| Summary: | This submission provides a commentary on thirteen of Richard Riddell's publications between 1999 and 2010. It explains the professional and policy contexts from the early 1990s onwards, when the author was a senior Local Authority officer, which gave rise to the thinking behind the first phase of his publications. These included the development of a bespoke school improvement process, deeply rooted in the context of the communities served by a school, and involving the development of an urban pedagogy and curricula. The centre piece of this phase was Schools for Our Cities (Riddell, 2003b). Attention then moved for phase 2 of the publications towards the social processes outside school that advantage middle class children within it. Research for this phase identified a managed model of social reproduction being operated by middle class families with children at independent schools, and an independent school/prestigious university nexus. Policy interventions of the 2000s might have begun to create analogous kinds of social processes for working class children, but they are no longer in place. The central piece for phase 2 was Aspiration, Identity and Self-Belief (Riddell, 2010).
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