Geographies of supplementary education: Private tuition, classed and racialised parenting cultures, and the neoliberal educational playing field

This paper makes two contributions to knowledge. First, it broadens geogra-phies of education's focal reach by concentrating attention on the consumption of supplementary education. Supplementary education markets are booming as parents seek to ensure their children have the qualifications required to succeed in knowledge economies. The paper elucidates how consumption of such commercially provided tuition—which is delivered outside of school boundaries but designed to improve performance in school—is shaped by place-specific, classed and racialised parenting cultures. This shines an important light on shadow education market mechanics that have hitherto been hidden from geographical view, and foregrounds the significant role parenting cultures play in shaping children's educational experiences. Future research in geographies of education must


| INTRODUCTION
Geographical research into education first took root in the 1960s, but has blossomed on the international stage in the twenty-first century (Kučerová et al., 2020).The field encompasses research on formal early years, school-age and higher education (Mitchell, 2018), as well as informal and alternative learning environments (Mills & Kraftl, 2014), but supplementary education has until recently been conspicuous by its absence (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).This omission is noteworthy as supplementary education is booming in the twenty-first century (Bray, 2017), as parents seek to ensure their children have the qualifications required to succeed in knowledge economies (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).
Supplementary education is the umbrella category used in global studies of education to refer to services that instruct children in academic subjects outside of school hours to enhance their in-school attainment (Aurini et al., 2013;Bray, 2017).Provision takes diverse forms, including one-to-one private tutoring; small and large-scale cram-schooling which reinforces school curricula; learning-centre provision which follows company syllabuses (e.g., in literacy and numeracy); correspondence courses etc. Extra-curricular cultural and sporting classes are excluded from this definition (Aurini et al., 2013;Bray, 2017).Commercial provision paid for by parents overwhelmingly dominates this supplementary education landscape, though some initiatives which seek to provide free tuition to disadvantaged children exist (Bauer & Landolt, 2022).
Global market growth in supplementary education has emerged alongside enduring local specificity in supply, and provision has been monikered 'shadow education' by academics as its form often morphs to reflect the demands of different national education systems (Bray, 2017).This paper focuses on England where neoliberal education policies emphasising competition and a credentialised labour market (Reay, 2017;Tholen, 2020) drive increasing use of supplementary education.The supplementary market in England, which is conservatively estimated to be worth £2 billion per annum (Kirby, 2016), is notably domesticated in form, compared with say India or the USA (Gupta, 2020;Ho et al., 2019).Two thirds of sessions involve the unregulated delivery of one-to-one private tuition by teachertrained and unqualified tutors in the tutor's or tutee's home, but group provision is increasing (Holloway & Kirby, 2020;Wainwright et al., 2023).This private tutoring market sits neatly within global education research's umbrella category supplementary education; however, as a specific form of this, it is also referred to as private tuition in this paper to reflect local language norms. 1  The paper has two purposes.First, it extends the focal reach of geographies of education, concentrating attention on the under-researched field of supplementary education, through an exploration of how parental practices shape consumption in burgeoning commercial private-tuition markets.In England, 26.2% of state-educated pupils aged 11-16 now receive private tuition at some point in their academic career compared with 18.3% in 2005 (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).Recent research has highlighted significant inequalities in access to private tuition by class (31.2% high affluence; 15.5% low affluence), race (Asian 45.8%; Black 44.1%; Mixed-Ethnicity 34.5%; White 21.7%) and region (e.g., economically dominant London 43.8%; the central East Midlands 27.5%; the peripheral North West 13.5%) (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).However, while these socio-spatial patterns have been mapped, they have not yet been explained.This paper addresses this lacuna, exploring how place-specific, classed and racialised parenting cultures shape the consumption of private tuition.
Second, this paper advances the conceptual contribution of geographies of education, highlighting how geographical scholarship can develop social scientific theorisations of the links between home and school learning environments.The next section of the paper introduces this conceptual landscape, establishing how researchers in Sociology and Education have theorised the importance of parenting practices to formal education (Bourdieu, 1973(Bourdieu, , 1984(Bourdieu, /2010)), including middle-class parents' 'concerted cultivation' of children's development versus working-class parents' approach to 'natural growth' (Lareau, 2000(Lareau, , 2002: 748): 748).Critical review of this material from a geographical perspective highlights the need for a new conceptual agenda, including not only a need to rethink binary approaches to class, and examine its intersections with race, but also crucially to remain important, but attention to inter-class similarity and intra-class variation, as it emerges through intersections with race and in place, is equally vital.

K E Y W O R D S
class, concerted cultivation, parenting cultures, race, shadow education, supplementary education attend to a multi-scalar sense of place (Massey, 1994) in research on parenting cultures.The centre of the paper progresses this more thoroughly spatialised conceptual agenda through a focus on private tuition, utilising 60 qualitative parental interviews, to explore how England's multi-scalar educational playing field stimulates tuition use and how its differential uptake is shaped in place through complex classed and racialised parenting cultures.In conclusion, the paper not only emphasises the importance of deepening geographies of education's engagement with supplementary education, but also the conceptual implications of geographical perspectives for interdisciplinary educational research.

EDUCATION MARKETS
Geographical research on education is theoretically eclectic (Kučerová et al., 2020).The focus here is on Bourdieu (1973Bourdieu ( , 1984Bourdieu ( /2010Bourdieu ( , 1986) ) and subsequent approaches, as his writing not only has an enduring influence in geographies of education (Blokland, 2023), his thesis that cultural reproduction through education is essential to the social reproduction of class inequality has also been highly influential in interdisciplinary research on home-school links (Davies & Rizk, 2018).Bourdieu's premise is that families in the ruling classes transmit 'linguistic and cultural competence' to their children at home, and that possession of these 'instruments of appropriation' facilitates their educational success as they are attuned to the dominant culture that shapes schooling (Bourdieu, 1973: 494).They thus accrue more institutionalised cultural capital (e.g., qualifications) through education than their less well-off counterparts, reproducing class inequality.In pursuing this agenda, Bourdieu eschews both atomistic understandings of the individual, and structuralist positions which casts people solely as agents of power, instead arguing for a focus on 'the production of habitus, that system of dispositions which act as a mediation between structures and practice' (Bourdieu, 1973, p. 72).The habitus (viewed as individual or group dispositions) is always mediated through its intersections with cultural, social and/or economic capital (which shape the ability to act) and the social environment or field (as context affects the leverage of different dispositions and capitals).This is a relationship Bourdieu (1984Bourdieu ( /2010, p. 95) , p. 95) neatly summarises in the equation: '[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice'.
Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and broader theory of cultural reproduction, have proved enormously influential in debates about families' roles in educational inequality, despite concern in some quarters that 'core concepts and mechanisms are ill defined in his writings' (Jaeger & Breen, 2016, p. 1080).Rather than hinder its impact, however, this opacity may have been productive.Davies and Rizk (2018, p. 439) argue that the 'synthetic quality' of Bourdieu's workwhich traverses national, theoretical and methodological traditions-underpins his appeal to diverse scholars, who employ disparate interpretations of his concept of cultural capital.The development of the Lareau tradition is particularly pertinent to this paper.Lareau built on the tradition of family-school ethnographies to explore how many middle-class parents' practices (including their emphasis on extra-curricular activities, verbal reasoning with children, and parental involvement in school) entail the 'concerted cultivation' of children, as they learn to perform in situations that mimic school, acquire soft skills vital in the labour market, and develop 'an emerging sense of entitlement' (Lareau, 2000(Lareau, , 2002, p. 748 & p. 768), p. 748 & p. 768).Conversely, many working-class parents tend towards the 'accomplishment of natural growth' (ensuring that children are safe, fed and loved, and taught to obey adult directives), which gives children more relaxed childhoods and deeper extended-family relationships but also constrains their interactions with institutions such as schools (Lareau, 2000(Lareau, , 2002, p. 748), p. 748).
In the past decade, new research on parenting cultures has challenged this binary framing in Lareau's work (Lareau, 2000(Lareau, , 2002) ) between middle-class concerted cultivation and working-class natural growth on a number of counts.First, it has been argued that class differences in parenting practices are the outcome of financial rather than cultural divides, as mixed methods research in the USA and UK demonstrates that parents of all classes prize activities for children (Bennett et al., 2012;Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014).Second, it seems that social change over time means there are growing similarities in classed practices as most parents, for example in Australia and the UK, now engage in socially prescribed intensive parenting (Craig et al., 2014;Dermott & Pomati, 2016).Third, research with low-income US parents suggests they also undertake other more extensive, class-specific forms of intensive mothering (e.g., emphasising children's access to appropriate material goods to ensure social inclusion) (Verduzco-Baker, 2017).Finally, the middleclass/working-class binary has been challenged by calls to take intra-class variation seriously, for example in India and the UK, while also foregrounding the intersection of class with other social differences, including race (Gupta, 2020;Vincent, 2017).These new insights since Lareau emphasise the need to explore the complexity of classed parenting cultures in different global contexts.
Lareau's original thesis that tendencies towards concerted cultivation and natural growth were differentiated by class but not race has also been open to empirical and conceptual challenge.Empirically, quantitative research demonstrates that White US families engage in more concerted cultivation than Black families (Bodovski, 2010), partially explaining differences in attainment (Cheadle, 2008).Dumais et al. (2012), however, complicate this picture, demonstrating that structural inequalities mean the same parental investments in children's education produce different results depending on race and class.Qualitative research is also fleshing out the intersections of race and class in concerted cultivation exercised by middle-class Black and Indian families in the UK (Mukherjee & Barn, 2021;Rollock et al., 2015).Conceptually, Manning (2019, p. 15) uses race-based critical theory to reread Lareau's research, demonstrating that it overlooks the centrality of 'racial socialization and parenting techniques … to class-based concerted cultivation practises of Black middle-class families'.Likewise, Delale-O' Connor et al. (2020Connor et al. ( , p. 1915) ) decentre the White parenting norms that lie at the heart of debates about concerted cultivation, and the deficit model of African American parenting this implies (see also Verduzco-Baker, 2017), by focusing on the 'racialized compensatory cultivation' through which socio-economically differentiated minoritised parents consciously employ educational strategies to mitigate the impacts of racism on their children's learning environments and opportunities.In so doing, both Manning (2019) and Delale-O'Connor et al. ( 2020) highlight the need for intersectional research into race, class and parenting, including that which makes assumptions about Whiteness explicit.
These social scientific debates about race resonate with twenty-first century developments in geography.Geography too has research that documents racially unequal outcomes (Nash, 2003;Pulido, 2002), and studies which follow critical race theory in insisting that societal formations must be theorised as inevitably racialised (Hawthorne, 2019;Pulido, 2002).Pulido (2002) militates for boundary crossing between these approaches, but highlights that questions of race are not always asked by White-dominated geography (notwithstanding increased interest in Whiteness).Black geographies have emerged to challenge this Whiteness and centre Black lives (Hawthorne, 2019), including in intersectional ways (Noxolo, 2022).As the product of White researchers, this paper makes no claim to add insight into supplementary education to Black (or minoritised Asian) geographies-disciplinary diversity is imperative to allow knowledge production from varied 'enunciative positions' (Noxolo, 2022(Noxolo, , p. 1236))-but nor does it avoid questions about race.Rather, insights from inter-disciplinary social science literature (above) inform a boundary-crossing approach (Pulido, 2002) that simultaneously documents intersectional race and class differences in parenting practices, and explores their creation through inherently racialised and classed social formations (Delale-O' Connor et al., 2020;Manning, 2019).
Intersectional research is vital, but geographical perspectives demonstrate that researchers must also pay greater attention to the context of concerted cultivation.Empirical research on cultural capital has tended to 'tear the concept out of its surrounding framework and its related notions of field, habitus and practice' (Davies & Rizk, 2018, p. 347), meaning insufficient attention has been paid to the importance of field in shaping how habitus and capitals combine to shape parenting practices.Research informed by a progressive sense of place (Massey, 1994) can reconnect Bourdieu's conceptual triad (Bourdieu, 1984(Bourdieu, /2010) by enlivening interest in the field.Place-sensitive research allows framing of the field not as a flat context for social action, but as a product of interaction between power relations that we may for analytical convenience label as global, national or local in level, but which in reality are 'constellations of temporary coherences' (Massey, 1998, pp. 124-5), meaning they are never purely global or national, nor entirely closed and local.
In respect to supplementary education, global differences in the educational field matter to parenting cultures as the inculcation of habitus and effectiveness of different forms of capital varies between nations, depending on the demands of their national education systems (Katartzi, 2017).National policy landscapes do not operate evenly across a country's territory, however, not only as implementation may vary deliberately between regions, but also as policy only takes form as it is enacted in different localities.In these localities, the 'nuanced relationship between material and sociocultural resources of neighbourhood[s] profoundly influence local patterns of parenting practice' (Witten et al., 2009(Witten et al., , p. 2893)).Local moral geographies can shape parents' habitus as they must negotiate locally dominant ideals about education, whether or not they agree with them (Blokland, 2023;Holloway, 1998).Moreover, the neighbourhood constituency (which is partly shaped by wider processes) can influence access to social capital that facilitates the work of parenting, though it may still create 'a homogenous community in a heterogenous locality' (Vincent & Maxwell, 2016, p. 277).Furthermore, differing dispositions and capitals must be negotiated in the context of locally available educational provision (itself partly an artefact of national and regional policy) (Reay, 2017).Multi-scalar research that explores the contextualisation of concerted cultivation through attention to the dynamic nature of the field-which is shaped by mutually constituting global, national and local processes-is therefore vital.
In summary, the existing literature points to the need for research which explores the complex classed, racialised and crucially also contextualised dynamics of parenting cultures as they shape access to private tuition.To this end, the paper progresses its twin aims-of raising supplementary education's profile in geography, and advancing geographers' conceptual contribution to interdisciplinary debates-by addressing three research questions.First, how does the multi-scalar educational field foment the use of private tuition as a tool of concerted cultivation in England?Second, how do Asian, Black and White middle-class parents' dispositions and resources combine here to shape their divergent approaches to concerted cultivation through tuition?Third, how do racially diverse working-class families' habitus and capital cohere in this context to shape their distinctive tuition usage as a potential vehicle for concerted cultivation?

| METHODOLOGY
The paper focuses on England where education policy revolution has been wrought through marketisation, reshaping the school system and activities within schools (Reay, 2017).In the education marketplace, schools and individual teachers are increasingly held accountable for the attainment of their pupils (Kulz, 2017), and educational credentials play an important role in pupils' transitions to the next stage of education and employment in the knowledge economy (Pratt, 2016;Tholen, 2020).Somewhat paradoxically, parents too are increasingly held responsible for their children's educational outcomes (Reay, 2017), both as they are expected to exercise agency to choose well for their children in the education market (Olmedo & Wilkins, 2017), and as political discourse posits that the home environment has a bigger impact on attainment than school quality (DfE and DfH, 2011).It is in this educational field-which for the past decade has seen structural underfunding due to government policies of austerity-that the private tuition industry is now flourishing (Holloway & Kirby, 2020;Roberts, 2019).
As the study seeks to explain how parents' habitus and capital combines with this field to shape disparate tuition practices (Holloway & Kirby, 2020), semi-structured interviews were undertaken to explore the reasons underlying parental behaviours.Interviews were conducted in the following three case-study regions to encompass spatial diversity in the tuition market: London-the highest usage region that lies at the heart of England's south-eastern dominated economy (43.8%); the East Midlands-an average-usage region located in central England (27.5%); and the North West-the lowest usage and one of the two most northerly regions of England (13.5%) (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).In total, 20 families with at least one child in Years 8-13 (ages 12-18) at a state secondary school were recruited per case study region (n = 60 families).This paper draws on 60 individual interviews undertaken with parents: women's social responsibility for education produced more female volunteers (Holloway et al., 2023), but parent is used to include the 54 mothers and six fathers who participated (50 married/cohabiting; 10 lone parents).The families include those using grammar schools (academically selective), local education authority comprehensive schools (pupil make-up reflects school locality) and centrally financed academy schools (designed to increase competition in school markets) (Kulz, 2017;Reay, 2017), but it is noteworthy that all state schools are shaped by intensive, data-heavy assessment cultures and the need to compete in a school marketplace (Finn, 2016;Kulz, 2017).To incorporate diverse perspectives, most families were tuition users but one third were not.
Participants were recruited via online and offline flyers circulated through diverse educational institutions, employers, community groups, and cultural and leisure organisations.Recruitment was stratified by class and race to ensure a diverse, intersecting sample.Our purpose in using class and race as variables is not to naturalise socially constructed differences (Nash, 2003), it is to gather data that allows investigation of how they come to matter in shaping known differences in tuition use.We recruited parents across the class spectrum, measuring their status using the self-coded National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) (ONS, 2021).To incorporate non-employment aspects of class experience, we asked parents about their educational attainment (Dumais et al., 2012) and used Acorn classifications (CACI, 2021) for insights into their residential area: these are discussed in the text where pertinent.In recruiting a racially diverse sample, participants were asked to self-define their ethnic or racial group, and this was used to classify families as Asian, Black, multi-racial or White, the categories seen in previous English research on private tuition (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).The analysis does not separate multi-racial families as a distinct group as this did not emerge in the data; rather their experiences are incorporated into the analysis as they discussed their relations to Asian, Black and White families.
All members of the research team undertook interviews using a schedule that addressed children's schooling, attitudes to and experiences of private tuition, and future aspirations.Given the regional, class and racial diversity of participants, the White, northern, and first or second-generation middle-class researchers traversed insider and outsider positions in different interviews.Although we recognise that emergent subjects neither have, nor can communicate, full self-knowledge (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008), our strategy was to directly engage with potential cultural misunderstanding (Riessman, 1987) in interviews by asking for interviewees to explain context-specific, classed or racialised parenting practices to those outside their communities.This methodology illuminates parenting practices shaped by multiple intersecting differences, but the need for disciplinary diversity remains (cf.Noxolo, 2022).The research received full ethical approval from Loughborough University.Provisions were made for informed consent; right to withdraw; interviewer vetting; transcriber confidentiality; secure data storage; and participant anonymity (unless disclosure required for safeguarding).
The interviews, which averaged 91 min, were subject to systematic qualitative analysis to ensure the rigorous interpretation of data.Interviews were fully transcribed and coded in NVivo in a branching-tree system (Bazeley & Jackson, 2013).The primary boughs included class, race and place; secondary branches spurred from these (e.g., class encompassed branches on expectations, diversity, privilege and finances); and these secondary branches sprouted tertiary twigs where required.The results of the thematic analysis-a process which saw the development, refining and reviewing of themes that emerge from theory and unexpectedly from the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006)-are presented in the subsequent section using individual quotations to exemplify broader trends.Pseudonyms are used for anonymity.Although this approach aligns with Braun and Clarke's (2006) 15-point checklist for good thematic analysis, all methodologies have shortcomings: future research could focus on individual ethnic groups to facilitate even greater reflection on intra-group differences.

| PARENTING CULTURES AND PRIVATE TUITION IN ENGLAND
4.1 | Contextualising concerted cultivation: The multi-scalar educational playing field The paper's first research question addresses how England's multi-scalar educational field foments the use of private tuition as a tool of concerted cultivation.National political and policy discourses that characterise education as an instrumental good, emphasising its role in the country's national economic and individual success (Kulz, 2017;Reay, 2017), shape a parental consensus that qualifications are vital in shaping children's futures.This invokes a sense of jeopardy, succinctly articulated by Amira Fayed, a working-class, Black, London mother: If she [daughter] hasn't had the qualifications, she can't have the good job and, and her future will be ruined.Amira's view is shared by parents across class, racial and regional boundaries as they regard qualifications-an institutionalised form of cultural capital-as a vital mechanism that facilitates children's successful transitions through education and into work (Bourdieu, 1986).
Highly class-differentiated patterns of educational outcomes in England (DfE, 2021) mean parents express these fears about the ruin wreaked by a lack of qualifications at different attainment levels.For working-class Kate Davies and Val Dhanda, respectively White and Asian parents from the East Midlands, securing a pass in GCSE maths and English (examinations in Year 11, ages 15-16) is the key objective as they are cognisant that neoliberal shifts in education and employment (Reay, 2017;Tholen, 2020) mean these increasingly govern post-16 education options and access to paid work: [GCSE] English and maths are the main importance for me … if you want to do A levels [examinations in Year 13, at 17-18] if you haven't got your GCSEs, you're not doing A levels.
I think it's more important now purely because the way things are.It's changing.Employers look for those qualifications now.You've got to have a basic level of literacy, maths and English now even before you can get an interview.
For parents with higher-attaining children, more of whom are middle class (DfE, 2021), excellent A level results (alongside work experience, volunteering etc.) are seen to open the door to prestigious courses and universities in the massified higher education system and a respected degree now required to unlock wide-ranging job opportunities (Tholen, 2020).
This imperative that children must gain qualifications is experienced through a marketised and highly unequal education system in England (Reay, 2017) and this has implications for tuition use.The biggest distinction in English education is between well-resourced fee-charging private schools and financially challenged state education (Roberts, 2019).Some parents, including David Shaw, a middle-class, Black, London father, seek to use private tuition as a cost-effective strategy to leverage the benefits of private education, while using a state school: [N]ot everybody's got that money [for private schooling], so how do you do it anyway?Or how to you get that edge?A little bit of private tuition.
Neoliberal education policies, however, have also enshrined school diversity and parental choice within the state system (Kulz, 2017) and this fuels tuition use.On the one hand, parents turn to tuition to try and win the competition for school places, for example to help their children succeed in the 11 Plus examination that governs access to academically selective grammar schools in regions where these are available (Hajar, 2020).Gaining a place means, as this middle-class, Asian mother Riya Chawla from the North West explains, that 'you're sort of set for life'.On the other hand, losing the fight for a place in a favoured school also drives tuition use among some working-class families, for example Mandip Joshi an Asian mother from the East Midlands, who feel compelled to fill the gap: I'm very open to tuition because I'm not happy … with the school [regulator grade 'Requires Improvement'] … if the school is 'Outstanding' … I wouldn't need to put money that I haven't got, you know, for tuition.
As Reay (2017) argues, success for one child in an educational competition inevitably means a loss for others.
Neoliberal education policy has also embedded competition into the daily practices of diverse state schools, for example through encouraging setting [division of cohort into 'ability' groupings] and the micro-management of teachers and pupils through attainment data (Finn, 2016;Kulz, 2017).Across academies, comprehensives and grammar schools, parents in this study use tuition to help children compete for places in higher-attaining sets, as Fadilah Sarraf, a middleclass, Black mother from the East Midlands, explains: It's almost like a very competitive environment in every single subject, especially the core subjects-English, maths and science-where they're settled … that's the reason that she's having the tuition for them … they … mix and match some of the sets every half-term, so there is potential to move up and down every half-term in Year 10 … it was a major worry.
Worry is also experienced when children are unable to understand classroom work and fear they may fail to achieve their individual target grade (assigning these is a near universal practice in English state schools) (Finn, 2016).Neoliberal education discourses which increasing hold parents responsible for children's attainment (DfE and DfH, 2011;Olmedo & Wilkins, 2017), and young people's sense of accountability for these grades which is instilled through 'collective and individualising affective atmospheres of progress' in data-driven schools (Finn, 2016: 44), prime families to seek tuition when faced with these concerns.Thus, the unequal education market, and the neoliberal responsibilisation of families for learning outcomes, helps drive tuition use.
The impact of national education policy on the field is important, but its intersection with local differences in England's tuition market also matter.Statistics show sharp regional differentiation in the tuition market (Holloway & Kirby, 2020): high-usage regions contain many localities with significant tuition use, alongside some less well served areas; while low-usage regions have pockets of tuition proliferation, as well as more numerous low-usage neighbourhoods.This heterogeneity within regions means that the local, neighbourhood scale is more significant in shaping parental practices.Notably, parents in high-usage neighbourhoods (in all regions) are repeatedly exposed to tuition through parenting networks, children's peer groups, local advertising and high-street tuition businesses, and these encounters can ensure tuition emerges in the locality as an unremarkable, everyday practice.As Jemima Price, a middle-class, White, London mother states: 'it's relatively easy to come by a tutor … it's just a very normal thing in my area'.
The processes underpinning this normalisation warrant attention.The prevalence of tuition in some areas in part reflects the dispositions and capitals of local people.A locality's social make-up is partly shaped by broader processes, but collective practices mean that local moral geographies of parenting emerge (Holloway, 1998;Vincent & Maxwell, 2016) that have a neighbourhood impact (Blokland, 2023;Davies & Rizk, 2018).Most directly, peer pressure from those using private tuition can prompt other parents into action, as Ian Wilkinson, a middle-class, White father in part of the North West that has grammar schools, details: The discursive parallel that Ian draws between not using tuition and child abuse points to the power of national policies that redefine children's attainment as parental responsibility (Olmedo & Wilkins, 2017), as any failure to maximise performance is cast as maltreatment.Not all parents succumb to locally experienced peer pressure, but even some who resist question their own judgement.
Furthermore, neighbourhood environments also create a sense of possibilities for parents.For Parminder Rani, a middle-class, Asian mother, the move across London to a tuition-rich area (Reay, 2017) changed her attitudes, making the service seem an accessible prospect (Wainwright et al., 2023): [I used to think] tuition really was for the rich, the upper class … when I came to East London, predominantly Asian, I couldn't believe the amount of tuition centres that I could see firstly, like on the main road, it's almost like every cluster of shops would have a tuition centre there.Every week I would get a leaflet through the door, tuition … my perception's change from being here … that may have supported me … going into it with my children.
By contrast, Kerry Stewart, a working-class, White mother who lives in a low-usage North West town without a high-street tuition industry, has not been exposed to its possibilities: To be honest, it didn't really cross my mind … I thought tuition was something that you used in college … I don't really know much about it.
Thus neighbourhood experiences (Davies & Rizk, 2018;Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014)-and their intersection with the national policy emphasis on qualifications which are gained through unequal school markets (Kulz, 2017)-shape responsibilised parents' private tuition practices.This results in the development of local parenting cultures which are specific to individual localities, but whose creation stems from the temporary coherence of power relations that operate across shifting, intersecting scales.

| Middle-class concerted cultivation in racially differentiated families
The paper's second research question considers how Asian, Black and White middle-class families shape their differential use of tuition as a potential tool of concerted cultivation in this multi-scalar educational field.Tuition use is highest among heterogenous Asian middle-class families (Holloway & Kirby, 2020), and global migration emerges as a vital factor shaping both migrant and British Asian parents' dispositions (Bourdieu, 1984(Bourdieu, /2010)).First generation Asian parents were raised in birth nations that lacked a comprehensive welfare state, producing a mindset of self-reliance through achievement that stimulates tuition use both there (Azam, 2016;Liu & Bray, 2017) and in England.As middle-class Vera Walsh-who grew up in China but now lives in a Multi-racial family in North West England-explains: When we go to Kumon [tuition] … 80% of the parents are Indian or Chinese … or Asian background.The reason … in China or India … they are very competitive nations, not as in they're born competitive, it's just society's made them competitive … the government don't look after people … so you kind of have to rely on yourself … you either suffer when you're young, or you suffer when you're old!Their habitus endures post-migration, Kamal Vara-who was Indian born but now resides in the East Midlands-explains, despite encounters with White British parents who introduce the notion that 'there's something called "too much pressure", there's something called "balanced"'.This disposition towards concerted cultivation is not unreflexively cultural, rather Kamal's strategic desire for her children to excel in competitive education and labour markets (Dhingra, 2018;Sriprakash et al., 2016), combined with her economic ability to act, informs her purchase of private tuition for her high-attaining children (Ho et al., 2019).
Migration's impact in shaping the dispositions of British Asian middle-class parents is different, notably so for those raised by working-class parents in twentieth-century England.For this group, the desire to escape the hardship of their migrant parents' working lives (Shah et al., 2010), and offer their children greater help than they received, impels tuition use.Sherin Mehri, now part of a Multi-racial family in the North West, explicates this: Our parents were the first generation who had come from Pakistan, every single penny was sent back home … the only thing I've got [as a child] is if I do well in education … I didn't want what my parents had … I didn't have support, and that will had to come from me.Whereas now with the kids, I just want to throw everything I can in order to help them.
Local racialised social capital is also crucial in reproducing middle-class Asian parents' use of tuition.On the one hand, parents such as Kamal (above) actively source tutoring recommendations through her Indian 'community network'.On the other hand, parents such as Leela Habib from London experience 'a lot of peer pressure' about supplementary education from Asian family and friends as this group, as in the USA and Australia (Dhingra, 2018;Sriprakash et al., 2016), has high tuition use.The pervasive strength of the culture of academic achievement (Ho et al., 2019), and hierarchy of desirable educational and occupational fields (e.g., medicine) (Gupta, 2020), can mean some parents feel uncomfortable conforming to, what they recognise as, an Asian stereotype.Some emphasise their distinction from this, for example, explaining that in focusing on future success they support children's choices, rather than narrowly prescribing career paths.Nonetheless, as London-based Heather Tan explains, a competitive drive to excel (Dhingra, 2018), albeit now within the child's chosen path, is seen as a specifically Asian parenting style: I think that's where the difference [is] in terms of parenting … White people probably would want them to be more happy, whereas I want them to be happy but ambitious.
Black middle-class families' use of tuition is only a little lower that of Asian middle-class families (Holloway & Kirby, 2020), but they are distinctive in giving greater prominence to education as a tool to challenge racism.The heterogenous nature of the middle-classes is evidenced in economic differences between Black middle-class families (Vincent et al., 2013): some are comfortably middle class, but others who are first-generation middle class in employment terms, still live in less well-off areas (CACI, 2021) and feel working class.Parents, such as Renne Paul from London, whose professional role in education places her in the top class category in the NS-SEC system (ONS, 2021), but whose neighbourhood is categorised as 'deprived and ethnically diverse in flats' (CACI, 2021), thus define education as part of an ongoing racialised, class project: [M]ainly I'm working class because I live in a social housing place … my mother hasn't really got qualifications and my son is in university now, but I wouldn't say that we're middle class, we're working class.We just have high expectations … and being a Black person as well, I think that is the only way that we can rise … I think we see the education as the route out … [of] poverty … if our children are successful, then we as parents have done a successful job.
In so doing, she draws on neoliberal discourses that characterise education as a tool of social mobility (Reay, 2017)-which it can be at the individual if not the structural level (Holloway & Kirby, 2020)-and children's educational attainment as a measure of good parenting (Olmedo & Wilkins, 2017).
The racialisation of concerted cultivation is clearly evidenced in Black middle-class parents' accounts.Pursuing success, Black British Diane Thomas demonstrates the importance of local, racialised social capital as she follows a Black African friend in using tuition in London (Bourdieu, 1986).This is not activist, community-led Black supplementary schooling, which emerged in the late 1950s to counter racist schooling (Fairless Nicholson, 2023;Gerrard, 2013).Indeed, Joseph-Salisbury and Andrews (2017) argue that Black supplementary schooling declined significantly in the twenty-first century, as state schools embraced some of its cultural lessons, and private tuition burgeoned.Rather parents in this study are embracing academically focused private tutoring to help their children navigate racist landscapes.Diane, for example, engages in 'racialized compensatory cultivation ' (Delale-O'Connor et al., 2020, p. 1915), as she seeks to counter the poor environment her sons experience, both by keeping them away from local youth criminality (Vincent et al., 2013) and, as she describes below, in nurturing their development in the face of racist stereotyping and discrimination (Kulz, 2017): [B]lack boys don't do well in maths, simple as that.I needed them to get a step up … why are so many Black boys discouraged from academia and encouraged into sports?! Literally you're Black, you must be able to run fast … that is why I chose to have a tutor, just so that he has another gun in his arsenal.Because … automatically being a Black man, you're at a disadvantage in this country.
Tuition is also used as an 'equalisation strategy' (Manning, 2019, p. 12) by Black middle-class parents of girls, such as Fadilah Sarraf from the East Midlands, who share the hope excellent attainment will insulate them in racist labour markets: [I]t is a very much racist and discriminative society … it's really important that she does really well … we have these conversations all the time … in terms of the Black Lives movement … having that tuition just puts you on par … in the same level playing field as White British … [in] an interview, no one can try and say 'Oh it's because you've not done really well at school' … that excuse that they could use if they wanted to isn't there.
Nevertheless, while this individualised strategy is highly valued, it is not open to all within the economically diverse Black middle classes.As Julie Lewis from London explains: 'We haven't had the privilege of any sort of private tuition because it's just always cost too much money'.
White middle-class families use tuition less than their Asian and Black counterparts (Holloway & Kirby, 2020), and while they are not a unified group their concerted cultivation practices can be racialised in distinctive ways.Neoliberal education policy has responsibilised parents for children's education (Olmedo & Wilkins, 2017), but many White middleclass parents are conspicuous in representing themselves as balanced parents, who align with policy by supporting education, while nevertheless vocally eschewing pushy parenting.Helen Walker, from London, illustrates this trend: [We are involved in] a supportive way … encouraging them and always trying to aim really high … not in a pushy way … I wouldn't be surprised if people [locally] were more sort of, kind of pushy really … we support but we're kind of not too pressured.I want them to be happy first and then obviously to sort of pursue what they love doing as their career.Some White parents do engage with private tuition, to compete for school places or support children's attainment.However, in contrast to most Asian and Black parents who, like minority groups in other Western nations (Ho et al., 2019;Sriprakash et al., 2016), prioritise academic achievement alongside happiness, other White middle-class families question the need for excellence.Penny Ramsey, from the East Midlands, who is happy with her child's academy school, exemplifies this: [School] were absolutely excellent … I haven't felt the need to use a tutor … Imogen's never needed the extra input … I know you can always make a child better, she's not an … A* student, I appreciate that, but I suppose as well there is a financial element as well, where you've got to think, well can we afford it?White, middle-class parental discourses on excellence and affordability reveal intersecting layers of racial and class privilege (Bhopal, 2018).Penny could, she confirmed, afford tuition if she felt it was needed; however, her view is that this spending is not a top priority, as good enough educational performance is acceptable.This perspective is shared by other White middleclass parents, such as London-based Lisa Brooks, who have less economic capital than Penny: [T]here are other things that we need to spend the money on … sport is … far more beneficial to them for their mental health and their fitness and, and educationally they're doing well enough to not need the money that is being spent on their sport to be spent on their education … we haven't got the finances to do the tutoring as well.
This decision can be interpreted as a form of racial privilege (Bhopal, 2018) as these families feel able to prioritise the production of a well-rounded 'Renaissance Child' (Vincent & Maxwell, 2016, p. 272) over academic excellence.Unlike minoritised groups, they do not envisage a future where minor blemishes in children's academic record might hinder progress, and they thus complement solid, if not exceptional, academics with soft skills.However, it also points to internal class differentiation (Vincent, 2017) as not all White, middle-class families can afford both with ease, and many, such as Lisa, abstain from private tutoring.
4.3 | Working-class 'natural growth' in racially differentiated families The paper's final research question explores how racially diverse working-class families' habitus and capital cohere in this multi-scalar field to shape their distinctive use of tuition as a potential mechanism of concerted cultivation.White working-class children have some of the lowest educational attainment (DfE, 2021) and tuition use (Holloway & Kirby, 2020) in England, and generalising assumptions about problematic working-class parenting permeate education practices (Kulz, 2017;cf. Verduzco-Baker, 2017).Interestingly, some White working-class parents in this research parallel their White middle-class peers in disliking pressure and appreciating the rounded child: I wouldn't say I put pressure on her to do well at school, I'm more concerned with the fact that she behaves herself while at school … she'll always do her best … Education is important but I don't believe that it's the beall and end-all of everything in life that makes you whole as a person … it's not the most important priority.Reay (2017) explores working-class parents' commitment to education in the face of neoliberal policies that responsibilise them for children's attainment (DfE and DfH, 2011), tracing how their limited capital can hinder effective action.Although Dawn argues education is not her top priority, she actively engages with her daughter's schooling and has explored group tuition.However, living in a low-tuition neighbourhood her daughter is resistant to a service beyond her cultural knowledge, and the classes, like other forms of concerted cultivation (Bennett et al., 2012), are out of Dawn's financial reach.
White working-class families are not an homogeneous group, however.Some parents from British and mainland-European heritage do have sufficient financial capital (Bourdieu, 1986) to purchase tuition, albeit they reduce costs by using group services or cheaper tutors, in fewer subjects, for limited periods, demonstrating ongoing inequality even among those who do use tuition (Holloway et al., 2023;Wainwright et al., 2023).Neoliberal discourses that education offers the route to social mobility (Kulz, 2017) underpin their focus on GCSE maths and/or English as these are perceived as vital in securing children greater financial security than their parents.In accessing tuition, these parents are aware that they are contesting classed and racialised practices in their working-class neighbourhoods, as Jackie Donnelly explicates in the East Midlands: I think White working class, traditionally we don't kind of push our kids … But … set your sights a bit higher.I don't think that's ever a bad thing to say to a child.
Recognition that they are transgressing local, racialised, class norms mean this group are more likely to keep tuition secret than other groups.This is partially due to embarrassment at needing help, but as Leanne Taylor, a North West mother, explains, there is also a risk of being negatively labelled by your peers for focusing on attainment: 'people think you're a swot [assiduously studious person] then … that's how you get labelled'.In common with US research that highlights minority groups' focus on academic achievement (Ho et al., 2019), this fear of being labelled was not widely shared by other racial groups.
Black working-class families make greater use of tuition as a vehicle for concerted cultivation than their White counterparts (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).Although there is some suggestion that families with Black Caribbean heritage may be disillusioned with an education system in which their children do less well (DfE, 2021), first generation parents who had migrated from Africa had high hopes for children's education.Nura Manai, now living in London, illustrates this: [W]e came into this country … saying if you educate yourself, you'll do well … my oldest one, my priority is education, like I need to give her what I didn't have [as a child migrant] … in our culture … you so brag when your children do well … everybody knew who is in the top set, who is on the bottom set.
Her account both evidences the importance of migration in shaping educational narratives (Reay, 2017), and points to the significance of local racialised social capital in reproducing an emphasis on education (Bourdieu, 1986).Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of neoliberal policies like setting by attainment extend beyond children's school experiences (Kulz, 2017), and are integrated into local, racialised, community knowledges.
Black working-class families' use of tuition is not primarily centred on creating a positive sense of Blackness, as is the case with some supplementary schools and other forms of cultural provision (Delale-O'Connor et al., 2020;Gerrard, 2013), as private tuition is not attuned to value cultural diversity, but instead seeks to impart the knowledge and skills required in the national education system (Bauer & Landolt, 2022).Nevertheless, this is racialised compensatory cultivation in that, like their middle-class peers, working-class Black families seek to use education as a tool for equalisation (Manning, 2019) to ensure social mobility in a racist labour market.Martin Annan, a London-based father, argues that education is 'the most important thing for him [his son] to progress in this country' because White people's advantage in the labour market can only be countered when Black children 'excel in education' and leave employers 'no choice' but to appoint them.Financial capital (Bourdieu, 1986) matters to their practices, however; although Martin thinks private tuition gives children an 'edge', he 'can't afford' to use it.By contrast, others such as Asrat Desta in the East Midlands did use private tuition, including in difficult circumstances that required considerable parental sacrifice on a scale not considered by privileged middle-class families discussed earlier (Bhopal, 2018): If I sacrifice or if she sacrifice now, she can do better.What kind of sacrifices …? Money.Money is very key, because we are poor … I have to give priority and I leave my things [needs] behind … I don't care, I give them … it is fulfilling my responsibility as a parent.
Indeed Hassan Samrah, an asylum seeker in the North West, uses food banks to feed his family while spending his limited income on tuition.
Among working-class households, Asian families have the highest tuition rates (Holloway & Kirby, 2020), and the dispositions of working-class Asian parents are strikingly similar to their middle-class Asian peers (Bourdieu, 1986) who embrace the concerted cultivation of educational performance.The importance of international linkages in shaping the English tuition industry is evident, as first generation migrants who have experienced educational competition overseas (Azam, 2016;Liu & Bray, 2017) drive the tuition market, encouraging British Asian parents to follow suit.As Nadia Khalid explains: India-education is very competitive.Like you are all in a competition … in the last 15, 20 years, I have seen a lot of major shift in my area [of London], in terms of migration … so when they [new migrants] kind of bring that same kind of culture or attitude here … the tuition centres all started to crop up … And I think now it's more like the normal thing in our community.
The enduring importance of migration history, and particularly the desire 'to put things right' (Reay, 2017, p. 112), is seen in the ways British East and South Asian parents parallel their middle-class peers both in wanting to provide their children with a better start than they experienced, and in learning the importance of education to social mobility from their parents' experiences (Francis & Archer, 2005;Shah et al., 2010).As Val Dhanda explains: my mum and dad are from India … I didn't have any support with homework … I wanted to make sure my children had all the support I could give them … [E]ducation can get you far, and that's what my mum taught me … and I'm trying to get that into my children … Whereas, no disrespect to the White people, I don't think they put as much importance on that.These conspicuous similarities between working and middle-class Asian parents' accounts demonstrate both the potential for inter-class similarities in parenting, and the importance of race in shaping concerted cultivation (Delale-O 'Connor et al., 2020;Manning, 2019).
The key difference is that more working-class Asian families struggle with tuition costs than their middle-class Asian peers.Inequality in access to tuition is a global issue (Bray, 2017), and it is reproduced in the English market (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).Gunjita Manjal, for example, values education and emphasises its importance for her children's future employment, marriage prospects and family honour.However, living on state benefits in an area of 'urban adversity' in the East Midlands, she knows no one who uses tuition as, like her, they cannot afford it: Money is the barrier … If it [tuition] was for everyone, it would be great because then everybody's got a fair chance of benefitting from it.But if only those who can afford it [use it] … then it's an unfair advantage I think … we want to raise our school standards rather than having to rely on private tuition.
No amount of cultural attachment to the concerted cultivation of educational attainment (Dhingra, 2018;Ho et al., 2019) can overcome the lack of economic capital that bars her access to tuition (Bourdieu, 1986), a service that is virtually unseen in her low-income neighbourhood.The paper's first aim was to broaden the focal reach of geographies of education, concentrating attention on underresearched supplementary education (Holloway & Kirby, 2020) through a novel exploration of how differentiated parenting practices shape socio-spatially variable consumption in England's booming private-tuition market.The findings demonstrate that the dispositions of class and racially diverse parents (Vincent & Maxwell, 2016), and their respective capitals (Bourdieu, 1986;Davies & Rizk, 2018), shape families' differential capacity to act in a marketised education field that stimulates tuition use (Holloway & Kirby, 2020).The immediate import of these findings is that Geographers of Education must indeed pay greater attention to supplementary education, as its consumption has socio-spatially unequal consequences for education and society.This study provides insight into classed and racialised processes in an emerging tuition market in an advanced economy, but future research could explore supplementary education in high-intensity markets in both richer and poorer global economies (Bray, 2017;Gupta, 2020).More broadly, the research foregrounds the significant role parenting cultures play in shaping children's educational experiences.Future research in geographies of education must attend to these local parenting cultures (Blokland, 2023;Holloway, 1998), as interactions between the home and diverse formal, informal, alternative and supplementary education settings (Bauer & Landolt, 2022) play an increasingly crucial role in confronting and reproducing educational inequality.
The paper's second aim was to develop geographies of education's conceptual contribution to interdisciplinary debates about home environments' impact on schooling.The paper makes three conceptual advances in this regard, showing how geographers and broader social science researchers might theorise parenting cultures.First, the study establishes the importance of contextualising parenting practices through multi-scalar analysis.Although Bourdieu argued social practices should be understood as the outcome of habitus and capital in a specific environment (Bourdieu, 1984(Bourdieu, /2010)), to date cultural capital research has tended to underplay the importance of the field (Davies & Rizk, 2018).Geographical research informed by a progressive sense of place (Massey, 1994) advances interdisciplinary debate by elucidating how concerted cultivation is contextualised through intersecting global, national and local processes that shape the educational playing field.At the national level, the increased importance of qualifications for educational transitions and movement into paid work is an important driver of private tuition in England, an imperative that is enhanced by the marketised, and internally differentiated, education system (Hajar, 2020;Reay, 2017).This national 'field' is experienced through intersecting neighbourhood parenting cultures (Davies & Rizk, 2018;Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014).Notably, in high-usage areas peer pressure among parents, and the possibilities suggested by the tuition industry's visible presence in the local landscape, foments tuition use.Moreover, this intersecting national and local field is invigorated by global mobility, as recent and historic migration shapes the context in which parenting decisions are made.Future research in geography and beyond must firmly contextualise concerted cultivation, employing multi-scalar analysis (Massey, 1994) as it reattaches analyses of parental habitus and capital to an invigorated exploration of the field (Bourdieu, 1984(Bourdieu, /2010)).
Second, this examination demonstrates the vital importance of contextualising analysis of racialised differences in parenting cultures.Private tuition, as a form of concerted cultivation, is highly racialised in England, being notably more popular among Asian and Black families than their White counterparts.This directly counters Lareau's (2000Lareau's ( , 2002) ) suggestion that the cultural logics of parenting are shaped solely by class, and supports emergent social science calls for attention to the racialisation of these processes (Delale-O' Connor et al., 2020;Manning, 2019).Geographical analysis advances this debate, highlighting how the field shapes the emergence of racialised dispositions and the leverage of different parents' capitals (Vincent & Maxwell, 2016).At the global scale, formative experiences in political economies that encourage individual reliance influence first generation parents' use of tuition in England, and these practices spread into the wider Asian (and Black) community.Second and subsequent generations' experiences of hardship after their parents' migration also shape contemporary dispositions.Equally, structural racism influences the habitus of many Black families, who use tuition to try and insulate their children from discrimination in school and the labour market (Delale-O' Connor et al., 2020).White families were the only racial group not vociferous about maximising educational attainment, a position that in part reflects their White privilege in England (Bhopal, 2018).Place-sensitive analysis thereby facilitates examination of racially differentiated parenting cultures as socio-spatially contingent practices, eschewing naturalising them as cultural differences.
However, the argument that racialised dispositions are shaped through place-specific processes rather than being simply cultural differences, does not mean that global and local racialised cultures do not matter.They can, both in shaping how people feel part of a community, and in how that shapes their practices.For example, many Asian and Black parents assert that education is important in their culture (in England, and for some through diasporic connections to other nations), and local, racialised, social capital was important in reproducing knowledge about tuition.By contrast, White parents rarely explicitly saw themselves as part of a White community (Dottolo & Stewart, 2013), but they were nevertheless part of racialised cultures, for example White social networks centred on neighbourhood sport, that placed less emphasis on academic excellence.Future geographical and social scientific research must attend both to the socio-spatial factors that shape racialised dispositions, and the ways they are reproduced though global and local racialised social capital, to encapsulate both the radically unnatural constitution of racialised parenting cultures, and their socio-cultural significance for different racialised groups.
Finally, this research reveals the need for a more sophisticated understanding of class differences in interdisciplinary research into parenting cultures and education.Overall, economically advantaged families use tuition more than their less well-off counterparts, suggesting that binary models of middle-class concerted cultivation and workingclass natural growth have some merit (Lareau, 2000(Lareau, , 2002)).However, a twofold division of classed tendencies is too blunt to capture the complexity of class differences in England's tuition market.On the one hand, the binary model cannot account for inter-class similarity (Craig et al., 2014;Dermott & Pomati, 2016) and its intersections with race, for example as some working-class families of all races, but particularly minoritised groups, embrace practices of concerted cultivation through the use of private tuition.On the other hand, the dualist model does not attend to intra-class variability.This may, for example, reflect how intra-class variations in financial capital (Bourdieu, 1986) shape service affordability.Locality also matters, however, for example as working-class families living in hightuition neighbourhoods are regularly exposed to tuition services, while their counterparts in low-usage neighbourhoods may barely know tutoring exists.Future research in geography and the broader social sciences requires the more sophisticated approach to class advanced in this paper that continues to explore inter-class differences in parenting cultures, but complements this with an analysis of inter-class similarity and intra-class variation that attends to its intersections with race and emergence in place.

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Downloaded from https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12666 by Test, Wiley Online Library on [09/01/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License [I]n my experience, there's an element of peer pressure, other parents are doing it, so I'll do it … we used it leading up to those [11 Plus] exams … you're standing on the playground, talking to other parents and you'd hear it: 'What, you haven't got a tutor?!' It was tantamount to child abuse if you hadn't got a tutor.