A school system that has never repaired its own injustices will keep producing them, generation after generation. This project tests whether schools can actively undo the harms they have caused, rather than simply acknowledging them. The problem is that decades of research have documented how schools reproduce racial and class inequalities, but almost no work has asked what it would mean to *repair* those injustices. REPAIR-ED treats reparation as a practical, not just symbolic, question. The researchers will conduct detailed ethnographic and historical studies of primary schools across Bristol—comparing affluent and deprived areas—to understand how injustice is experienced, remembered, and contested. They will then use narrative and dialogic methods to explore what collective recognition and repair could look like in practice. If successful, this research could reshape how education policy and school leadership think about equity. Instead of aiming only to reduce future disparities, schools might adopt reparative frameworks that actively address past wrongs—changing how resources are allocated, how curricula are designed, and how communities are engaged. The work is primarily conceptual and empirical, not a blueprint for immediate implementation, but it opens a new horizon for education research: one where injustice is not treated as inevitable.
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It is almost a truism to say that school systems are structurally unjust. Understanding the mechanisms of persisting inequities in schooling as well as their forces of social reproduction has been a long-standing focus of research in the field of education. This project retains that central concern, but it departs from conventional approaches by interrogating the possibility of reparation in systems of schooling. The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions - such as education - which also shape lives-to-come. REPAIR-ED begins, therefore, with the hypothesis that reparative frameworks can create different futures of education. By integrating sociological, historical, philosophical, and participatory methods, the project will establish a novel inquiry into the conditions and normative challenges of reparation in education. It asks: what does reparation in school systems look like? The research explores the empirical bases of redress through the case study of systems of primary schooling in Bristol, England. Detailed ethnographies and histories of schooling across the city's geographies of deprivation and advantage will examine educational injustices, taking a particular focus on their racial and classed dynamics. Using narrative and dialogic approaches, the project will investigate not only the contingent experiences of schooling among different groups, but also how contested meanings of educational injustice can condition its collective recognition and its processes of repair. Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, theoretical and methodological horizons for the field of education.
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