Gentrification is usually discussed in positive terms - a rough, rundown area has been transformed and house prices boosted. It’s smiles all around for homeowners and estate agents.

But what about the other side of the story? Behind the proliferation of plantation shutters can be a community fragmenting and a shared history slowly disappearing.

Nowhere are the effects more visible than in education. Schools are often the anchor for their communities, but when a community is being tossed around on the waves of progress, everything changes - for teachers and headteachers, and for children and their parents.

Some of a school’s children will cease to be its children - families will effectively be shipped off, often miles away. Others will stay. New children will replace those who leave, but they will be different, with different needs. How do you fulfil your obligations to all of these children? How do you support and console while also being welcoming and trying to integrate? How do you ensure the children who leave get the best start elsewhere?

The children are blameless, but the act of gentrification rarely is.

It’s not these issues that are usually discussed, though. Instead, the narrative tends to be around the school’s results - most often, they were poor and now they will be good. It is about branding - the old school name was synonymous with “bad”, so it’s changed to something new and unrecognisable. It is about getting the right “mix” - unsettling notions of sink estates with sink schools are horribly common.

Rarely, says Pauline Lipman, professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a school seen for what it truly often is: a big sticking plaster on an open wound of societal neglect. It can be the only positive thing in a child’s life. But it can also be so much to so many more people: the one source of interaction for an isolated parent; a family for those who have no family; a hundred extra pairs of eyes on a parent and their children; a place of sanctuary and of trust.

But is school there for parents? It has to be. There is much evidence that parents are crucial to educational success, so a stable home environment is vital. If teachers are there for the children, it follows that schools have to be there for the parents.

It’s particularly important that this is the case when gentrification is taking hold. A community’s support systems are dismantled, long-standing relationships disappear and earned trust is discarded. Young people and their parents are left to flounder. Yet, on the whole, we fail to acknowledge both that process and what happens next.

How much is a displaced parent able to trust a new school? How much can they support their children when all their own support has been taken away? How long do feelings of abandonment, of not being welcome, linger?

And for the children who are left behind in the rush to regenerate, what messages are they being sent? Are they welcome in the new era? Are they part of the “old” that should have been swept away but have somehow survived? What does that do to a child? How far does the influx of new, affluent families create more social problems than were already there?

It is, of course, a complex issue. Some areas do need regeneration and more of a social mix, for many reasons. While there may be many winners in gentrification, let’s not forget there will always be losers, too. When a community fragments, children can easily slip through the cracks. Even if all others lose sight of them, we must make sure that schools never do.

@AnnMroz

This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “School is an anchor for families caught up in a storm of progress”