The quirky café selling vegan food moves in first, and the cupcake shop soon follows. It is not until the old boozers start calling themselves gastropubs, though, that the vacant premises on the high street start to fill up with estate agents. And then, a little while later, it finally happens: Waitrose moves in, and no one can pretend any more. The process of gentrification has been completed. And what is left is very different to what once was.

Gentrification happens all over the world. It’s tempting to view schools as passive in this process: after all, the vast majority don’t choose their catchment - they serve whichever community happens to be in their vicinity.

However, it doesn’t work like that in reality. Research suggests that schools can both be a catalyst for and a casualty of gentrification. They can be a beneficiary, of sorts, too. And, most importantly, they can provide a much-needed voice for those left behind.

The term “gentrification” was coined in 1964 by British sociologist Ruth Glass, who wrote: “One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes - upper and lower. Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”

Today, 56 years after that paragraph was written, it’s still as relevant as ever - and not just in the capital. Average house prices across Bristol have risen by 90 per cent since 2005; in the Grangetown area of Cardiff, property prices increased 23 per cent last year as the city was redeveloped; and plans to demolish tower blocks in the estates of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, have sparked protests by residents, who describe them as “social cleansing”.

These are just the recent, larger examples. Globally, gentrification has happened in most major cities: from Sydney to San Francisco, Brooklyn to Berlin. And it’s happened in many not-so-major cities, too.

There are numerous drivers for gentrification. Most often, it is down to regeneration projects that make pockets of deprivation around cities suddenly desirable to the middle classes: the original intention might be to improve the lot of those who live there, but soon enough high-value homes and rising local prices for everything from beer to bread mean that the original tenants are priced out. Sometimes, as in places like Margate, Kent, a mix of property, social, policy and marketing factors combine to get the process started.

But it can also be a school that drives the process. “Gentrification can be a strategy by middle-class households to colonise resources like education,” explains Rowland Atkinson, research chair in inclusive societies at the University of Sheffield. “Schools with good reputations feed into the private housing market in an area, which is then competed for by higher-income groups.”

We have ended up in a strange position, he says, where having a decent school in an area can have a “pernicious impact” on its residents.

Whatever the reason for it happening, many talk up the benefits of gentrification, though they tend not to use that word because of the negative connotations. But while improved job opportunities, better amenities, higher-quality housing and generally safer areas are acknowledged as potential gains of gentrification, they are not a given. And Atkinson argues that the likely negatives far outweigh these positives.

“I don’t see many positives in the process of gentrification; it’s predicated on the displacement of poor people from the neighbourhood,” he says. “And if you look at the research, that points to gentrification being a problem: it generates community tensions and raises the cost of housing, so you’ve got displacement pressures on low-income groups.”

Quality streets

Much of the negative impact picked up on in the research has a direct effect not just on schools in that area, but on the schools in the areas where the displaced families are sent.

Loretta Lees is a professor of human geography at the University of Leicester, and has just finished a huge three-year project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, exploring the effects of displacing communities from council estates in London.

Her analysis includes the Heygate estate in Southwark, South London, from which 3,000 residents were displaced in 2014. The blocks of flats, including more than 1,100 that were socially rented, were demolished and replaced with mostly private, high-cost housing. Many of the families who had lived there, some since the estate was built in 1974, are now scattered across the capital and even the country, says Lees. She believes the knock-on effects for the education of the children involved are troubling.

“We’ve been looking at the social, economic, cultural and public health impacts,” she explains. “One of the things we found was the detrimental impact on children, who are being moved far enough out that either they have to commute very long distances to stay at the same schools or have to be pulled out and relocated to new schools altogether.

“And then, around the edges of that, there are the extended family networks that would help: grandparents, aunts and uncles, who would do the school drop-off or pick-up and give other support, but now can’t. The whole world around the school day, and after school, has been completely disrupted for these displaced children. It decimates the community and social networks.”

Schools are often not prepared for such upheaval, particularly as they are suffering with already stretched budgets. It’s not just the direct issues around the logistical challenges set out above, it’s also the indirect factors - stressed parents, stressed children, feelings of being unsettled and unsafe - that can knock on into behaviour, welfare and wellbeing problems.

This doesn’t always happen at the end of the process. Gentrification can take place over several years, which brings its own toll, according to the research. The constant threat of displacement places pressure on parents and children, Lees explains. They’re “constantly stressed as they don’t know whether they’re going to be there a month or six months from now”.

“In the GP surgeries we’ve talked to, there’s been an escalation around mental health problems - anxiety and depression and even suicide - around this. There’s a really big public cost to this across the board.”

How much of the movement of displaced communities is properly tracked? Are there support packages for children and families or is there training for teachers to counter the negative impacts? How much is gentrification even acknowledged as a factor that needs looking at in schools? Researchers are trying to uncover the truth and find solutions, but it’s a resource-heavy endeavour with not a lot of support, financial or otherwise.

Teachers are a great source of information for this research. So how does a school change through gentrification and how does it feel to be inside that change?

Jill Roseblade knows the process well. When she took over as executive headteacher of an infant and junior school in Rowner, Gosport, five years ago, the area was “very much in the throes of regeneration”. Huge 1950s high-rise blocks that housed 1,000 people (and earned the area its “concrete jungle” nickname) were being demolished as part of the £145 million Rowner Renewal Project. New-build apartments and houses emerged where they once stood.

In the initial stages, this meant a reduction in the number of pupils at the schools.

“It’s been quite an interesting time, because many of the families moved out so the refurbishment could be done,” Roseblade explains. “That left quite a small group of children. When I started in 2016, there were 214 children on roll from Reception to Year 6, and now the project has finished, there’s over 380. In the past year, we’ve doubled our nursery from 26 places to 52 to cope with the influx.”

But she estimates that only around 20 per cent of pupils now are from families that moved back to the area after the development was finished. For these pupils and their families, it’s a very different place: Rowner is no more, having been renamed Alver Village owing to the development’s proximity to the Alver Valley Country Park. What’s more, the school they knew has disappeared, too.

“We realised that this was a school in dire need of regeneration,” explains Roseblade. “The surrounding area was being regenerated, so we decided to regenerate the school and really think about where we wanted it to be.”

That meant a total rebrand, including a new uniform, becoming a forest school and changing the name from Siskin Infant and Junior School to Alver Valley Schools.

Were the parents of the returning pupils upset that they had not only lost their homes and community but also their school as they knew it? Roseblade says that the proposals met with very little resistance from families, with only a couple of parents (out of around 300 consulted) objecting to the name change.

Go to town

Partly, the reaction to a school’s regeneration is determined by how you present the change, and present yourselves as teachers, she argues.

“I think we had to prove to them that we would give them something that was worthwhile,” she says. “Quite a few of them had been to the school themselves as children. The key thing for children is that they want to know that you like them, and it’s exactly the same with the parents. When I first started, I remember one of the long-standing staff saying, in terms of the parents, ‘They just want to know that you’re going to stay,’ which I thought was a really strange thing to say at the time. But they’d had 11 heads in 13 years. It was like a revolving door of people coming in.”

Now, Roseblade explains, those parents are happy that their children are being educated in a school with better behaviour, good results (69 per cent of students met the expected level in reading and writing at key stage 2 in 2019, up from 57 per cent 2013) and fewer exclusions (reduced from around 120 days per year to 10).

“We’re providing them with a really good education,” she says. “And that’s the key to everything.”

Some would argue that not all schools have such a positive story to tell, that such rebranding can have hugely negative impacts and that education is only part of the role that a school has in a gentrification area. Pauline Lipman, professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of those people. Her research has focused on the changing neighbourhoods around Chicago public schools.

In 2013, the city’s then mayor, Rahm Emanuel, announced that 49 schools would be closed, the vast majority of them serving black and Hispanic students and their communities. Though his reforms were wide-reaching across policy areas, it was schools that were his main focus: in a speech last year, he said that education was “where I’ve tried the hardest and probably pushed the hardest”.

He touts improved graduation rates and other metrics as evidence of success, but Lipman argues that these statistics do not tell the true story of what gentrification did to the schools - and the people - in these low-income areas.

“There were a series of schools on the south side of Chicago that were closed, that were located in public housing projects,” she says. “Those public housing projects were demolished. It was essentially a process of privatising public housing, pushing people out and rebuilding for mixed-income developments with a very small percentage of public housing.”

The people who closed those schools worked from a set of rubrics, she says, looking at measures such as capacity-to-enrolment ratios, test scores and school rankings. “In addition to the fact that these measures are often inaccurate, there’s a human factor here,” Lipman explains. “We’re not talking about products, we’re talking about children and families and communities that are supported by these schools as one of the few remaining public institutions. They have after-school programmes, clinics, education programmes, cultural programmes, some of them are open at the weekends, and they have history in the community and have produced intellectual leaders in that community - the loss of those schools cannot be quantified.

“The school district will say, ‘We’ve sent the children to a school with a slightly higher ranking,’ and that’s supposed to be an improvement and everyone feels good. But what’s been lost in the process is really profound. The communities that exist around schools can’t be easily rebuilt.”

Lipman gives the example of a school she worked with. Even when the city started clearing residents from their houses, she recalls, families kept their children at the school while it remained open, travelling long distances from different areas to take them there and “gather around the door every morning for an hour or two, to touch base, because this was their community”.

The school buildings themselves did not always disappear when the new housing was completed. Another of the strategies in Chicago is to create “turnaround schools” in gentrifying neighbourhoods, she explains, where the building remains the same but everything else changes, from leadership and staff, to curriculum and, crucially, admissions processes. It’s similar to what often happens with the forced academisation of failing schools in England.

This process of transformation is usually undertaken with good intentions, and sometimes it can yield positive outcomes. But its negative consequences are often not thought through, says Lipman.

“When you give the school a new identity, you’re essentially saying that whatever it was before is not what we want,” she argues. “We don’t want the same children who were there before, we want something else.

“These are deep, deep symbolic meanings. This is why people fight so hard for these schools, even when they’re not the best, even when they want to improve it, even when they have complaints.”

Are the mixed-income schools - and, indeed, mixed-income areas - not better for everyone involved in the long run? It’s a legitimate aim, says Lipman, but she argues that gentrification does not achieve it.

“There’s nothing wrong with mixed-income communities or mixed-income schools - in fact, naturally occurring diverse schools and communities provide everyone with a richer life and solidarity and society,” she says. “But these gentrification processes work the opposite way.”

So gentrification is complex for schools and those who run them. When the school is an innocent bystander, we have seen how much change gentrification can bring to the catchment and how there is a delicate balance in making that school part of the change, and reacting to that change.

Hitting them where they live

But what if the school is an active component of the drive to gentrification, as Atkinson mentioned earlier? Or what if you were there to provide a good school to those who did not have one, but found gentrification endangered that aim? What happens then?

Ed Vainker, executive headteacher of Reach Academy Feltham in West London, found himself facing unexpected gentrification issues as his new school developed an increasingly positive reputation.

The free school, which opened in 2012, initially had the same admissions policy as the majority of schools, he says, prioritising those with education, health and care plans, plus looked-after children, then those with siblings at the school, then those who lived closest.

But by the third year of it being open, he says, children had to live 160 yards from the school to get a place. And then the school got an “outstanding” Ofsted rating and things became even more intense.

“On one side of the school was a disused site that used to be a petrol station, and then on the other side there was some office space,” he says. “The year we got the ‘outstanding’ Ofsted [rating], both were developed into flats.

“And we started to see people moving, renting, with a view to getting into the school. Estate agents would include ‘In the catchment area for Reach Academy’ in the details - even for places that weren’t.”

And so the leadership team made a decision: to change their admissions process and end the competition. “The first thing we did was ring-fence 27 per cent of places for pupils eligible for the pupil premium, because that’s the percentage locally across the local public schools. Then we made a decision to move to a lottery for anyone who lives in the local area (roughly a mile-and-a-half radius from the school). And we said all of those people have an equal chance of getting in.

“So we reduced the impact of having a particular address. We thought that was fairer and those changes have yielded increasing diversity, for example, increasingly high levels of pupil-premium students.”

The move hasn’t been without its critics, he admits, especially among those families who live nearer to the school than those who have been accepted.

“We did have some people who said, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve moved here expecting to get a place in the school.’ And, of course, the longer you don’t do it, when you do make that change, you’re disadvantaging specific people. And that is challenging, obviously.

“But we serve a really diverse community in Feltham. That’s why we opened the school - it’s why we wanted to do it and chose this community, and we’re very committed to supporting the whole community.”

Clearly, it’s not easy to be a school in an area of gentrification, whether that school is part of the cause or not. The aim of most teachers is not to find a way of getting the most affluent children possible into their classroom, but instead to serve the community the school is situated within. Looking on as students are displaced, watching community links being torn apart, and trying not to judge those new students who come in to take their place, is tough.

There is no easy solution to all of the issues laid out in this article: these are huge social and policy questions that need asking and answering. But the research says that schools are important, nonetheless. They can mitigate, they can console, they can rebuild or maintain links. They can support and offer safety and consistency. And they can, in some cases, rebalance the scales to give those left behind a chance - they can act as society’s conscience.

Zofia Niemtus is deputy commissioning editor at Tes. She tweets @zofcha

This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “There goes the neighbourhood”