What ‘these kids’ need: discipline, misrecognition and resistance in an English academy school

Processes of marketisation have fundamentally reshaped England’s state education both in terms of access and ethos. This chapter locates the pedagogic practices of a primary academy school on an English council estate within neoliberal logics, where dominant discourses of responsibilisation and choice (Burgess et al., 2011) are mediated through localised constructions of community provision (Bhattacharya, 2013). Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a council estate between 2013– and 2014, the chapter explores the reformation of educational provision on The Estate through processes of academisation, outlining an analysis of Estate Primary, which was closed following its ‘failing’ status