ABSTRACT Despite successive policy interventions, students’ socio-economic status continues to strongly predict educational outcomes. Many schools aspire to ‘close’ this ‘gap’. This paper presents an ethnographic study of a group of Primary schools in predominantly white working-class areas in the Midlands of England. Generating ethnographic data through time-recurrent, multi-sited fieldwork including observation, informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, photography and documentary analysis, findings were constructed through critical dialogue between the group of six researchers. A concept of liminal spaces is used to analyse the schools’ work in seeking to move individuals, families, and communities beyond that which they previously knew, foregrounding norms, practices, and discourses constructed on the ‘inside’, and highlighting aspects in tension with the imagined ‘outside’. These schools’ conceptualisations of poverty are shown to be complex and multifaceted, and suggestions are made to employ liminality for articulating and critically exploring the spaces and transformations that schools seek to construct.

中文翻译：

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在英格兰主要是白人工人阶级地区，由小学建造的边际空间

摘要尽管采取了一系列的政策干预措施，但学生的社会经济地位仍在强烈地预测教育成果。许多学校渴望“弥补”这一“差距”。本文介绍了在英格兰中部地区以白人工人阶级为主的一组小学的人种学研究。通过六次研究人员之间的批判性对话，通过经常性，多地点的田野工作（包括观察，非正式对话，半结构化访谈，摄影和文献分析）生成人种学数据，并通过重要对话来构建调查结果。限制空间的概念用于分析学校在试图使个人，家庭和社区超越他们先前所知道的范围时所开展的工作，并着眼于在“内部”上建构的规范，实践和话语，并以想象的“外部”突出了紧张局势中的各个方面。这些学校关于贫困的概念被证明是复杂和多方面的，并提出了建议使用限制性来表达和批判性地探索学校寻求建设的空间和转变。