Education, Work and Social Change in Britain’s Former Coalfield Communities

Robin Simmons is Professor of Education at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research interests lie in the sociology of education, education policy, and the history of education. Robin has led research funded by leading bodies including the Raymond Williams Foundation, Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust. He has written extensively on social class, particularly in relation to young people’s experiences of participation and non-participation in education, employment, and work-based learning. Robin is co-editor of Education and Working-Class Youth: Reshaping the Politics of Inclusion published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.Kat Simpson is Senior Lecturer in Education and Community Studies at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Her research interests lie in education and social class, especially pupils’ and teachers’ experiences of schooling in former coalmining communities. She has written extensively on differentaspects of deindustrialisation and social haunting. Methodologically, Kat is interested in Marxist ethnography and critical policy analysis. Her book Social Haunting, Education and the Working Class: Reimagining Schooling in a Former Mining Community was published in 2021.

• Introduction In the Shadow of Coal; Robin Simmons and Katherine Simpson.- Chapter 1 Contextualising the Coalfields: Mapping the Socio-Economic and Cultural Loss of the Coal Industry; Tim Strangleman.- Chapter 2 A Conflictual Legacy: Being a Coal Miner’s Daughter.- Chapter 3 Education, Ghosts and Deindustrialisation: Attuning to Legacies of Resistance and Collectivity in the Hidden Curriculum.- Chapter 4 Growing up in the interregnum: accounts from the South Yorkshire coalfield.- Chapter 5 Working Down the Pit: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Coal Mining in Britain and the Implications for Contemporary Society and Politics.- Chapter 6 Are we expecting too much? Aspirations and Expectations of Girls Living in an Ex-Mining Community.- Chapter 7 School Legacies in the Former Coalfields: Education, Deindustrialisation and Collective Remembering.- Chapter 8 “A brewing, a world stirring”: A ‘Ghost Lab’ Approach to the Social Haunting of the UK Coalfields; Geoff Bright.-9 Conclusion Reimagining Education and Work in the Former Coalfields.