As part of the University’s Centenary Celebrations, a team led by David Stack in History has been researching the experiences of students and staff from working-class backgrounds at the University of Reading. Beginning with the widening participation roots of the University in the 1890s Oxford Extension movement and coming right up to date with policy recommendations for a more socially inclusive campus, the team have aimed to highlight working-class presence, celebrate success, and acknowledge ongoing challenges. Over the next few weeks, we are going to publish a series of linked blogs exploring some of the themes the team have been working on. Today, we wrap up the series.

1. We are all different but also connected. 

Every student and member of staff from a working-class background at Reading has a unique story. We differ by age, gender, ethnicity, and more, but, as Sharla Attala showed in an earlier blog, our unique stories are connected by a strong common thread of feelings and experiences, including ‘working hard to survive, hiding accents, being excluded from opportunities, [and] feeling “less than” in a culture where everyone always seems a step ahead’. 

It was also striking, reading Sharla’s interviews, how strongly many of the interviewees felt connected to others from their class – ‘class identity to me is like a community, even if you can’t see them’, one said – and carried with them a sense of representing not just themselves, but their wider families and communities.   

My mum and dad didn’t go to college or anything. So, I’m fighting for it. You know what I mean? Like, I’m doing it not just for me, I’m doing it for them because they didn’t get the opportunity. 

2. It’s weird here, but (usually) friendly. 

Almost everyone in our (admittedly self-selecting) sample had a broadly positive view of the University, but equally almost everyone also remembered occasions when they had found campus an alienating environment. Only rarely was this the result of overt snobbery or deliberate exclusion. More often, it was the more insidious challenge of an ineffably middle-class habitus. This term, coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, describes the shared way that groups, formed by a common cultural background, perceive, behave, and act. To be working class at university is to step into an alien habitus, where one’s instincts, intuition, and previous experience are unreliable guides, and in which new behaviours and manners must be constantly learned.  

In the words of one interviewee:  

You always feel like you’re getting into an environment where nobody has the same experiences as you. […] it’s like living a life but it’s not really you because you constantly have to navigate and reposition your personality in the new environment that you’re in. And, as I said, for me since I was a kid literally every step is like that. Literally every step I take is like you’re trying to redefine a persona that fits in. 

3. There is a lot of cosplay going on. 

Entering an alien habitus can be a wearying experience, and one which messes with a stable sense of self. Class, one interviewee explained, is ‘entrenched in who we are as a human being – how we think, how we function, how we carry ourselves, the decisions we make, everything. […] It’s my nervous system basically’.  Being working class at university can mean shutting that ‘nervous system’ down or at least attempting to mask its more obvious manifestations. Interviewees spoke of keeping part of themselves ‘hidden’, of not being able to show their ‘true self’ in order ‘to get accepted’, and of having ‘two identities’, one on campus and one at home. 

One member of staff reflected: 

I’ve had to be several different people in order to get where I’ve got, in order to only then go back to being who I actually am. It’s almost like I’ve gone to drama school, and I’ve had to act all of these characters before, then I’ve gone back to being who I am.  

4. ‘It ain’t what you say’. 

Accent, according to Bourdieu, forms part of habitus and provides one of the clearest markers of one’s inclusion or exclusion from a social group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, accent, and its loss or modification, was mentioned repeatedly. Many interviewees told stories of how they had been misjudged because of the way they spoke, and how draining it can be to constantly suppress or soften one’s accent. 

I’m not a person lacking in confidence, not now, I’m not. But I am anxious that I probably really think about my accent. I don’t even know if it’s become subconscious. But when I’m speaking or when I’m doing a presentation or when I’m in meetings, I absolutely feel that I have to neutralise it. 

Added to this, some reflected poignantly on the distance that the loss, or minimising, of an accent created with one’s own family.  

5. Class is emotional as well as economic. 

This last point brings home the often-unrecognised emotional aspect involved in all questions of class. Money (lack of) and finance were, of course, recurrent themes, with interviewees reflecting both on the straitened family circumstances in which they grew up and their own more immediate struggles – often combining paid work with study – to keep afloat. But social discomfort, accent, masking, a sense of loss, a debt of responsibility to others, and an ‘abiding sense’ of ‘being in between’ are also part of the story. Class, one interviewee reflected, ‘is a sense of feeling as well as an economic and locational thing, so it’s a multifaceted concept’. 

6. It never goes away. 

This ‘multifaceted concept’ runs psychologically deeper than a set of current economic circumstances. Class is more than a set of conditions one is passing through.  

As one member of staff put it: 

There is a tension because I’m certainly not economically working-class, but culturally, what’s made me, what shaped me, I am … so it’s really important to me because I’m not ashamed of it, it is just that bit about you, you don’t quite fit anywhere, if you see what I mean?  

It was striking that even those who might be said to have moved away from their economic background, nonetheless, retained a sense of being working class, for ‘good and bad’ as one interviewee put. The ‘bad’ is that enduring sense of being an outsider and the apprehension that being misunderstood and judged is never far away; the ‘good’ is the feeling that our background can be our superpower.  

if you get into university and you realise you’ve kind of made it when you thought you might not. It can give you a sense of bravery you might not have had if it had all been a bit easy. 

And one hope for the future … 

For many of us this project has been a liberating experience. For almost the first time in the quarter of a century I have worked here I have felt able to talk openly – to people with similar or complementary experiences and perspectives – about who I am. My hope for the future is simply that those conversations will continue.  

Let’s keep talking about class.