# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why we must restore the humanity of Black boys | Kay Adekunle Rufai | TEDxLondon

# data[].attributes.body
Please complete this short survey to give us an insight into your experience of the day!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Easily create surveys and polls to collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction, and organize team events.

# data[].attributes.headline
#FridayFact: Histories and Legacies of Sugar - INIVA - Holly Graham

# data[].attributes.subject
#FridayFact: Histories and Legacies of Sugar - INIVA - Holly Graham

# data[].attributes.headline
#FridayFact: Histories and Legacies of Sugar - INIVA - Holly Graham

# data[].attributes.subject
#FridayFact: Histories and Legacies of Sugar - INIVA - Holly Graham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Vision 2018-2022

Inspiring Futures: The Barking and Dagenham Cultural Education Partnership nurtures links between cultural organisations and schools to work towards every young person having the opportunity to be creative, either in school or beyond. We ensure every school has the opportunity to collaborate with other schools in hubs, form partnerships with cultural organisations, and take part in bespoke projects.

How can we support your school?

Inspiring Futures has three main threads of activity:

CPD for stakeholders

Throughout the year we offer career progression and development for teachers, governors, senior leadership, and creative organisations in the borough to ensure they are prepared to deliver a strong creative offer in Barking and Dagenham schools. Alongside this, we hold an annual conference brimming with CPD opportunities for schools.

We also work with schools to create Inspire Hubs, where local schools work together for peer learning, distribute knowledge, and develop larger sized cultural projects.

We ask each school provide a cultural lead, and send updates of upcoming CPD through this designated person.

Developing the Barking and Dagenham Cultural Education Offer

As part of our work, we create projects which develop cultural and creative opportunities for young people within the borough, including accredited achievements, wellbeing offers, and lobbying for opportunities for young people in local organisations and developments.

A key project is the Arts Award transition project, which happens every September. Please get in touch if your secondary school would like to be involved.

We also provide bespoke Artsmark support, to accredit your school with the creative standard for education. It ensures creativity is embedded across the curriculum and is recognised nationwide. Artsmark is managed by Arts Council England, Find out more on the Artsmark website.

Pathways into the creative digital industries

We develop pathways for young people into the creative and digital industries, by empowering teachers to be able to guide students into these careers.

Inspiring Futures works to develop resources and sessions for young people to get advice from industry professionals, and create links for work experience, as well as tasters of creative skills.

Upcoming events

The Inspiring Future's 2022 conference

Exploring diversity, representation, and identity's role in a 21st Century creative curriculum.

Join Inspiring Futures: The Barking and Dagenham Cultural Education Partnership to explore how creativity and the arts can aid in creating a curriculum which is reflective of our students and allows them to express their voice and identity. Including two student sessions, and a full day professionals conference, and facilitated by leading artists and education experts, the conference will give you a chance to explore these topics, as well as gain practical tools to embed into your practice.

All events are FREE.

Young Creatives Space
Thursday 10 November
Primary school session: 9.30 to11.30am
Secondary school session: 1pm to 3pm
Barking and Dagenham College
For Students with teachers and support staff

Join Inspiring Futures' session for teachers and pupils where we will creatively explore young people's sense of identity and its relationship with mental health and wellbeing. Young people will work with cultural organisation Iniva, therapeutic support service A Space and artist Holly Graham to artistically respond to the provocation of identity and wellbeing. The final piece of work will be shared at the professionals conference and contribute to empowering and amplifying youth voice within LBBD's Race and Social Justice programme.
Booking for primary schools. Booking for secondary schools. Professionals Conference
Thursday 17 November
10am to 3pm
The Barbican Centre
For teachers, senior leadership, governors, artists, and organisations

We are happy to invite you along to a full day conference of presentations, panel discussions, and workshops to explore how creativity can help aid diversity in the curriculum.

Including workshops from our Paul Hamlyn funded programme Story of Me (a two year teacher development programme exploring diversifying the primary curriculum through the arts), and a key note speech from artist Kai Rufai, there will be a chance to explore big topics, as well as gain some tools to practically take home and imbed in your practice.

Lunch included.

Please book here.

Want to get involved in Inspiring Futures?

Email inspiringfutures@lbbd.gov.uk with details about your organisation or school to be added to our contact list and be invited to future events.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inspiring Futures: The LBBD Cultural Education Partnership

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every young person can confidently participate, shape, and take pride in creative and cultural opportunities, making their voice heard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Thumbprint by Big Deal Young Actors Company at Studio 3 Arts, in Barking.

# data[].attributes.body
Please fill out this short survey which will take approximately 4 minutes to complete.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Easily create surveys and polls to collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction, and organize team events.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a space for you to add any comments you have throughout the day or to network with the people you meet!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Position: Senior School Improvement Adviser (Primary)

Kate is a Senior School Improvement Adviser with over 30 years' experience of teaching and senior leadership in inner London schools. ... Read more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Position: Senior School Improvement Adviser (Primary) Kate is a Senior School Improvement Adviser with over 30 years' experience of teaching and senior leadership in inner London schools. ... Read more

# data[].attributes.headline
INIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts)

# data[].attributes.subject
INIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Three years after the first national lockdown began, it has become commonplace to think in terms of before and after Covid. Whilst the pandemic may no longer be as front of mind as more present concerns such as the cost of living crisis, its long-reaching impacts continue to be felt. In addition to bringing unprecedented challenges in the sectors we work in, Covid has also been a catalyst for...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the largest independent grant-makers in the UK, we focus on the Arts, Young people, Education & Learning and Migration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Supporting Local Partnerships

We work with partnerships in a number of London boroughs to shape work that can support more children and young people to develop their creativity and play an active role in the city's culture and heritage

Find out more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Supporting Local Partnerships We work with partnerships in a number of London boroughs to shape work that can support more children and young people to develop their creativity and play an active role in the city's culture and heritage Find out more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mercury Theatre Colchester | Unique, Insightful and Incisive Theatre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the Mercury Theatre. We have a diverse and exciting programme of unique, insightful and incisive theatre in Colchester.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creative Schools+ Creative Colleges - Future proofing success for all

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We tackle the real-world challenges faced by schools and colleges through innovative creative projects. We broker projects through our talented network of creative partners giving arts and creativity a bigger voice in education. We help futureproof success for all by inspiring collaboration and problem solving and supporting children and young people to build resilience, agency and interpersonal skills through creative and cultural learning experiences and projects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) Programme is free to children and young people who live or go to school in Barking and Dagenham and are eligible for benefit-related free school meals, with paid places available for everyone.

# data[].attributes.body
#loveENO sign the petition to save a organisation that changes lives

# data[].attributes.headline
Decolonising SOASLearning and Teaching Toolkit

# data[].attributes.subject
Decolonising SOASLearning and Teaching Toolkit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Riz Ahmed - Channel4 Diversity Speech 2017 @ House of Commons [subtitled/legendado]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
John Amaechi is a psychologist, a New York Times best-selling author and a former NBA basketball player. In the wake of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests, and at a time when many people want to learn how they can be better allies for black people, we asked John what it means to be anti-racist.

There's a big difference between being not-racist and being anti-racist. I know it doesn't seem like it. I know that both of these things seem equally good, but they're not.

Video Transcript Video Transcript

John: There's a big difference between being not-racist and being anti-racist. I know it doesn't seem like it. I know that both of these things seem equally good, but they're not. Think of an interaction. I'm afraid you've probably had one right? With somebody, maybe even somebody you respect, maybe even someone you love, who says something that's racist, does something that's racist, behaves in a way that's racist. Someone who's not-racist: they won't say or do anything in that moment. They want to not rock the boat. They don't want to be upstanding. Instead, not-racists: they tend to be bystanders. But afterwards, after the event, they'll find other people who are also not-racist and they'll talk to each other about, well, that was terrible, that thing that happened the other day. I would never say anything like that. Anti-racists are different and they come in all shapes and sizes. They come in all ages. Anti-racists are constantly looking around to say, what tools do I have available to make it clear that this is not acceptable? And this, this is what anti-racists do. It's not that they stand up at the dinner table when their uncle's a little bit racist and kick the turkey off. That's not it. But what they do is they say, I'm sorry uncle John. That's not acceptable. That's racist. Quietly and respectfully. What they do is they make sure that they never miss an opportunity to let the world know where they stand, even if they can t change everything. You're probably in a position where other people have a lot more power around you. I know how that feels. Sometimes, we sit and we look around us and we think, how can I possibly change all this? And sometimes you can't. But what you can do is make sure wherever you go, people know where you stand. They know that you're an anti-racist. You become a beacon of light that way. You become someone who makes other people want to be anti-racist too. You've got tools at your disposal. Learn. Read. And make everybody clear where you stand.

Sometimes, we sit and we look around us and we think, 'how can I possibly change all this?' And sometimes you can't. But what you can do is make sure wherever you go, people know where you stand. They know that you're an anti-racist. You become a beacon of light that way. You become someone who makes other people want to be anti-racist too. You've got tools at your disposal. Learn. Read. And make everybody clear where you stand.

If you need support

You should always tell someone about the things you're worried about. You can tell a friend, parent, guardian, teacher, or another trusted adult. If you're struggling with your mental health, going to your GP can be a good place to start to find help. Your GP can let you know what support is available to you, suggest different types of treatment and offer regular check-ups to see how you're doing.

If you're in need of in-the-moment support you can contact Childline, where you can speak to a counsellor. Their lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are more links to helpful organisations on BBC Action Line.

It's important that you keep yourself safe when confronting racism. For support and advice, see the articles below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Not-racist v anti-racist: what's the difference?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
John Amaechi describes the difference between being not-racist and anti-racist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"An ally is someone who understands and makes an effort to help achieve racial equality", according to Professor Kehinde Andrews.

He is an expert in black studies and author from Birmingham City University.

Find out what else Professor Kehinde has to say on the matter here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"An ally is someone who understands and makes an effort to help achieve racial equality", according to Professor Kehinde Andrews. He is an expert in black studies and author from Birmingham City University. Find out what else Professor Kehinde has to say on the matter here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There was a lot of backlash recently around reports that actor Will Smith was cast to play the father of Venus and Serena Williams in a brand new film.

The problem? People were upset that Richard Williams is dark-skinned and would be played by Will Smith, who has lighter skin. They thought the role should have gone to a dark-skinned actor because people thought it was unfair to let Will play the role.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Colourism: Dark-skinned and light-skinned - why there is no difference

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People are talking about something called colourism, which sees some negative views about darker skin tones. De'Graft talks to kids about what it means and why more people need to know about it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABSTRACT
Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England's education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called 'word gap.' This article conceptualizes the word gap as a realization of raciolinguistic ideologies in which the language practices of racialized, low-income and disabled speakers are characterized as deficient, limited, and indeed, full of gaps because they fail to meet benchmarks designed by powerful white listeners. With a genealogical approach, I trace how word gap ideologies and interventions are tethered to colonial logics and have (re)intensified in England's education policy in recent years. I draw on a cluster of data, including education policy documents, Hansard records, political discourse, textbooks for teachers, research reports, media coverage and the work of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. I discuss the durability of the word gap in England, newly marketed under seemingly benign guises of scientific objectivity, social justice and empowerment - despite decades of criticism exposing how it perpetuates racial and class hierarchies whilst blaming marginalized speakers and their families for their apparent failure to use the right kind of words.

Mind the gap

Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools (e.g., Garćia & Otheguy, ; Johnson & Johnson, ; Labov, ; Rosen, ; Snell, ), yet these have enjoyed a recent resurgence in England's education policy - evident in discourses, funding and classroom materials related to the so-called 'word gap' or 'vocabulary gap.' The three quotes which opened this article provide initial illustrations of these, in which 'language' is taken to be 'words,' and a perceived 'lack' or 'poorness' of words is taken to be a root cause of social inequality. The word gap is a deficit-based concept which, since the early 2010s, has been re-imported to education policy in England from the USA under the logics of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa ). Raciolinguistic ideologies represent beliefs about language tethered to European colonialism and its ongoing legacies, within which low-income and racialized speakers' language practices are perceived as deficient, incomplete, and indeed, full of gaps when compared against the language practices of the idealized white middle-classes. Schools are a key space where raciolinguistic ideologies get turned into practices - such as through word gap interventions which position teachers as linguistic remediators whose role is to fix linguistic deficiencies by filling holes where there are 'absences.'

Raciolinguistic ideologies are as much about social class as they are race - especially in England, where working class racism and global capitalism have long shaped the fabric of society and schools (e.g., Preston, ; Shilliam, ). Ethnoracial formations, including whiteness, are not static nor monolithic and intersect with other processes such as classism and ableism. For example, (Shilliam's, ) genealogy shows how since the 1700s, state-crafted ideas about race and class in Britain have divided working class communities into the 'deserving white' and the 'undeserving non-white.' These are constructed categories of racialized othering, with both represented as idle and licentious - including in their use of language. Shilliam writes how the white working class was constitutionalized through empire, analogization with Black slaves, and what he calls a 'blackening of the poor' (Shilliam, , p. 11) - concluding that ' class is race [...] there is no politics of class which is not already racialised' (Shilliam, , p. 178, my emphasis). Similarly, Rosa and Flores () describe how a raciolinguistic perspective offers a 'raceclass' approach which simultaneously challenges the structures of white supremacy/global capitalism and the crafting of racial/class hierarchies. This raceclass approach allows us to expose how proposed solutions to racial and socioeconomic disparities (such as word gap interventions) rely on transforming the individual behaviors of marginalized speakers so that they are deemed to comply with standards set by the white listening subject, rather than transforming oppressive structures (Rosa & Flores, ). The white listening subject does not typically refer to individuals, but to institutions, policies, assessment instruments and other technologies of linguistic surveillance which perpetuate raciolinguistic ideologies through racialized, classed and ableist modes of perception.

Ideologies about the 'limited' vocabulary of marginalized speakers in Britain reach back to at least the 1500s, where British colonizers deployed such discourses in their representations of indigenous communities as part of their justifications for colonial rule (Gilmour, ; Smith, ). These deficit-based ideologies became further entrenched through 1950s British education research (e.g., Bernstein, ), and have long been prominent in the USA (e.g., Bereiter & Engelmann, ; Hart & Risley, ). The word gap as a named policy intervention, however, has been re-imported to England in the last decade as part of a broader transatlantic education policy trade route with the USA. Like existing critiques of word gap ideologies, including limited work from England (e.g., Burnett et al., ), my discussion foregrounds a 1995 study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, which attributes low academic performance by Black children living in poverty to their purpotedly diminished vocabulary size and 'suboptimal' child-directed speech.

In the following section, I outline the methodological approach and data used to trace the (re)normalization of word gap ideologies in England. I then describe the transatlantic origins of such ideologies, before showing how these continue to inform contemporary practices. I show how word gap ideologies in schools get normalized, legitimized, and popularized through state-level financial support, teacher textbooks, academic literature, and Ofsted, an institution who conduct inspections of all state-funded schools and teacher education programmes in England.

Raciolinguistic genealogy and transatlantic policy diffusion

I use a raciolinguistic genealogy to analyze data which were generated through my own close observations of how word gap ideologies have (re)surfaced in England through contemporary policy initiatives. I collected texts spanning across political discourse, media coverage, academic research, popular classroom resources, and state education policy documents. This resulted in a corpus of searchable data allowing me to trace the emergence of word gap ideologies in contemporary policy and how they are tethered to ideas from the 'past.' These 'older' ideas were explored during archival work at the George Padmore Institute in London and the Gottesman Libraries in New York City. In the sections that follow, I move between these strands of data to show how recent policy initiatives in England work to perpetuate raciolinguistic ideologies under new disguises of scientific objectivity and social justice. I examine how the rhetorical appeal of the word gap continues to attract generous funding and public support whilst exacerbating harmful language ideologies by blaming low-income, racialized children for literally, not using enough words.

Historicizing the gap

Word gap ideologies are rooted in deficit perspectives of language which claim that minoritised speakers do poorly in school not because of structural inequality, but because of a cultural, cognitive and linguistic deficit located within the speakers, their families, and their communities. Whilst discourses around 'limited' language played a key part of British colonial education policy (e.g., Gilmour, ; Smith, ), gap ideologies were granted academic credibility under UK-based sociological work in the 1950s-70s and the writings of Basil Bernstein in particular (e.g., Bernstein, , ). These were propelled under his theory of elaborated and restricted codes, which differentiated between working class and middle class speakers' language practices based on their supposed simplicity/complexity (Rosen, ). Some psychologists of the time (e.g., Deutsch, ; Jensen, ) argued that deficits are genetic, perpetuating connections between language, racial hierarchies and biological racism. Jensen (, p. 8) pays a particular homage to the British eugenicist Cyril Burt in his writing, where he describes how in 1957 he visited London as a postdoctoral student and heard Burt speak, which he summarized as 'the best lecture I ever heard.'

Similar to Bernstein's proposals was the work of Carl Bereiter and Siegfried Engelmann, whose research continues to frame marginalized populations as suffering from 'verbal deprivation' (Bereiter & Engelmann, ; see also, Riessman, ). Bereiter and Engelmann claimed that low-income African and Mexican-American children are restricted by a 'limited grammar,' having 'not learned the language rules that are necessary for [...] drawing inferences; for asking questions, and for giving explanations' (Bereiter & Engelmann, , p. 5). Their solution was the Direct Instruction programme, developed as part of the US-government funded Project Follow Through, which initially ran from 1968-1977 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's so-called War on Poverty. Direct Instruction provides teachers with tightly regulated classroom scripts to follow, with DeBose (, p. 66) showing how it characterizes marginalized children's language in terms of 'badly connected words and phrases,' 'not possessing the means for logical thought,' gestures, one-word answers, and in some cases, the absence of any language at all (DeBose, , p. 66; see also, Rosa, ). Despite a body of work which has long exposed the inherent racism within deficit-based perspectives and Direct Instruction (e.g., Labov, ), they remain durable concepts in England and the USA, disseminated to teachers through pedagogical textbooks under guises of scientific objectivity, empowerment, and 'research-informed practice' which overlook even the most well-known critiques.

Deficit perspectives were revived and rebranded in 1995 with the publication of Hart and Risley's book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Hart and Risley claimed that families with higher socioeconomic statuses compared with those from lower statuses talk more frequently and with a wider variety of vocabulary, and that this caused them to face challenges in school. Based on monthly, 1-hour observations and recordings of 42 families in Kansas City from three different socioeconomic categories ('professional,' 'working class,' and 'welfare') and tracking children from 7-9 months to 3 years old, they claimed for the existence of a thirty-million-word gap between the 'welfare' group and the 'professional' group. This claim was based on calculating the average hourly rate of words spoken to children from their caregivers (~600 per hour for the 'welfare' group and ~2100 for the 'professional' group) and then extrapolating these numbers to predict that by the age of four, children from low-income families will have heard 30-million fewer words than their high-income counterparts. As well as the word gap being a construct derived from predictive modeling then, it is also flawed in its sampling: from the 13 families in the 'professional' category, just 1 of these were African American; from the 6 families in the 'welfare' category, all 6 were African American.

A huge body of US-based research has critiqued Hart & Risley's work (e.g., Aggarwal ; Avineri et al, ; Baugh, ; Figueroa, under review; Garćia & Otheguy, ; Johnson, ; Johnson et al., ; Johnson & Johnson, ; Rosa & Flores, ), showing how the alleged gap is underpinned by a raciolinguistic ideology which frames the language practices of minoritized speakers and their families as inherently deficient and the root cause of their poor performance in school. Baugh (), for example, shows how Hart & Risley construe the 'quality' of linguistic input as an objective measurement which is benchmarked against the language practices of white, middle-upper class communities. A raciolinguistic perspective (e.g., Garćia & Otheguy, ; Rosa & Flores, ) shows how Hart & Risley's work has come to legitimize covert racial segregation by replacing genetic inferiorities (such as in the work of Arthur Jensen, discussed earlier) with discourses about the supposed linguistic deficiencies of low-income, racialized children.

The word gap then, is a durable ideology which licenses policy makers to point blame at minoritised speakers and their families, diverting attention away from educational inequalities produced by broader structures of white supremacy, global capitalism and European colonialism. It implies that children of color from low-income families are disadvantaged not because of such oppressive structures, but because their parents are unable to adequately raise their children which renders their home language practices as unsuitable for school.

The word gap as a raciolinguistic policy (re)import to England

In the following sections I trace the recent transatlantic (re)importing of word gap ideologies from education policy in the USA to England, showing how this is tethered to the same kinds of colonial, deficit-based and verbal deprivation narratives discussed in the preceding section. I conceptualize word gap ideologies as a raciolinguistic industry which attracts major funding, turns supposed linguistic defects into economic profits, and continues to overlook the root causes of educational inequalities by framing the most vulnerable members of society as having linguistic and cultural shortcomings.

Legitimizing and funding the gap

I begin by examining government support for the word gap in a cluster of data, including Hansard records, language assessment tools, national curricula, policy manifestos and political speeches.

Returning to the Hansard, in October 2012 Seema Malhotra referenced Hart & Risley's study when she said, without any criticality or context: 'there is a 30-million-word gap between a child from a deprived household and one from an affluent household' (Hansard, ). Michael Gove, the then Education Secretary, responded by claiming attainment differences between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds are a result of 'growing up in households where they are not read to and where they do not have a rich literary heritage on which to draw.' Similar to mainstream UK-based gap research which would follow (e.g., Sullivan et al., ), Gove locates the causes of social inequality within decisions that individual families make, pointing the blame at parents not just for failing to read to their children, but failing to read the right kind of literature. Whilst these discursive strategies of 'broken homes' and 'lack of cultural capital' have long been in place in Britain, especially for those who are poor and racialized (Shilliam, ), word gap discourses were increasingly utilized by politicians following the 2011 civil uprisings in which low-income, Black and white communities protested the police murder of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London. Deficit perceptions about vocabulary played a key role here - with the 'inchoate street slang' of young, marginalized speakers deemed by politicians from across the political spectrum to be the root cause of their disenfranchisement and struggles in school, as well as reproducing racist anxieties that working class white people were adopting Black language and culture (e.g., Johns, ).

Word gap ideologies were concretized in the 2014 National Curriculum for England, of which Gove was one of the chief architects. Within this curriculum, teachers are instructed to focus on vocabulary in ways which equate 'knowing more words' with 'academic success' - such as 'increas[ing] pupils' store of words'; 'expand[ing] vocabulary choices' and 'develop[ing] vocabulary actively' (DfE, , p. 11). Other (white) architects of the curriculum, notably Nick Gibb, made regular references to the word gap around this time - such as in a 2016 speech where he cited Hart & Risley's study as a mechanism for enacting social justice and empowering marginalized youth (Gibb, ). And even earlier, the then deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, referred to Hart & Risley's study in a 2010 speech on social inequalities (Clegg, ), whilst a report by Jean Gross suggested that a lack of vocabulary and the 'daily grunt' of low-income, racialized speakers was a determinant of anti-social behavior, school exclusions and serving a prison sentence. Here, word gap ideologies are threaded together with the criminalization of young people, notably groups such as Black boys, who themselves are disproportionally represented in the criminal justice system in England (see, Joseph-Salisbury, ; Cushing, for the links between literal and metaphorical language policing).

2017 onwards saw a spike in instances of the phrase 'word gap' in the Hansard records, which coincided with a cluster of heavily funded government initiatives worth over £100 million and statements from Justine Greening, the then Education Secretary, declaring that 'closing the word gap' was going 'right at the top of my to do list' (Greening, ). These plans were outlined in a manifesto, Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential (DfE ), which claimed to alleviate social injustices by focusing on modifying the language practices of low-income and racialized communities. 'Ambition 1' within this is to 'close the 'word gap' in early years education, centering on 'tackling development gaps' in 'early language skills' (2017: 8). From Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential came at least two word gap schemes. The first was a £5 million project led by the Education Endowment Foundation designed to 'give parents and carers the tools to widen children's language, vocabulary and social skills in the pre-school years to tackle the 'word gap" (DfE & Hinds ). The second, an 'Early Years Social Mobility Peer Review Programme' was an £8.5 million behavioral change programme, targeted at changing the speech of low-income and racially minoritised children before they begin formal schooling. Similar to Hart & Risley, the report dichotomizes the language practices of marginalized families against those of the most socially and economically powerful, drawing on capitalist metaphors of language 'richness' to do so:

These were soon followed by the 'Hungry Little Minds' programme, a public health campaign drawing on the words are nutrition metaphor (see also, Johnson & Johnson, ), and whose website includes resources for parents geared around vocabulary development. The campaign also included adverts placed on billboards and bus stops around the UK, purposefully placed in areas of high economic deprivation which were home to a large proportion of racialized families. Media coverage surrounding the launch of Hungry Little Minds (e.g., Hogenboom ) centered on Hart & Risley's study whilst making ableist claims that the word gap functions as a 'lag which plays out in the brain.' Also in 2018 was the launch of the £26.3 million government-funded English Hubs Programme, a network of 34 primary schools across England held up by the government as models of good practice - specifically around their use of word gap and Direct Instruction interventionist strategies.

Finally, one of the major programmes to continue to receive government funding is the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme. NELI, designed by a group of psychologists, is a 20 or 30-week oral language programme targeted at children who show 'poor spoken language skills' (Sibieta et al., , p. 4) with its evidence stemming from a Randomized Controlled Trial from 193 schools in England - most of which are in areas of economic deprivation serving a high-proportion of multilingual children with special educational needs. One example session plan from the NELI website focuses on decontextualized vocabulary instruction, using scripts for classroom interaction which resemble the 1960s Direct Instruction programmes of Bereiter and Engelmann:

Vocabulary

Introduce today's 'special words' doctor, vet, healthy and ill.

Doctor, vet, healthy and ill: Say, " Today we are going to learn some new words. Look at this picture. What is this? "

Reinforce correct responses and give the answer if no correct responses are given. " Let's all say the word 'doctor'." Make sure all the children say the word. Repeat for vet. " Who knows when you see a doctor, and when you see a vet?"

Reinforce correct responses and give the answer if no correct responses are given. " That's right - we go to the doctor when we feel ill and we go to the vet when our pet is ill. Let's all say the word 'ill'. Who can tell me what the opposite of ill is?"

Reinforce correct responses and give the answer if no correct responses are given. " That's right - the opposite of ill is healthy. We do not need to see a doctor or a vet when we and our pets are healthy."

For all the emphasis that the NELI programme claims to place on interaction and conversation, examples such as this offer a disembodied version of communication which confuses 'language' with 'vocabulary.' Closed scripts and routines are, however, easily rendered into testable and measurable 'evidence' of vocabulary improvement, providing an attractive solution to the government in demonstrating how their investments have addressed word gaps under a guise of scientific objectivity. NELI continues to receive major financial backing - in August 2020, the government announced an extra £9 million for NELI to 'help close the Covid language gap,' and in May 2021, it was announced that every single school in England with a reception class was to be offered the NELI training, at a cost of £8 million.

Popularizing the gap

Since the mid-2010s, teachers from across the political spectrum in England have been popularizing word gap ideologies through blogs and social media (e.g., Ashford, ). This was propelled in 2018, with the publication of a hugely popular book Closing the Vocabulary Gap, by the white writer and ex-teacher Alex Quigley. My criticisms here are not of an individual, but of a durable raciolinguistic ideology based on research which perpetuates racial and class hierarchies. Quigley's book, and his accompanying industry of blogs, classroom materials and teacher training, is simply a consequence of how attractive these ideologies are to teachers looking for quick-fix panaceas to social injustices.

From the title and very beginning of Quigley's book, emphasis is placed on vocabulary as the key factor which shapes people's lives - what Blum (, ) calls a Euro/USA-centric ideology of 'wordism.' This ideology construes language as primarily being about words, with the more words the better, and that naming things in the world is the main function of language. The NELI materials discussed above are good illustration of how wordism underpins pedagogical materials claiming to 'close the gap,' a stance which is also reproduced by Quigley:

We are surrounded by a vast wealth of words and they profoundly affect our lives - words we use and receive, hear and speak. From the cradle to the dinner table, the classroom to the boardroom, our wealth of words can determine our status in life. (Quigley, , p. 1)

Quigley's use of wealth metaphors is common within gap discourses (Johnson et al., , pp. 14-15), framing certain words as having material value, and stigmatizing the language practices of speakers from low-income and racially minoritised households as literally impoverished and of little worth. His focus on vocabulary as something which 'can determine our status in life' attributes success and failure to language (or indeed, words), with his suggestion being that the simple adding of words into a child's vocabulary is a solution to rife social inequality:

Quigley bases the core of his book on Hart & Risley's study, which he summarizes in two sentences within the opening pages and neglects details concerning methodology, participants and context. His description is based on a similarly uncritical summary from Horowitz and Samuels ():

From birth to 48 months, parents in professional families spoke 32 million more words to their children than parents in welfare families, and this talk gap between the ages of 0 and 3 years - not parent education, socioeconomic status, or race - explains the vocabulary and language gap at age 3 [...]. (Horowitz and Samuels : 151, as cited in Quigley, , pp. 4-5)

Gilkerson et al. () uses the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system - a 'talk pedometer' which is strapped to young children's bodies to audio record their speech - and can be thought of as a mechanical version of the white listening subject. Based on primarily white, monolingual families in inner-city Denver, the authors claim for an existence of a 4-million-word difference between socioeconomic groups, as well as writing that 'intervention is probably unnecessary for many low-income parents' (Gilkerson et al., , p. 261; as cited in Johnson & Johnson, , p. 44). Marchman and Fernald () studied 28 children from primarily white, university-educated families - a limitation acknowledged by the authors (Marchman & Fernald, , p. 13), but not by Quigley. Children's vocabulary size and speech processing speed were tested at 25 months old and then 8 years old using standardized IQ tests - themselves a technology of raciolinguistic ideologies which have their roots in eugenics and biological racism (see, for example, Charity Hudley et al., , p. 215).

IQ and psychometric tests were also used in Cunningham and Stanovich (), which reuses data from 1984 in assessing 56 students aged 6-7 across 'general intelligence,' decoding speed, phonological awareness and listening comprehension. The authors extrapolate data to claim that reading ability and intelligence at age 16-17 can be predicted by ability at age 6-7. Of particular concern here are the tools used to measure 'general intelligence': Raven's Progressive Matrices, a non-verbal IQ test which exhibits cultural bias against Black African communities (e.g., Onwuegbuzie & Daley, ), and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Similar to the tools used in NELI as discussed above, PPVT is a receptive language test - the experimenter says a word, the participant is shown four images, and points to a picture which they perceive best matches the word. Responses are then compared against a standardized sample which is largely made up from white, middle-class participants. Various studies have shown how the PPVT is racially and culturally biased against African American and Hispanic speakers (e.g., Stockman, ), and I here conceptualize the PPVT as a listening technology underpinned by raciolinguistic ideologies. Finally, Law et al.'s () study claims for the existence of a word gap based on data from the British Cohort Study, collected from 17,196 people who were born in a single week in 1970 and at then at 4-5 year intervals in their lives. Any participants whose home language was not English and whose ethnicity was not white-European were excluded, 'because this group is likely to be at risk, at least in the early years, of lower language skills because of competing linguistic input ' (Law et al., , p. 1403, my emphases). A related paper (not cited by Quigley) on the Millennium Cohort Study by Sullivan et al. () uses parental vocabulary knowledge to claim for the existence of a word gap in contemporary Britain, locating linguistic and cultural deficiencies within the home and concluding that children whose parents are 'less educated and those from particular ethnic minority groups may require additional input at school to support the development of a rich vocabulary' (Sullivan et al., , p. 227). Such studies, which use idealized white, middle-class behaviors as the normative benchmark, reify the existence of a word gap under a guise of scientific objectivity (Flores, ) whilst framing the language and cultural practices of marginalized families in need of interventionist-based correctives.

Whilst a continued critique of Quigley's book is beyond the scope of this article, this section has illustrated one way in which the word gap has been popularized and turned into material capital on the education marketplace. Quigley's work, widely used in schools, has been highly effective in (re)normalizing deficit discourses and raciolinguistic ideologies, under the logic that giving poor, racialized children more words will solve structural social inequities, and that 'more vocabulary' offers a panacea for educational disparities.

Institutionalizing the gap

This section examines a further mechanism which has (re)normalized word gap ideologies in England, propagated by Oxford University Press (OUP). In the same year as the publication of Quigley's Closing the Vocabulary Gap, OUP's Children's Language team (of which Quigley is associated with) published a report, Why Closing the Word Gap Matters (Oxford University Press, ) based on their own research which surveyed 1,313 teachers about their observations of the word gap in schools and what they believed the root cause of this to be. The report was covered uncritically in the UK media, deploying ableist discourses such as in Adams (), which reported on the increasing presence of children's 'stunted vocabularies,' and in Eyre (), which suggested the word gap was 'stifling' children. OUP's research reifies the word gap and grants legitimacy to remedial interventions geared around explicit vocabulary instruction, whilst reporting statistics on teachers who claim that 'at least 40% of their pupils lacked the vocabulary to access their learning' and how 'teachers believe the word gap is increasing'. (Oxford University Press, , p. 2). OUP have since designed a series of marketed resources and invited schools to 'become a word gap partner school' through 'demonstrat[ing] your commitment to closing the word gap' (Oxford University Press, ), working to commodify word gap ideologies and convert them into economic profit.

The report references an internally distributed executive summary (Oxford University Press, ), which I obtained through a private freedom of information request. This internal report shows how perceptions of 'vocabulary deficiencies' intersect with race, class, disability and gender, describing how although all pupils are 'at risk' of a 'vocabulary deficiency,' the 'most vulnerable' are those with special educational needs, multilingual speakers, students eligible for Free School Meals (i.e. those living in poverty), and boys. Quotes from teachers include methods on how to screen children for word gaps and other 'errors' in speech, and how to address these - such as by policing nonstandardised verb tenses, placing children into after-school intervention programmes, and referring children to speech and language therapy. It is ironic that these interventions are often geared around the prohibition of certain language practices when the whole aim of word gap programmes is purportedly to increase vocabulary.

According to OUP, the solutions to fixing this perceived lack of language (and much like NELI, Quigley, and the Direct Instruction programmes of Bereiter & Engelman) lie in explicit vocabulary teaching, code-switching, demanding that students speak in 'full sentences,' policing 'non-words' such as 'innit,' and insisting on so-called 'academic language.' These remedial-based recommendations all work to perpetuate raciolinguistic ideologies because they require marginalized speakers to modify their supposedly inadequate speech. Flores (), for example, shows how 'academic language' works as a proxy for idealized, middle-class whiteness, framed as a checklist of empirical linguistic practices that are dichotomous with the home language practices of low-income, racialized students. Word gap programmes are one way in which the raciolinguistic ideology of academic language comes to be seen as a viable solution to broader social inequalities, through policing the supposedly less complex and specialized language of marginalized speakers.

Inspecting the gap

Since 2017, Ofsted have made an increasing commitment to word gap ideologies whilst simultaneously claiming that their work is motivated by social justice. For example, in a video presented by Ofsted's (white) deputy director of schools, Matthew Purves, he claims:

This same discursive strategy was deployed in a speech given by Amanda Spielman, a white woman who has been the Chief Inspector of Ofsted since 2017. In June 2018, Spielman referred to the word gap and what she called 'unlucky' children who 'have less than a third of the English vocabulary of their peers.' She continued:

In wider policy, and similar to Quigley and OUP, Ofsted make regular use of phrases such as 'research shows ... ' and 'studies suggest ..., ' presenting their initiatives as 'research-informed' and 'evidence-led.' For example, a document on early years education policy, Bold Beginnings (Ofsted ), cites Beck et al.'s () book Bringing Words to Life as 'evidence' for the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction. Beck and her colleagues' work relies on an uncritical reading of Hart & Risley's study and what they conceptualize as 'tiered' vocabulary - a system where words are hierarchically organized according to apparently objective evaluations such as 'sophistication,' 'importance,' 'complexity' and 'utility.' Through this ranking system, the policing of words categorized as 'simple' and 'basic' is legitimized because they are not deemed to be adequate for school. Ofsted's use of research to support claims for a word gap intensified in 2019, when they revised their methodologies for the inspection of schools and pre-service teacher education programmes. An early document in this process, School Inspection Update (Ofsted, ) dedicated an entire section to 'vocabulary' - and citing Hirsch (), claimed that 'the correlation between vocabulary size and life chances is as firm as any correlation in educational research' (Ofsted, , p. 7). Citing Hart & Risley and 'subsequent studies' (none of which are referenced), Ofsted claim that this 'confirms' the 'correlation between socio-economic status and volume of caregiver-to-child speech' (Ofsted, , p. 7). Ofsted did not respond to my request for the references to these 'subsequent studies.'

Ofsted's revised inspection frameworks were introduced with an accompanying 'overview of research' (Ofsted, ) which they stated offered an 'evidence base' for their inspection methodology. One section includes the assertion that:

This 'clear and consistent evidence' is made in reference to two studies - both of which uncritically cite Hart & Risley. One study (Huttenlocher et al., ) is a quantitative examination of caregiver talk in 47 Chicago families (based on just 810 minutes of video recordings per family) with a focus on lexical diversity and syntactic complexity. The study is based on a disproportionate number of white families, with 30 of the families being white, and all families being 'native' speakers of English, with English being the dominant language spoken in the home. The second study cited by Ofsted is Gilkerson et al. (), work produced by the LENA team discussed above and based on 329 families in Denver - all of whom were monolingual English speakers and 322 of whom were white. The study presents a predictive model of language experience based on word frequency in daily recordings over six months and follow-up testing using PPVT (see above for a critique). As the authors themselves point out, the 'generalisability of results to those of other languages and cultures is unknown' (Gilkerson et al., , p. 9), yet Ofsted's representation of the work suggests that linguistic differences between ethnoracial and economic groups as uncontestably factual. Ofsted (, p. 27) do go on to reference Hart and Risley () but framed with the clause 'while some older studies have been challenged.' Here they cite Sperry et al. (), whose failed replication of Hart & Risley has casted further doubt on the validity and ethical legitimacy of the original 1995 study. However, any critical engagement of Hart & Risley is negated by their references to other studies which are highly uncritical of it, including (OUP's ) as discussed above. The research behind the inspection framework underpins the two manuals used during inspection work: the School Inspection Handbook () and the Early Years Inspection Handbook (Ofsted, ). Similarly, a so-called 'research review' of English in schools (Ofsted, ) cites Quigley, Hart & Risley and the OUP reports as evidence for the existence of a word gap in low-income children. Policies and pedagogies related to vocabulary feature heavily in these handbooks, with inspectors being instructed to surveil how schools are, amongst other things, placing a 'sharp focus on ensuring that children acquire a wide vocabulary' (Ofsted, , n.p) and 'increasing children's vocabulary and cultural capital' (Ofsted, , n.p), so that 'children consistently use new vocabulary that enables them to communicate effectively' (Ofsted, , n.p). Again, vocabulary is framed by the inspectorate as a panacea for tackling educational disparities in ways which obfuscate social inequalities created by broader sociopolitical structures pertaining to white supremacy and global capitalism.

Since Ofsted's subscription to word gap ideologies in the mid-2010s, they have increasingly attributed praise to schools and teacher education programmes who reproduce these ideologies in their own work. For instance, a 2019 report of an initial teacher education partnership (graded 'outstanding') comments how:

Ofsted recommend explicit vocabulary teaching as a solution to addressing apparent linguistic deficiencies - a pedagogical strategy with close relations to Direct Instruction. This is named in Ofsted's Core Content Framework, a document which outlines the minimum content and standards that teacher education programmes must provide. This includes how pre-service teachers must demonstrate competence in:

Teaching unfamiliar vocabulary explicitly and planning for pupils to be repeatedly exposed to high-utility and high-frequency vocabulary in what is taught.

Modeling and requiring high-quality oral language, recognizing that spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing (e.g., requiring pupils to respond to questions in full sentences, making use of relevant technical vocabulary). (Ofsted, , p. 15)

The word gap as a durable ideology

Word gap ideologies operate on the myth that the language practices of white, able-bodied, middle-upper class communities are objectively higher quality than those of racialized, disabled and low-income communities. They are durable ideologies which are part of a long history of linguistic stratification in England and the USA, leading to covert racial segregation and the continuing stigmatization of families who are deemed to be failing in preparing their children for school.

This article has deployed a raciolinguistic genealogy and the raceclass approach of a raciolinguistic perspective to trace how word gap ideologies have been diffused across the transatlantic education policy trade route. Racist ideas about the 'limited' language of non-European speakers were a common trope within early British colonial writings, with these same representations being redeployed in 1950-60s deficit discourses within British and north American sociology and developmental psychology. Since the early 2010s, these ideologies have been borrowed back to England and renormalized via a dense web of mechanisms including government-funded interventions, textbooks for teachers, academic research and Ofsted. These mechanisms were found to subscribe to word gap ideologies under claims of scientific objectivity, whilst overlooking its racist, classist and ableist roots and failing to engage with a transatlantic tradition of scholarly work which has long called it into question. In tracing through these mechanisms, I showed how the word gap in England is conceptualized as a sign of educational failure and low academic competency, a determinant of mental health issues, a predictor of school exclusions and entry into the criminal justice system, and a public health crisis.

Word gap ideologies continue to be attractive to transatlantic policy makers because they offer a seemingly simple solution to a host of determinants of social inequalities along the intersections of race, class and disability, whilst exploiting marginalized groups by turning supposed linguistic deficit into material economic profit. Word gap ideologies open a space where a legitimate and sensible solution to fix social inequalities is to first claim that poor and racialized children have a lack of language, then design interventions which seek to fill the heads of such children with more words, and then make subsequent claims around social mobility, liberation and raised standards. Recent word gap discourses in England have subscribed to this logic under a guise of scientific objectivity, social justice and 'research-led' policy making, with Ofsted and Oxford University Press in particular occupying a position of institutionalized power which coerces schools and teachers into reproducing word gap ideologies in their own settings. However, this article, along with other critiques of gap ideologies, has shown that word gap interventions simply obfuscate structural conditions pertaining to racial hierarchies and economic inequality, and instead, serve to maintain the raciolinguistic status quo whilst alleviating the state of any larger responsibilities concerned with welfare and genuine social reform. Despite word gap interventions claiming to be about increasing the vocabulary of marginalized children, their practices are typically rooted in linguistic prohibition and constraint. For example, in my extensive fieldwork in schools in England, I have witnessed how the vocabulary of low-income, racialized children comes to be policed as 'non-academic' or 'tier-one' and placed in 'word jails' or 'word graveyards' as part of policies subscribing to word gap ideologies (see, also Cushing, ). These carceral metaphors of word jails and language policing are not always metaphorical, but reflect broader sociopolitical structures in which marginalized children are routinely criminalized in and outside of school.

What more can educational linguists do to further challenge such durable ideologies? A raciolinguistic perspective pushes us to seek a radical transformation of institutions to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism, in the rejection of ideologies which maintain the power of the white listening subject and the onus it places on minoritised speakers to modify the way they talk. Emerging frameworks such as Crip Linguistics (Henner & Robinson, ) and critical disability studies more broadly also push us to think about how the word gap is rooted in ableist conceptualizations of language which frame disabled people's communication as 'less than' because they are deemed to not conform to normative modes of language practiced by able-bodied communities. In education systems such as England, which are characterized by an increasing level of state power and surveillance, it becomes urgently important to challenge word gap ideologies which exacerbate social inequality under seemingly benevolent guises of empowerment and social justice.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the reviewers whose critical engagement with earlier versions of this manuscript undoubtedly helped to strengthen it. An earlier version of this work was presented in the UK at Northumbria University and in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. I am thankful to the audiences there for their comments and questions - particularly Nelson Flores, Marcelle Mentor and Julia Snell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Edge Hill University Research Investment Funds

1. Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills. Ofsted have existed in some form since 1839, in both England and former British colonies. They grade schools as either 'Outstanding', 'Good', 'Requires Improvement' or 'Inadequate' after an inspection of two days.

2. Records of Parliamentary debates, in transcript form.

3. Gross is a consultant who has significant power as a language policy maker in England, being the former 'Communication Champion' and chairing the influential 2018 Bercow: Ten Years On report, which reviewed services within speech and language therapy for children and subscribes heavily to word gap ideologies. She continues to offer training to schools in England on policies promising to 'close the word gap' (see also Gross, ).

4. The 'wealth of words' is an intertextual reference to E.D Hirsch's 2013 article A Wealth of Words. Hirsch is a influential figure in post-2010 education policy reform in England (see, for example, Nightingale, )

References

(2020). School closures will widen 'word gap,' warn teachers. Times Educational Supplement. <https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-school-closures-will-widen-word-gap-say-teachers>

DfE. (2013). The national curriculum in England: Framework document. DfE.

& (2018). Multi-million fund to boost children's early language skills. UK Government. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/multi-million-fund-to-boost-childrens-early-language-skillss.

& (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard educational review, 85, 149-171.

Gilkerson, J. , , , Montgomery, J. , Greenwood, C. , Kimbrough Oller, D. , , & . (2017). Mapping the early language environment using all-day recordings and automated analysis. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 26(2), 248-265. https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_AJSLP-15-0169

(2008). Getting in early: Primary schools and early intervention. The Smith Institute and the Centre for Social Justice.

. (2018). Foreword. In Why closing the word gap matters: Oxford language report. Oxford University Press, p. 2.

(2013). A wealth of words. City Journal. Available at: https://www.city-journal.org/html/wealth-words-13523.html

HM Government & National Literacy Trust. (2018). Improving the home learning environment: A behaviour change approach. DfE.

Hogenboom, M. (2019). Why the way we talk to children really matters. BBC Online. Available at: https://&#x003C;https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-the-word-gap-that-affects-how-your-babys-brain-grows&#x003E;

. (1970). The logic of nonstandard English. In (Ed.), Language and poverty: Perspectives on a theme (pp. 153-189). Academic Press.

, , , & . (2009). Modeling developmental language difficulties from school entry into adulthood: Literacy, mental health, and employment outcomes. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52(6), 1401-1416. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2009/08-0142)

Oxford University Press. (2020). Bridging the word gap at transition. OUP.

Oxford University Press. (2021). Become a word gap partner school. <https://oupform.edcowebsites.co.uk/secondary/register-as-a-word-gap-partner-school-and-access-your-free-secondary-toolkit/?step=form&region=uk>

, & . (2020). Reimagining race and language: From raciolinguistic ideologies to a raciolinguistic perspective. In , , & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), The oxford handbook of language and race (pp. 90-107). Oxford University Press.

Rosenshine, B. (2012) Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 13-39.

, , & (2016). Nuffield early language intervention: Evaluation report and executive summary. Education Endowment Foundation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the 'word gap' in England's education policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABSTRACT Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England's education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called 'word gap.'