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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how migration and difference were imagined and contested at a former special education centre for refugee and asylum children in Bolton, UK, with an emphasis on the tensions between the school’s disciplinary, compassionate, and aspirational possibilities.

Paper long abstract:

Education is a space in which ideas of future societies – local, national, global – are imagined and contested. Different forms of conflict and crisis shape educational possibilities and responses, generating both positive and negative imaginaries of individual and social futures. This paper takes a historical case study of a ‘unique’ school solution for refugee and asylum-seeking children in Bolton, UK. The town, a former textile and industrial centre outside of Manchester, was the site of a pilot refugee resettlement scheme bringing families from Sub-Saharan Africa as a ‘legal Gateway’ to juxtapose New Labour’s tightening asylum and immigration laws. The education project established to support these children responded to global, national, and local imaginaries of migration, difference and vulnerability during a period of conflict abroad and securitization at home. The school (Starting Point) reflected local and contextual responses to national and geopolitical landscapes, framed by local understandings of class and opportunity. Tracing the evolution of this project between its establishment in 2004, the rupture of educational failure and transformation in 2010 and eventual closing in 2020, the paper considers Starting Point as a site of contestation between different imagined futures – offered by the state, local structures, and individual actors, as well as transnational communities and children and families themselves. While the school itself no longer exists, the tensions between its disciplinary, compassionate and aspirational imaginaries help us understand how broader political and social conflicts are embedded and resisted in educational spaces.