Bourdieusian theory in policy: critical analysis of early years workers’ responses to Ofsted’s cultural capital

This paper engages a feminist critique of governance to investigate Ofsted’s use of cultural capital in inspection documents as policy in action, through the perspectives of 20 early years workers. In 2019, Ofsted introduced cultural capital into regulatory documents guiding their inspections, defining it in deficit terms as categorical knowledge upon which they infer a value judgement. Cultural capital is embedded in classed social structures, and as the early years sector predominantly employs working‑class women, we adopt a critical feminist approach to examine its interpretation and impact in this field. Our focus group data demonstrates that Ofsted’s use of cultural capital destabilises practice through surveillance and power. Little is known about how government discourses of cultural capital operate in practice, and this is the first project to explore early years practitioners’ perspectives of cultural capital in the context of Ofsted inspections, making this a unique contribution to scholarship on Bourdieusian capitals in social policy. We argue that Ofsted’s implementation of cultural capital represents ‘symbolic violence’, and a neo-conservative shift in early years education and care regulation. Our findings indicate the particular need for critical attention to Bourdieusian theory in social policy related to gendered and classed fields of work.