A concerted effort? How an elite London school, its students, and their parents negotiate university admissions

This thesis explores how an elite London independent girls’ school, its students, and its parents collectively negotiate university admissions. It makes a major contribution to the study of elite schooling through sustained dialogue with the literature around the ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau, 2011) enacted by middle-class parents. It also reframes Lareau’s ideas around ‘concerted cultivation’ in important new ways, using ‘concerted’ to signal mutually reinforcing work carried out by multiple actors in relationship with one another. Finally, it highlights the importance of attending to the tensions that are part of working collectively and ‘in concert’. The research draws upon interviews with sixth form students and their parents, senior school staff, and external tutors, as well as participant observation.
First, I show how one can see an elite school as closely engaged in ‘concerted cultivation’ in terms of its work to help students negotiate elite university admissions. One can conceptualise the school as performing a parenting role, in the way that it enacts ‘concerted cultivation’ work. This lens on the elite school is an important one, as it illuminates the concrete, direct processes through which elite schools work to systematically secure advantage for their students in the context of elite university admissions. These ranged from: the development of particular kinds of academic selves that led students to seek out the particular kind of learning that Oxbridge facilitates, and directly prepared them to be academically competitive applicants; the deployment of the biographies of teachers and past pupils to both foster an affective affinity with elite universities, as well as offer practical direction-finding guidance for the journey; and the organisational work of overseeing and monitoring the students’ applications to ensure their timely and effective completion. This level of empirical detail has been neglected in the elite schooling literature to date.
Second, I show how the work of ensuring elite university entrance is the result of the mutually reinforcing actions of multiple actors, not only encompassing parents and the school, but also students themselves, and private tutors—I term this ‘cultivation in concert’, deploying an orchestral musical metaphor. This marks an important contribution to the field of elite schooling, which has tended to neglect the role of parents and private tutors in shaping young people and their trajectories. It also makes a fruitful contribution to studies of ‘concerted cultivation’, which have not paid serious attention to the roles of multiple actors working together, and the complexities of this work.
Third, drawing on this metaphor I illuminate the complexity of ‘cultivation in concert’, showing how this collaborative work between different actors was also charged with inherent disagreements and tensions among them. In this way, I make visible the complex relationships and realities of how privilege is enacted on-the-ground, in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of how educational advantage is (re)produced.

Keywords: university admissions
concerted cultivation
elite schooling
Lareau
higher education
parenting
private tutoring
Advisor: James Relly, S
Mills, D