Summaries related to Gillian Evans


By Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Date: 7 June 2026


Reviews of Gillian Evans book, Educational failure and white working class Britain.


Patrick Ainley. "Gillian Evans' approach to the 'social fact' of social class is through her own experience as a 'posh cow' bringing up mixed-race children with her black partner over 13 years in Bermondsey." "It is not, in fact, exclusively concerned with 'white working class children', though the particularities of Bermondsey are replicated a thousand times in similar areas throughout Britain. The prime focus is on educational failure." "Evans approaches this anthropologically without the 'benefit' of the educational literature but 'to make analytical the categories through which people make sense of their everyday lives' (note 2, p. 176)." "At times this method leads Evans astray—the distinctions her informants make about themselves and others between 'common', 'common as muck and 'common as shit' do not really hold and her attempts to distinguish between 'different types of posh people' also founder. However, she rightly divines that 'the relationship between the social classes in England hinges on a segregation that is emotionally structured through mutual disdain, not just occupationally defined' (p. 28). So that 'at school, and in life, middle-class people behave as if they are doing working-class people a favour'. Thus, 'the school... represents... posh people’s values' (p. 32)." "30 years ago when school leaving and working class were synonyms and qualifications were a proxy for middle class. Now the proxy for deprivation is free school meals. This is an indication of how the academic National Curriculum has intensified the situation."

Reference. Ainley, Patrick. 2007.  Review of Educational failure and white working class children in Britain by Gillian Evans. London Review of Education 5(3): 317-319. Available at:
https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/lre/article/2646/galley/16964/view/



Helen Tomlinson. At Amazon. "The interview subjects of this book will make you feel angry, shocked, feel pathos, feel guilty that pathos was not the first thing you felt and then feel like you have learned much from their plight." "This was a really good read and great for anyone wanting an honest and accessible depiction of what working class life is. What I enjoyed most about this book is the author's personal reflection on what was observed from her stand point. As a researcher I always have a soft spot for any author who can tell a story and during this I really did feel I was living this research with her!"


R L Coherty. At Amazon.  "The observations and conclusions are logical and make sense. But, it still assumes the failure is due to working class students inadequacy and the inadequacy of the state education system rather than the lack of impartiality by external examiners. One serious flaw is that failure is somehow an act of rebellion against the system when educational success will be more important to working class students than their more privileged and usually more successful competitors."


Peggy Froerer. "While class is fundamentally the outcome of an 'inextricable relationship between money and manners' (p. 24), we are reminded that the idea of a 'homogeneous' working class is none the less an erroneous one: there are varying levels of 'common-ness', all of which are positioned in relation to being 'upper' or 'posh'."... "the reason why non-white people (namely blacks and Asians) cannot be 'common' is because they are 'complete outsiders', from 'another place, another culture, a different way of life' (p. 60)." [No distinction between subjects' views and Evans' views?] "We are taken into the classroom, where we are introduced to two boys from years 5 and 6 who represent the kind of child caught between the different forms of participation required by the home and the school: the vulnerable 'mummy's boy' who struggles at school but finds self-worth from the small gang with whom he hangs in the street; and the clever, capable boy whose disruptive behaviour sees him regularly suspended from school." "Evans reiterates an earlier argument about how the physical disposition and constraints on the body that formal learning demands, and that the disruptive boys singularly fail to achieve, contribute to the increased educational failure of working-class white children."
Reference. Froerer, Peggy. 2010. Educational failure and white working class children in Britain. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(1): 170-171. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261898802_Educational_Failure_and_Working_Class_White_Children_in_Britain_by_Gillian_Evans

Stephanie Jones, Sue Morris, Nick Peim. "Two strengths of the book are Evans' reflexive writing and her focus on popular culture within the lives of the boys of Bermondsey."  "The young boys in Evans' study are portrayed as having much unsupervised time to themselves for riding bikes, playing with friends and moving from area to area on the council estate as they learn about and negotiate various exchanges. Evans argues that an ongoing informal competition for which of the boys will become the 'Big' men on the council promotes the creation of exclusive groupings, verbal assaults and even violence..." "This theme of boys and men feeling they must be somebody different as they enter spaces dominated by middle-class values and expectations (work, school) is a persistent one across the book."  "she argues that the difference between boys' forms of participation on the street and those necessary to obtain good marks in the classroom is the fundamental reason for their educational failure in particular." "Evans writes about the boys ignoring her, avoiding eye contact and not responding to her questions throughout the study until she attempts to become a participant within their Pokemon practices when she uses a poster of Pokemon to draw one of the characters. The boys were suddenly interested in Evans and her apparent value as someone who could produce a material good of great worth to them." "A critical analysis of which lives are asked to be left at the door when entering school would have enriched the text.. It is doubtful… that her children would be asked to leave their  already-acquired values for book learning behind as they enter the classroom." Asks whether the sealing-off of the self, required by working class children, is even possible. "Unlike the expectations held for the children at Tenter Ground, Evans does not attempt to seal off her self from the work of ethnography". There is missing information on teacher-student relations which means the book does not live up to its title. But her research on "what it means to conduct research across class lines might be invaluable. [really invaluable] Evans constructs herself as both trying desperately to overcome the limitations her poshness creates while simultaneously reading data through the lens of such limitations." Reviewer wants more about her as a mother. Reviewer notes that she was purposely naive about past literature.
Reference. Jones, Stephanie, Morris, Sue, and Peim, Nick. 2007. Review of Educational failure and working class white children in Britain by Gillian Evans. British Journal of Sociology of Education 28(5): 653-669. Available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425690701505581

Anne Frederike Muller's review is in French and seems difficult for me to put into online translation software. See:
https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/16/1/j.1469-8676.2008.00027_11.x.xml?print