It is commonly assumed that to leave school with few if any paper qualifications is a bad thing. In addition, many people presume that learners who want to achieve paper qualifications and continue their education at a higher level have been successful and that individuals who do not fulfil that aspiration have failed or underachieved in the education system. In this book, I argue that to want to do well at school and to be seen to be successful in achieving paper qualifications and to progress into further and higher education is a legitimate aspiration to hold. I very much enjoyed studying at A level, life as an undergraduate, postgraduate, and completing my PhD.

Education has come to be seen as central to social mobility and equality. Beginning with the 1944 Education Act and the Robbins Report (Committee on Higher Education, 1963) meritocratic narratives have come to dominate discussion on education policy and practice. In more recent years, neoliberalism is advertised as bringing about transformation in our understanding of social stratification. Social positions are no longer awarded based on a person's birth right; instead, people earn their positions in the class structure through hard work and diligence. Rose (1999: 27) offers an informed definition of neoliberalism as ‘a certain rationality’ that characterises ‘strategic attempts to rationalize the problems of government’ [and] ‘integrating them in thought so that they appear to partake in coherent logic’. In this sense, the rationality of marketisation and entrepreneurship comes to shape how education is understood as a market-driven activity. By this we mean that key decisions by stakeholders in the system and issues in relation to accountability are made through the market.

From the 1980s onwards there was a change in basic assumptions underpinning discussions of social justice in relation to education from the earlier discussion of equality in terms of a need for greater economic redistribution of goods and power reflected in a politics of structural difference, to a focus on recognition, and a politics of cultural difference. For the main part difference, in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, or impairment was no longer viewed as ‘deficit’. It became no longer uniformly acceptable to view difference as deficit. Coming to terms with difference involved challenging misrecognition and accepting the voice of the marginalised and excluded as a legitimate voice.