in the children’s struggles around self-worth, despite changes of teacher, lockdowns and their increasing age.

Ethics

I adhered to the ethical guidelines of the British Sociological Association (2017), including a commitment to anonymity and confidentiality in line with GDPR (2018) and ethical approval was awarded by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (REC 1079). Parents’, schools’ and pupils’ written consent was sought at the start of the project, and pupils’ re-sought verbally each term and their right to withdraw restated. Sampling was explained sensitively so not to reinforce negative labels; we said that we wanted to hear from pupils who sometimes struggled in maths and English lessons.

Three pressures to perform

Michael, Clara, Ellie and Sam all found schoolwork challenging and felt caught between competing messages and anxieties about who they ‘ought’ to be and the implications of failing to be this. As a result they each, though in very different ways, expended huge amounts of emotional energy in their efforts to maintain a sense of self-worth in school. In the following sections I explore how the three pressures that emerged as key to their sense-making about school, discussed above, made maintaining their self-worth a struggle. I finish by showing how they might be usefully theorised as a triangle of mutually reinforcing pressures.

The dominance of attainment in the children’s sense-making

Academic attainment was at the top of all four participants’ lists of what they thought school wanted of them, and they viewed it as defining not only academic identity but wider school identity. This meant the only school identity available to ‘low attainers’ was one of failure, and other routes to school success, such as sports, music, or casting ‘cool work’ as an alternative to school work (Jackson 2010) were marginalised in their sense-making. All were highly sensitive to a boundary between the normal and abnormal, acceptable and ‘other’ (Foucault 1991) – as Clara put it, ‘some can’t do the work and some can do the work’ – and all were very aware of the costs associated with being positioned on the wrong side of this boundary.

Michael explained that poor work meant teachers were angry, shouted at you and would ‘rip up your page, scrunch it up and put it in the recycling bin’. He said that children who don’t learn ‘properly… don’t get the job’ and their ‘life is ruined’, contrasting this with a student with good marks feeling ‘powerful’. Lessons could become a constant worry; Sam felt ‘… it might be easy for other people, but it might be just like ‘oh it’s so hard’ for me… I’m just so angry and sad at the same time, like, I’m angry because it’s so hard’.

Tests, the most explicit form of academic ranking, could cause fear, humiliation and sadness. When I asked Sam to draw the negative aspects of school, he drew a page of his test papers with disastrous results, so many they spilled over onto what should have been the positive page. I was struck that although some dated back to ‘test weeks’ in previous years, he remembered every mark vividly, and when telling me about them started viciously beating a plasticine model of a teacher who had humiliated him, exclaiming passionately ‘I hate those weeks’. He said that he felt ‘very sad and disappointed’ when his results were read aloud, and that his teacher should:

Not shout, not shout out the scores… it makes me feel really sad, embarrassed… Like he shouts it out to the whole class.

Test results ranked you unambiguously against others, establishing your (ab)normality. In a joint interview with Michael, Sam was painfully clear that he was on the ‘wrong’ side of this normal/abnormal boundary:

Sam: (angrily) Have you ever done a massive maths test and only got 6?

Michael: No.

Sam: Or 3?

Michael: No.

Sam: Or 2?

Michael: No no no. The only scores I got -

Sam: (interrupting) Yeah, welcome to my world… it was test week, and we had this maths test and I only got 2…

Laura: What does it feel like to be in your world when you -

Sam: (interrupting) Sad… disappointing… I was 4 off.

Laura: 4 off what?

Sam: 4 or 3 off from 10 or 11. 4 off from 11, 3 off from 10.

Laura: What score do you think you would have needed to get to not feel that embarrassment?

Sam: 12.

Sam is describing the boundaries of normality − 10, or 12 to be secure, far higher than his own marks – and quantifying his failure to meet them – ‘3 off 10 and 4 off 11′. His cry to Michael, ‘welcome to my world’, the world of 2s, 3s, 4s and 6s, describes a world outside the acceptable norm.

Michael, also preoccupied with ranking himself against others, was keen to distance himself from those at the ‘bottom’ and staunchly identified as ‘middling’ and ‘ordinary’. He justified this by comparing his test marks to those ‘lower’ than him, claiming that he was given ‘middle work’, not sent out for ‘interventions’ or put on the ‘support table’. However, he felt the ‘bottom’ loomed dangerously close and his classroom was full of disciplinary technologies that reminded him of this; for example, he was worried to find he was one of only three not to have been given the ‘special pen licence’ that allowed you to write with pen rather than pencil. When asked what he would feel like if he were at the ‘bottom’ he explained:

I would be sad, disappointed. I don’t know, all those words that are bad. I would be like disappointed. But lucky I’m in the middle.

Ellie, too, thought that pupils were largely judged on their attainment, and was highly aware of the division between ‘those who can’t and those who can’. However, unlike my other participants, she did not struggle to view herself as on the ‘right’ side of this, believing her failure as a learner was inescapable and telling me that her teacher ranked her bottom of the class. This was not a matter of indifference to her; in class she seemed subdued, anxious and unhappy, very different from the talkative, enthusiastic child I saw in interviews. However, her struggle was not to deny her failure as a learner, but to avoid allowing this to define her worth as a person. She rejected the value of high attainment, seeing it as irrelevant to her career plan to be a dog groomer and telling me: ‘I wouldn’t mind like little marks because it doesn’t matter about your work, it just matters about people just like doing good’ in contrast to the ‘meanness’ she associated with competitive high-marks pupils. She was committed to being kind and supportive, and what she felt she needed to be happy and fulfilled in life - friends, dogs and a mobile phone - were all things she already had. Despite the unhappiness she experienced in the classroom, the values she associated with her home life – full of people that she loved, respected and aspired to be like – supported her rejection of the idea that attainment was a judgement of either her value as a person or her likely future.

The responsibilisation of attainment in children’s sense-making

Except for Ellie, my participants explained differences in attainment largely within discourses of responsibilisation, the result of effort and attitude, rather than fixed ability or environmental factors such as their quality of teaching. Michael was typical in telling me that to get good marks you had to be ‘really well behaved and listen to the teacher’ and ‘always read books all the time’ rather than playing on the computer. If you followed such advice, you could achieve anything; Clara told me that people ‘can be whatever they want. They can be a doctor, they can drive an ambulance, they can be a police officer, they can be anything, anything in the world’ and that you simply needed to ‘literally you put your mind on something’ to achieve it. When I asked Michael if this was true, he replied, ‘everyone can do it’.

Low attainment, then, became the result of not working hard, following instructions, or listening. Clara, explaining why a boy in her class found work difficult, placed the responsibility firmly on his attitude, sounding indignant as she told me:

He can do it but he’s just acting silly, like he can’t do it… he doesn’t want to listen… If he was listening he would learn more, more maths.

It is this boy’s failure to want to listen, to take responsibility for his own learning, that Clara saw as the cause of his low attainment, and she took an equally responsibilised approach to herself. For example, when I asked about being moved down the ‘traffic light’ behaviour chart in her classroom, she described it as ‘embarrassing’, viewing the chart’s verdict as legitimate and explaining ‘when this happens… I need to make a change and put it up’.

This high level of responsibilisation was also evident in her drawings of (imaginary) high- and low-attaining children and their teachers. Her high-marks child was ‘trying so hard’, ranking herself competitively, ‘the only one who pays attention’, and ambitious, wanting harder work. Her teacher, blue eyed and beaming, her ‘lips strawberry cos she has lipstick’, says she is ‘really really really really really good… she’s trying so so hard, I wish (pause) I wish the other child was trying so hard too’.

The ‘other child’, the low-marks child, gets a very different reaction from the teacher. With a downturned, black-lipped mouth, angry red eyes and eyebrows ‘going down to look mad’, she was furious, ‘really really really mad… I’m so mad at this child cos he, she, is supposed to be doing harder!’. The low marks child appeals for ‘a bit more help… because sometimes it’s hard’ but this is an insufficiently responsibilised response and gets no sympathy or support from the teacher.

For responsibilised ‘low attainers’, then, the only way to do better is by greater effort. As Sam told me, drawing on the language of ‘growth mindset’, ‘if I find something hard I just try my hardest’ and ‘if you get it wrong it’s kind of a good thing because you can learn from your mistake’. This faith in hard work also showed in Michael’s advice to Sam, responding to Sam’s cry that he works hard by advising him to work still harder:

Michael: He needs to change like his like spellings… he needs to do like hard work, he needs to do like -

Sam: (interrupting) I do hard work!

Michael: Okay, you do hard work… he needs to like listen to the teacher on the whiteboard, he needs to put his hands up so many times.

Both boys seemed flummoxed that Sam’s hard work had led nowhere; it did not correspond to the discourses of responsibilisation that dominated their sense-making. Sam’s conclusion was despairing:

It’s like my life, it’s like it’s a massive jigsaw, and I just – then pieces are missing… I keep, I basically, I miss out bits. It’s like a story and then it’s missing a page. Do you know what I mean?

Sam struggled to understand how his greatest efforts can still lead to failure, concluding passionately that he must have a permanent defect; he is flawed and incomplete.

In contrast to the others, Ellie rejected responsibilising messages almost entirely. She did not believe hard work and effort would affect her attainment, seeing herself as ‘dumb’, ‘not smart’ and ‘bad at maths’. High achievers were different, simply ‘smart’ and that’s all there was to it. Ellie’s failure to embrace ‘growth mindset’ messages and her belief in her own fixed inability, although likely hindering her academic progress, seemed to protect her from some of the ‘self-blame’ that discourses of responsibilisation could lead to. For her, being smart or otherwise was something you just were, unlike the things she felt she could control and were of greater value, such as being kind or a good friend, into which she put considerable thought and effort. Combined with her belief that attainment was unimportant to her, she could attempt to construct an ‘alternative’ self of value outside dominant school discourse.

The responsibilisation of happiness in the children’s sense-making

Two participants, Clara and Michael, talked repeatedly of the importance of staying upbeat and positive, and claimed to be always happy:

‘I’m like a happy, always excitable and happy person… My aunt would say I’m so nice and always always always always always happy’. (Clara)

‘… happy… a really positive person… I’m fine. I’m always fine’. (Michael)

This was accompanied by a fierce commitment to never being otherwise. Clara told me ‘I don’t really get mad or angry’, and Michael that ‘I’m never miserable, I’m never sad’ and that ‘I don’t have all these, um, like worries and all that’.

Sadness, within the ‘happiness discourse’ they deployed, indicates that you have not chosen to be happy, making it a sign of personal failure or inadequacy. Michael claimed that his most admired teacher never felt sad, despite strong disagreement from Sam:

Michael: Mr Reed never feels sad. He’s a strong man. I’d say he never feels sad…

Sam: I’ve seen this guy sad a million times!…

Michael: No, he never feels sad.

Seeing sadness as a sign of weakness, Michael felt that being ‘strong’ required constant positivity. When I suggested his friend Sam was unhappy at his low test marks being announced to the class, Michael assured me that Sam was ‘never worried. He’s just, like, he’s normal. No, he’s never worried’.

Michael completed our entire ‘feelings photography’ activity without acknowledging having ever felt a negative emotion in school. When asked to take a photo of an ‘unhappy’ place he could not think of one and took a photo of a ‘happy’ place instead. His ‘scared place’ was not somewhere he’d felt scared himself but a PE shed he imagined it would be scary to get locked in, and his ‘anxious place’ was in the road across from the football pitch where he said, if a mis-kicked football ever landed there, it might be ‘popped by a car’. Even watching himself during a distressing experience in class on film, where he looked unmistakably upset, he told me firmly, ‘No, in the outside I look worried but in the inside I’m not’. When I pushed him to express negative emotions, he often recast them as lower levels of happiness. He described how he felt when he got something wrong in front of the class as ‘less’ happy than usual, showing me with his fingers and saying it was ‘okay a little bit’ and that he wasn’t ‘that happy, it was just like this tiny bit’. He explained that ‘the right emotions is like happy, excited, surprised. But like the wrong emotions is like sad, angry’.

Clara, too, was strikingly unwilling to acknowledge negative emotions. When asked to photograph somewhere in school where she had felt stressed, she instead chose a place she could go to eliminate stress:

Stressed – oh, the secret garden… whenever I’m stressed nature makes me feel happy… because like you can sit down and watch all the birds come and it will be so quiet here.

Both Clara and Michael spoke about emotional states as something largely plastic and within their control. Clara told me, for instance, that ‘maybe once I was sad and my friend said ‘come on, don’t be sad, be happy’ and then I was happy’.

They both, too, had strategies to maintain their positive mental attitude. Clara described how she conquered anger and attained a state of positivity:

… just to calm down, relax… just go somewhere like in my imagination and like go somewhere really quiet and relaxing… Like I’m somewhere like a candy-land and I have friends there that will play with me, and I live in a gingerbread house and I meditate when I’m angry and mad… I cross my feet, I have to – first I pray, and then when I’ve finished praying I um meditate just quiet for like two minutes.

Clara’s strategies drew from the fields of meditation, visualisation and prayer. How she had collected this repertoire of techniques was unclear, though she had said her teacher had told her to ‘breathe in and out’ when she was angry and that they did yoga at school ‘just to relax and like just think of your imagination, where you are and stuff like that’. She was also, like Michael and Sam, taught the SEAL programme, and she attended Church weekly with her family.

Being able to sustain a positive mental attitude, remaining resilient, optimistic and self-confident in the face of difficulty, is important to maintaining the ‘grit’ (see Saltman 2016) expected of pupils. Choosing to enact a classroom test during sand-play, Clara told me that the children were ‘very very very happy’ and enjoyed tests, positioning this as the basis for normative judgement. The only unhappy child was so because he lacked the right attitude and emotional state ‘because he doesn’t like studying’. On being told ‘come on, you can do it’, however, he got top marks along with the others and learned that he should ‘never doubt yourself, to always convince yourself that you’re great’, suggesting that controlling such doubt is a task to be achieved. As she explained, ‘Well behaved is basically like you’re smiling’.

This response to academic failure was also important to Michael. Although he said he made ‘mistakes, so many mistakes’ sometimes leading to ‘big trouble’ and work being ripped from his book, he explained that he ‘would feel fine if I got an answer wrong’ and that ‘I’m always confident’. He said:

If I get bad marks I mean it’s okay because you’re learning [from] your mistakes… Don’t feel scared because um, yeah just don’t feel scared… just like take out the fears of your body and that, just feel happy, just feel calm and that.

He explained:

Believe in yourself, so like, for example, if you want to sky dive… and you’re like ‘I don’t want to do this’, just be yourself, you know, take all those frights away, take all the scarediness away.

Like Clara’s visualisation, breath control and prayer, the work Michael was doing on himself echoes descriptions of the ideal resilient subject, working on themselves to ‘spring through’ (Gill and Orgad 2018, 478) hard times by cultivating positivity. ‘Happiness discourse’, it appeared, was working for them both as a technology of the self; they strove to produce desirable emotional states when faced with challenging situations, including their all-too-common instances of academic failure.

Discussion

Sam, Michael, Clara and Ellie all struggled to construct a stable sense of themselves as valued within school and put a huge amount of emotional work into strategies that enabled them to feel good about themselves, each in different ways. The three particular pressures I have discussed in this article, while not unique to ‘low attainers’, may be harder for them to negotiate successfully in part because of the way they reinforce each other, so that failure in one fosters failure in the others. I present these as a triangle in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Diagram of three reinforcing pressures on ‘low attainers’.

The first pressure can be situated within the dominance of attainment in education. As noted, the way in which the success of a school is increasingly judged by narrow ideas of academic attainment means pupils are valued by how they contribute to this. This puts success out of reach for those designated as low attaining, making them not just academic failures but school failures. Nonetheless, the strength of this emphasis on attainment in my participants’ models of what makes a ‘good pupil’ came as a surprise. It may be that, for low-attaining pupils, their constant struggle to negotiate their liminal academic position, to avoid relegation to the realms of unacceptability and abnormality (Foucault 1991), means that attainment dominates their idea of a ‘good pupil’ even more than it does for more academically secure pupils.

This is interesting given earlier findings (Hempel-Jorgensen 2009) that pupils in lower-attaining, predominantly working class, schools feel that qualities such as passivity and obedience are valued over academic achievement. It may indicate that meritocratic discourses around ‘high expectations’ and helping ‘deserving’ but disadvantaged pupils rise to the top, a key message of academy chains (Kulz 2017), has meant high attainment is now emphasised as much, or perhaps more, in working-class than in middle-class schools.

The second pressure, the responsibilisation of this attainment, is part of a society-wide discourse of individual responsibility for success and failure. All my participants except Ellie believed that ‘working hard’, ‘making the right choices’, and ‘not being silly’ were what made the difference. This second side of the triangle seemed to work, for these three pupils, in conjunction with the first to compound their sense of failure by making attainment a measure of one’s character. High attainment shows strength of character and poor attainment a weak and inadequate character, and shame at poor attainment swells to more general shame at who one is, not only as a learner but as a person. Shamir (2008) has usefully linked this belief to the extension of the ethics of the free market into society more broadly, making the pursuit of self-interest morally acceptable and creating, in Anagnostopoulos (2006, 7) terms, an ‘ideology of deservingness’. If you take seriously that your academic failure is a failure of character, and that where you get in life is up to you, it suggests that you are both likely to, and deserve to, fail more widely; you deserve your position at the ‘bottom’ of the class, and this is a foretaste of your deserved position in life.

The dominance of ‘growth mindset’ ideas may help explain why Sam, Michael and Clara drew on discourses of effort more than those of innate ability; as Bradbury (2019) suggests, a ‘good learner’ must now display a ‘growth mindset’. Another CLIPS participant role-played a teacher telling a pupil off by shouting ‘You have a fixed mindset!’, and the four participants discussed in this article frequently showed awareness of growth mindset messages about the need to learn from mistakes, do their personal best and believe in their ability to succeed.

However, schools can give highly ambiguous messages in this respect, as they are also dominated by the need for results. Clara’s words reveal a tension between the importance of high marks and a belief that it is effort not outcome that matters:

… just try your best… I’m going to try really really hard to get the high marks. I will say: ‘You can do it. You might get high marks or low marks it doesn’t matter’.

Although schools may responsibilise pupils through discourses of effort, when this is coupled with the strong emphasis on attainment, pupils can be left caught between competing discourses when their best efforts combine with poor results, as Sam shows.

The third pressure, the responsibilisation of emotions, can be situated within a society-wide discourse of happiness that has accompanied the growth of positive psychology. Within this, happiness becomes a task we can succeed or fail at (Binkley 2011; Cabanas and Illouz 2019), making emotional failure possible. For both Michael and Clara, the requirement to have a ‘positive mental attitude’ (Gill and Orgad 2018) operated as a technology of the self (Foucault 1988), disallowing them from acknowledging any distress or anger resulting from their low-attaining status. They worked on themselves to ‘improve’ their emotional states (Lentzos and Rose 2017), experiencing this as their own personal project and with a skill-bank to draw on including chanting, prayer, visualisation, meditation and, in Michael’s words ‘taking the fears out of your body’, perhaps reinforced by the SEAL programme they were both taught. They illustrate how ‘happiness discourse’ may encourage individuals to pursue self-improvement as a solution to the stresses and contradictions resulting from marginalised situations, discouraging an understanding of systemic constraints, criticism or resistance.

The relationship between the dominance of attainment and its responsibilisation – the first two sides of the triangle – and the responsibilisation of emotions, is complex. Where academic attainment is prioritised and becomes a judgement of character, the pressure to maintain a positive mental attitude disallows anger and makes distress at ones position a further indication of failure of character. In combination, this triple positioning as a failure, with its connotation of a lack of deservingness, has implications for both individuals and society worthy of further, inter-disciplinary, exploration.

There is substantial discussion of the attributes required of the neoliberal pupil subject, adding character traits such as self-promotion, competitiveness, resilience and a ‘growth mindset’ to more traditional disciplinary qualities (Bradbury 2019; Jerome and Kisby 2019). My findings suggest schools may be not only promoting the message that pupils must take responsibility for their approach to learning but also for their emotions about it and that this list should be further augmented with associated positive mental states.

Conclusion

In this article I have explored how four children made sense of their low attainment and their struggles to maintain a sense of self-worth. While an in-depth study of only four children has obvious limitations when it comes to generalising, it did allow me to identify three pressures that seemed particularly damaging to them and suggest an explanatory model for understanding the way in which these pressures reinforce each other. ‘Low attainers’ seem to be at risk of three-fold failure: the failure to attain, the result of a failure of character in not working hard enough, and the failure to adopt a positive mental attitude in the face of such failures. I have argued that those who experience all three can feel in an impossible position where they are shamed, blamed and stigmatised for their low attainment while expected to deny or overcome the distress this can cause them.

The impact of these pressures may be mitigated to some extent within schools. For example, re-imagining classroom practice and ideas of student success as collaborative and collective, and working to value a wide range of skills and qualities, would go some way to addressing the focus on individual academic attainment. In addition, exploring how ‘growth mindset’ ideas are being implemented and working to interrupt a simplistic linking of effort and achievement in classrooms could begin to divert children from considering themselves as lacking when their efforts do not yield success. Moreover, Gillies (2011) notes how positive education programmes do not do justice to the range and complexity of emotions, and an awareness that emotions can be unpleasant, unexpected, constantly in flux and informative, might help collapse the model of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings that both Clara and Michael present. However, the discourses within which these three pressures are situated are far bigger than individual schools and will not be effectively addressed without wider societal change.

Many children, disproportionately those from backgrounds of disadvantage, fail to meet a narrow, socially and culturally biased, criterion of success. If they, and others, accept that failure results from a failure of character, being at the ‘bottom’ of the class becomes a foretaste of the future, all they should expect or deserve. By looking in detail at how four low-attaining children experience the classroom, this article has aimed to contribute to discussions of the role of schools in the reproduction of inequalities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by The Leverhulme Trust under grant 2017-413 and supported by my co-researchers, Eleanore Hargreaves and Denise Buchanan, as well as Alice Bradbury.