Place
Debts of a divided city
The Repair-Ed Project focuses on the city of Bristol, England.
Our research seeks to understand and address the uneven geographies of educational opportunity across the city.
Why Bristol?
Some of Bristol’s neighbourhoods are the most deprived areas in England, yet the city also ranks among the highest income per capita in the country.
Inequities in school provision are arguably deepening in the city: government schools, already squeezed by decades of funding cuts, are currently facing large budget deficits in the face of Covid-19 recovery, while Bristol has one of the country’s highest concentration of private school places.
In the words of a major report on education, Bristol is a ‘divided’ city. Others have called its geography of schooling an ‘educational apartheid’.
As Gloria Ladson-Billings has argued, educational disparities are not simply ‘gaps’. They are structurally produced injustices: outcomes of particular historical, political and economic arrangements. And therefore, they represent moral debts which we have the responsibility to address.
