Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: English Subaltern Education from the Charity Schools to the Neoliberal Meritocracy of Widening Participation

British educational ideas and policies towards working-class and minority youth show continuous preoccupations with social status and preparation for labour. In examining this, we link educational discourses and practices in England from the Charity Schools to the contemporary higher education policy Widening Participation (WP). We argue that WP is heir to successive educational programmes that explicitly fit poor and marginalised youth to labour and, contrary to its asserted aims, legitimates social and economic hierarchies. Using major government reports, promotional narratives and data on university expansion and tuition fees, we argue that the ‘disadvantaged student’ in WP is a currency for higher education institutions and student debt is the price of a ticket to ‘success’ within an imagined neoliberal meritocracy. The novelty is that whereas in the past, the costs of subaltern education were covered by philanthropy, today’s ‘disadvantaged students’ indebt themselves to maintain their positions in society.