Jason Arday’s name has been everywhere for a fortnight. This is not a piece about the truth or otherwise of any allegations. Other people are handling that, at length, and will keep handling it for months.
But there is a question underneath the story that has held our attention this week. What is the function of the extraordinary success story in an education system that produces so few of them?
When a narrative like that travels successfully through systems, we have an opportunity to examine the systems themselves.
Les Miraculés
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent his career studying how schools and universities sort children, and he had a word for the person at the centre of a story like this one.
A miraculé is a person from a group the education system almost always eliminates who nonetheless makes it to the top. In French, the word carries two senses at once. It is what you call the pilgrim who walks out of Lourdes healed. It is also what you call the one person who walks away from a crash that killed everybody else in the car.
In a landscape of so many hertbreaking stories, is tempting to read one person’s success as a victory over the establishment. Bourdieu argues the opposite.The miraculé is not a crack in the structure. It is load-bearing.
The miraculé supports the fallacy of meritocracy.
If the system excluded whole groups entirely, it would be visible as a system of exclusion and would lose its legitimacy. A system that lets a very small number through can present itself as fair. The door was demonstrably open. Therefore those who did not come through it lacked something. The institution has no charge to answer.
Notice what the story leaves out. Every teacher assessment, every reference, every decision somebody made in a room. The institution disappears from the account of its own openness, and what remains is one person and their own effort, which is the version everyone involved prefers.
That is what the miraculé is for. And the story gets repeated, written about, celebrated by the individual and the institutions because it flatters both. Look at him, he made it! We recognised his genius and we welcomed him with open arms!
This does not only happen at professor level
Schools are institutions just as capable of pulling this trick as universities.
The former pupil whose photograph is on the wall by reception. The ex-student invited back to assembly, now running a company. The mentoring programme with young professionals who share one characteristic with you. The name that comes up in every conversation about aspiration. Look, it can be done.
Held up to children who are being managed by the same arrangements that eliminated everybody else in that photograph’s year group. We do not tell them what it took, or how many the school lost on the way.
A miracle requires a starting point that can be presented as hopeless. Somebody has to be written as nearly worthless for the ending to land, which is why the deficit story and the inspirational one are the same story told from different ends.
If you want to argue that a system is rigged, you need to be able to point at a pattern. Produce a counter-example and the pattern comes apart into a scatter of individual efforts and individual failings. The argument disappears without anybody having to answer it.
And it reaches back into classrooms. The miraculé becomes evidence for a claim about children: that the ones who deserve it get through. Which turns elimination into a diagnosis. Every child still outside is now carrying a verdict about their own capacity, and nobody has to ask what the school did.
Bourdieu borrowed a word from the medieval church for what this produces. An oblat was a child given to a monastery, raised inside it, owing it everything. Most of us are working somewhere that gave us our standing, and it is difficult to hold a system to account while it is holding you up. The conviction that the rules are fair rarely arrives as a decision. It arrives as the absence of a question.
The question has to be asked
So it has to be asked deliberately, because nothing in the working day will ask it for you. Not just what are we doing to these children, but what are we thinking and saying about them, and who does that story let off the hook. Every time we tell a story about a young person we are deciding who a young person is. The accounts we give are not commentary on the system. They are part of how it runs.
None of this requires giving up on individual children. It requires refusing the arithmetic where one success settles the account for a whole year group. Where one child with special Educational Needs and glowing SATs results obscures the memory of the child who was excluded. A school that produces one miraculé and a hundred eliminations has not demonstrated possibility. It has demonstrated its rate.
Paulo Freire’s warning is that the oppressed inherit their idea of freedom from the oppressor, so the aspiration becomes rising rather than transforming. Getting to the top of a structure is not the same as being free of it, and a structure with a top requires a bottom. The one child on the wall is not evidence of what is truly possible.
So the next time a miraculous first lands in your timeline, the next Jason Arday success story, hold a critical thought for what the story is doing. Not what the person did. What the telling is for, and what it is quietly asking you to stop asking.
A miracle is what you call something when you have decided not to examine its causes. Bourdieu’s move is to refuse the celebration and refuse the pity, and ask instead why a society organises itself so that this outcome registers as miraculous at all.
If you are looking for a community in which to examine the stories schools tell about young people, our next Foundational Learning dates are now open.
Come and think with us.
