This paper sets the scene for critical discussion of the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) team’s place-based action study to date in a school-community on the Trem y Mynydd housing estate, to use its pseudonym, to push back against child poverty, especially its ongoing influence on schooling success. Concerned to realise an ‘ethnography that makes a difference’ (see Mills and Morton, 2013), it opens with some points for debate about the relationship between scholarship and politics, notably Hammersley’s (2000) concerns about research and its neutrality. It is informed by our compilation of case stories (see Beckett, 2023) but also shared ideas about inequality, social exclusion, unmet needs, values, powerlessness and degraded life chances (see Child Poverty Action Group, 2017, p.2). As CPAG noted, how you define it has a lot to do with what you think ought to be done about it. This paper is concerned with poverty and values, notably Piachaud’s view that poverty carries a moral imperative that something should be done, and Alcock’s view that poverty is a political concept that implies action to remedy it (see Piachaud, 1981, and Alcock, 1993, both cited by Child Poverty Action Group, 2017, p.22). Our sober approach in seeking to influence government decisions about schools/social policies can be aligned to the ‘worldly ambitions’ named by Mills and Morton (2013, p.142). This is both necessary and problematic going by Ball’s mapping of the new transnational policy networks and their connections (see Ball, 2008; Nambissan and Ball, 2010; both cited by Mills and Morton, 2013, p.142). It is evident in the tensions between successive UK government neoliberal policy choices like de-industrialisation, austerity and Brexit and devolved Welsh governments’ social democratic policies such as the 2015 Well-being and Future Generations (Wales) Act, the 2018 Children First needs assessment, and the 2022 Curriculum for Wales. This complex policy field, underpinned by party political ideology, requires concerted efforts to strengthen participatory and collaborative approaches to democratise policies, their roll-out and resourcing, all built on a constructive analysis of the present, including the history in the present, and of possible and probable futures. These efforts are strengthened by synchronising with other city-based teams working in school-communities voicing the practical-political realities of child poverty charted in their own localities, sharing values, findings and research intelligence about their respective cultural, political, and social contexts. Of interest are local solutions prefiguring national systemic and structural changes.

Child Poverty Action Group (2017). Poverty: The Facts. Ivinson, G., Thompson, I., Beckett, L., Wrigley, T. Egan, D., Leitch R., & McKinney, S. (2018) The research commission on poverty and policy advocacy A report from one of the BERA Research Commissions BERA available online at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/132212039.pdf Ivinson & Thompson (2020) Poverty and Education Across the UK. Bristol: Policy Press. LappaLainen, S., Hakala, K., Lahelma, E., Mietola, R., Niemi, A.M., Sallo, U.M., and Tolonen, T. (2022) Feminist ethnography as ‘Troublemaker’ in educational research: analysing barriers of social justice. Ethnography and Education, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457823.2022.2122855 Mills, D. & Morton, M. (2013). Ethnography in Education Sage Thompson, Ivinson, Beckett, Egan, Leitch, McKinney (2017) Learning the Price of Poverty across the UK. Policy Futures in Education, 16, 2, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1478210317736224