This edited collection is about poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. It opens innovative areas of thinking by exploring different explanations and approaches to school change.

1 Researching educational sites serving ‘disadvantaged’ (sub)urban communities: reframing policy and practiceSusanne Gannon, Robert Hattam and Wayne SawyerFOCUS AREA 1 Mapping the damage 2 Resisting educational inequity and the ‘bracketing out’ of disadvantage in contemporary schooling Stewart Riddle3 Beyond ‘naïve possibilitarianism’ in urban schools in England Lori Beckett4 Moving beyond the academic and vocational divide in Australian schools Barry Down5 Beginning teacher subjectivity and pedagogical encounters in low SES schools Susanne Gannon6 Challenging beginning teachers’ misconceptions of the effects of poverty on educational attainment in an initial teacher education programme in EnglandIan Thompson7 Circling a conflicted policy landscape: child poverty and education in Northern Ireland Tony Gallagher, Ruth Leitch and Joanne Hughes8 Mapping possible futures: funds of aspiration and educational desireSusanne Gannon, Mohamed Moustakim, Dorian Stoilescu and David WrightFOCUS AREA 2 Resources for hope 9 Effective pedagogies for enhancing preschoolers’ engagement with learning in disadvantaged communities Leonie Arthur and Christine Woodrow10 Creating space for a shared repertoire: re-imagining pedagogies to cultivate transcultural and translingual competencies Jacqueline D’warte11 Teacher development through collaborative research in low SES contexts: a tale of two schools Katina Zammit and Wayne Sawyer12 Poverty and school processes: from equality of opportunity to relational justice Karen Laing, Laura Mazzoli Smith and Liz Todd13 Hope, spaces, and possible selves: processes of becoming socially critical teachers Alison Wrench14 Quality teaching discourses: a contested terrain Jo Lampert, Bruce Burnett, Barbara Comber, Angela Ferguson and Naomi Barnes15 Realigning young peoples’ aspirations: triggers and processes Katrina Barker and Margaret Vickers16 Ideas of community: assembling new governance in early childhood educationAnne Power, Christine Woodrow and Joanne Orlando17 ‘Dumping grounds’ and ‘rubbish tips’: challenging metaphors for alternative education provision Martin Mills, Richard Waters, Peter Renshaw and Lew ZipinFOCUS AREA 3 How might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future? 18 Ethnographies in education: misunderstandings and new developments Debra Hayes and Meghan Stacey19 Researching the ‘North’: educational ethnographies of a (sub)urban region Robert Hattam20 Educational exclusion? It’s what we do and it’s always been thus Roger Slee21 Shifting paradigms: can education compensate for society? David Egan22 Transforming the curriculum frame: working knowledge around problems that matter Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan23 Schools as sites of advanced capitalism: reading radical inequality radically Margaret Somerville24 Poor children need rich teaching, not deficit labelling Terry Wrigley25 Writing as bodywork: poverty, literacy and unspoken pain in ex-mining south Wales valleys communities Gabrielle Ivinson and Emma Renold26 Reclaiming educational equality: towards a manifesto Robert Hattam, Wayne Sawyer and Susanne Gannon