Lack of Educational Attainment and Socioeconomic Progression

Abstract

This chapter acquaints the reader with the Andrew family.

Mr and Mrs Andrew came from the Caribbean in the 1950s. According to their son, Andy, they had hoped to ‘work hard to help develop the Motherland’, but they were disappointed by the State’s—and more generally British society’s—lack of preparation for their arrival and integration in Britain.

The Andrew family’s social world is characterised by unrelenting poverty, a variety of traumas from which members across three generations do not recover, self-sabotaging dependencies, lack of support in social networks, and poor performance in education and socioeconomic domains. These experiences across the generations underlie aversions to educational attainment, socioeconomic progression, and other mainstream successes. The second generation is limited in the same ways as the first generation in terms of prospects to alleviate its poverty. This limitation is passed to the third generation by virtue of lack of guidance and support to effectively navigate away from them. Thus, in addition to a predisposition to perform poorly in education and socioeconomic domains, each generation suffers in a social world in which lack, limitations, and traumas are prevalent.