Coming‐of‐age in 1980s England: reconceptualising black students’ schooling experience

Much conventional ‘race‐relations’ research of the schooling of black youth has tended to be underpinned by models of social pathology and subjective discrimination. It is argued here that there is a need to reconceptualise black youths’ schooling experience within a theoretical framework that moves beyond mono‐causal explanations and examines the multifaceted dimensions of racially structured English schooling. Placing students at the centre of the research enables us to see how schooling for black female and male youths is a central part of an alienating social response to them, that results in their experience of a structured ‘different reality’ from the white population. In response to this, they have, collectively and individually, creatively developed coping and survival strategies. These are examined here.