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Evaluating the mix

The previous chapters have discussed the ways in which parents’ and carers’ discussion of school choice were infused with concerns about their children’s emotions and also how talking about school choice also frequently raised emotional responses. Chapter 4 focused in particular on ideas of threat and contamination which were produced when thinking of high schools and the presence of classed others. This ‘underclass’ was imagined as gendered, identified by both behaviour in and around the school and through dress and appearance. The classed other is seen as posing a potential threat to both the respondents’ children’s happiness and educational achievement. As we also saw in Chapter 3, the assumed source of the problem with unruly children is bad parenting. In this chapter, the focus is placed more specifically on the parents’ discussion of ethnic diversity, arguing that parents were more likely to consider diversity in general as something related to race or ethnicity rather than class, and this kind of diversity is often welcomed. However, what ethnic diversity is and what risks it may be seen to pose vary by area, with some parents in Cheadle Hulme expressing reservations about both ethnic and religious difference which they saw as potentially threatening, particularly when accompanied by ‘political correctness’. As we will explore below, in the UK schools have been a key site for the implementation and debate over multicultural policies and it is perhaps unsurprising that they also serve as a site for anxieties about multiculturalism. The chapter considers how many parents desire a ‘good mix’ in the schools and talk about ethnic diversity in positive ways. Thus, schools can be an important site for the kind of everyday conviviality (Gilroy 2004, Valluvan 2016; Rzepnikowska-Phillips 2017) which many parents view in a positive light and seek cross-cultural