This paper explores school attitudes to child poverty in England and interrogates these through a wider European frame. Often, research about education uses the term ‘schools’ but means ‘teachers’.  However, whilst the attitudes of the teachers matter, so too do the attitudes of others within the school community. The attitudes to poverty of teaching assistants, senior leaders, lunchtime supervisors and governors have a profound effect on how children and families living in poverty experience school life.

Despite a body of scholarly research suggesting poverty is not a simple concept but is messy, complex and complicated, revealing itself as amorphous and highly contextualised (Gorski, 2017; Emery, et al, 2022), discourses associated with poverty in education have been historically packaged into neat and simplified solutions to overcome gaps in attainment in order to ‘fix the problem’ of poverty, see for example the work done by the OECD.(Salinas,2018). Addressing poverty and social inequalities has long been the responsibility of schools, as ‘engines of social mobility’ (Gibb, 2016), accountable for the success of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds as part of a contemporary, common-sense aim of education, based on meritocratic narratives of the last twenty-five years (Owens and St Croix, 2020).

For schools, extant education policy responses, linked to crude indicators of poverty, such as Free School Meals (FSM) in England, have been associated with individualised interventions and overcoming barriers to learning for a seemingly homogenised group of pupils. Concomitantly, levels of accountability and the ‘standards agenda’ have fixated schools work on attainment, progress and an ability ‘to deliver’ within an increasingly apparent performance culture (Ball et al, 2012). The contemporary education policy, therefore, with its onus on progress and commitment to attainment no matter the economic status of pupils, does not acknowledge the larger, societal barriers that might affect those living in poverty nor recognise potential deficit views and myths associated with a broad, decontextualised ‘culture of poverty’ (Gorski, 2017). For too long, reductive education policy responses to poverty have made invisible the deeper histories, stories, emotions and relationships the child resides in (Emery et al, 2022).

Research, mostly from America (Ullucci and Howard, 2015) but also emerging in England (Hayes et al, 2017) and Europe (Strbova, 2012), tells us that this ‘culture of poverty’ ideology has shaped schools and teachers’ attitudes towards pupils living in poverty. Yet in reality, outside of the USA, we have little to no knowledge of what these attitudes are beyond broad brushstrokes. Certainly, in England, beyond the work of Simpson et al (2017), there is a paucity of either tools or data regarding school attitudes. Commensurately, we need to gain a clear understanding of what attitudes are held by those working within schools in England towards children living in poverty.

Adopting a critical frame and building on the thinking of Gorski (2017), we consider three, interrelated questions: How are social mobility discourses reflected in schools' attitudes to poverty? What do these attitudes say about the contemporary, professional identity of staff? To what extent can social mobility, as the normative education poverty discourse, be considered ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2010)?

Building on the attitudes survey work of Yun and Weaver (2010) - but with a strong emphasis on the English and European context, we have over the past five years, employing a cross sectional survey design, coproduced, alongside teaching colleagues, a UK-based Schools Attitudes to Poverty survey. The survey follows a 4-factor structure on attitudes to poverty - Factor 1 -Individualistic, Factor 2 – Stigma, Factor 3 – Societal, Factor 4 – Determinism This survey has been piloted and delivered to over 700 teachers, support staff, governors, senior leaders, premises teams and teaching assistants working across three regions in England and its development has been supported by the English National Education Union and the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Body.

It is the findings of our School Attitudes to Poverty survey that our paper interrogates, with a strong emphasis on how social mobility discourses shape teachers’ thinking and doing in England and more broadly across Europe. We reveal how, through language, soaked within the culture of poverty discourse, schools and wider education policies are both constituted and constituting ‘rescue’ identity notions. We also report on and explore the positioning of children living in poverty, and their families, as subjects to blame or feel pity for, thereby perpetuating mythical notions of social mobility and meritocracy.

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