It is almost a truism to say that schooling systems are structurally unjust. There are stark differences in educational offer and opportunity across the UK. This lecture explores the possibility of reparative frameworks to address the structural injustices of education systems – particularly relating to racial and classed dispossession. The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. Arguably, until injustices are actively addressed, they can endure in social institutions – such as education – which also shape lives-to-come. But what does reparation in education look like? A new five-year participatory research project – Repair-Ed – seeks to explore this very question, focusing on the city of Bristol and its histories and geographies of inequality. Professor Arathi Sriprakash argues that injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons for the politics and practice of education.

Arathi Sriprakash is Professor of Sociology and Education at the University of Oxford. She is author of Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State. Her current research examines reparations and reparative justice in education. Learn more at: www.repair-ed.uk