Ian Cushing, who has been has been awarded a 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prize to lead a three-year project on linguistic justice in schools, explains how the research will move beyond documenting inequality to work with teachers and pupils to design systemic change, challenging deficit views of language and reimagining more just educational futures

In October 2025, I was honoured to find out I had been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, from the Leverhulme Trust. These grants are, to quote from the Leverhulme Trust, ‘for researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising’. What this means is that from November 2026, I will have the time and resources to lead a three year project of my choice. It’s a rare opportunity to focus 100% on a piece of research, with a lot of freedom and opportunity. Here, I’ll describe what my plan is for the project, the kind of contribution I am seeking to make, and the theory of change I will be working with.

The project is about grassroots, activist efforts to imagine and design futures of linguistic justice in schools. My motivation for this stems from my own and others’ research which has repeatedly documented how schools are sites of linguistic injustice. Linguistic injustice results in children — particularly those from marginalised backgrounds — having their language framed in terms of defects, limitations, and deviations from an ideological norm. This limits and polices a group’s capacity and rights to choose how they communicate. Importantly, linguistic injustice is not about individual, prejudiced beliefs about language, but is a structural phenomenon and a design feature of schools and education policy. And these injustices are never just about language. The way that a child experiences the stigmatisation of their language is always connected to broader patterns of injustice concerning race, class, gender, and disability. 

I am, of course, not the first one to point this out — my project builds on a long history of key scholarship in English education which has exposed how schools are sites of linguistic hierarchies and inequality, for example, Harold Rosen in 1971 and the extensive archive of the Rethinking Schools magazine. But with the current policy emphasis on oracy, which is taking place in sync with an upswing in deficit thinking about language, it feels like a particularly important moment to embark on a project which is both theorising and implementing linguistically just schooling. 

Drawing inspiration from decades of similar efforts then, my Leverhulme project is about disrupting unjust structures, and pushing for new ones which are anchored in linguistic justice. To do this, I’ll collaborate closely with teachers and children to imagine and design what linguistically just schooling might be. This begins with a particular understanding of what linguistic justice is. It is about the affirmation of linguistic diversity in all its forms. It is about teachers and children developing critical knowledge about language itself. It is about destabilising dominant language ideologies and their associated hierarchies. And it is about contributing to broader social justice efforts by pushing for the transformative change of unjust policies and systems. This project is not then, about the cataloguing of existing harms, but is about change, speculations, futures, transformations, and visions. Critical research in English education must move beyond the repeated documentation of injustices and work towards interrupting them. Put simply: we don’t need another research project which seeks to just expose what is unjust in our schools, we need a project which seeks to eradicate those injustices.

Such ambition requires making a commitment to a theory of change which is about long-term, systemic change. For this project, I’ll locate the research within abolition and transformative justice, which focuses their efforts not on small tweaks but on making large-scale transformations across entire institutions. Whilst abolition has not yet been taken seriously by scholars in English education in the UK, it has a long history in relation to racial justice struggles in education more broadly, for example, in the work of Bernard Coard. It is increasingly visible in US-based English education scholarship.

Abolition is a ‘political exercise that seeks to end repression while simultaneously supporting the capacity of historically oppressed and marginalised peoples to think and create’ (David Stovall).

Abolition rejects ‘reform’ as a valid theory of change for justice, arguing that inequitable systems are not ‘broken’ — they are working exactly as they are designed. Abolition is not simply about dismantling unjust systems, it is a creative and generative one which focuses on the design of more equitable systems. 

Applied to linguistic justice efforts, what this looks like in practice remains to be seen. I have previously theorised how abolition can be utilised as a creative tool to achieve linguistic justice in schools, and my Leverhulme project is seeking to translate those speculations into practice. The following sections outline five of the core principles in how I plan on achieving those aims. 

1. Building on the past

In the first year of the project, I’ll be building an interactive, open access timeline of historical and contemporary linguistic justice efforts in England’s schools. Accessing archives such as the George Padmore Archive, the Black Cultural Archives, and the Working Class Movement Library, the timeline will bear visible the long histories of linguistic justice struggles as practiced by activists, communities, parents, and teachers. It will also serve as a reminder that contemporary linguistic justice efforts are always building on previous ones, and that we can learn and take inspiration from the past. As such, the timeline is not a simple linear chronology of linguistic justice efforts, but a genealogy which shows how the ‘past’ continues to shape the present. 

2. Community and collaboration

I might be named as the lead researcher on the project, but that does not mean I’m the only person working on it — far from it. I’ll be collaborating closely with teachers and children from schools who I have existing relationships with. We’ll be thinking through some complex questions and exploring how our responses to those might translate into practice at policy and pedagogical levels. How, for example, might schools develop linguistically just policies? How might they engage in critical pedagogies for linguistic justice? How might they foster critical knowledge about language variation to challenge dominant ideas? How might young people be positioned as language activists who have the linguistic creativity and dexterity to challenge deficit framings? 

3. Grassroots activism and bottom-up change

In some of my previous work which has focused on how the state reproduces linguistic discrimination in its own practices, I have tried to effect change by directly engaging with representatives from those institutions. But those engagements have always been disappointing, with clear evidence that the state is unwilling to invest in changes which go beyond small-scale reforms. In this project I’ll do something different — I’ll engage in a bottom-up theory of change which seeks to build resistance across schools, and supports efforts to preserve and sustain the work of politically engaged, radical teachers who are pushing for transformational futures. 

4. Local contexts and global issues

I’ll be focusing on Manchester schools, adopting a place-based approach to understand how experiences of schooling are shaped by local geographies and histories of linguistic injustice. This approach will require ethnographic methods to build a rich description of how schools engage in linguistic justice struggles at a structural level, but also how they might forge networks of solidarity across the city. But linguistic in/justice is a global issue — and so during the project, I’ll also conduct extensive international fieldwork to learn and take inspiration from related efforts around the world, especially in the US and Canada.

5. Cross-movement solidarity

Linguistic justice struggles are never just about language. A child in school experiences linguistic stigmatisation not just because of how they use language, but because of how they are positioned in society more broadly. Taking an intersectional perspective on injustice, it follows from this that campaigns for linguistic justice must broaden their scope to think about how language is connected to other forms of social stigma, and how we can build resistance across different campaigns. So, for example, we’ll be situating linguistic justice struggles as connected to other social justice struggles such as disability justice, racial justice, and anti-colonialism. Through cross-movement solidarity, schools can see how social justice struggles are linked and interconnected. 

Futures of linguistic justice

My hope in this project to provide an antidote to dominant discourses of linguistic deficit by re-framing marginalised youth as linguistic innovators and visionaries for linguistically just futures. Whilst linguistically just futures might feel distant and difficult to imagine, this project is about bringing those futures closer to reality. I think that is exactly the kind of work that we as applied linguists, English education scholars, and NATE members should be doing. To be continued… 

Further reading

Baker-Bell, A. (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge.

Coard, B. (1971) How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System. London: New Beacon Books.

Cushing, I. (2024) ‘Transformative Justice as a Method in Applied Linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 44.

Cushing, I. (2025) ‘Social In/Justice and the Deficit Foundations of Oracy’, Oxford Review of Education, 51(3).

Garcia, A. and Mirra, N. (eds.) (2023) Speculative Pedagogies: Designing Equitable Educational Futures. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gibbons, S. (2025) Harold Rosen and English in Education and the Language Arts. London: Routledge.

Morrell, E., Mirra, N., Garcia, A., de los Ríos, C. and Lyiscott, J. (2026) Critical English Education: Enduring Voices, New Perspectives. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Rosen, H. (1974) ‘Language and Class: A Critical Look at the Theories of Basil Bernstein’, Urban Review, 7.

Souto-Manning, M., Martinez, D. and Musser, A. (2022) ‘ELA as English Language Abolition: Toward a Pedagogy of Communicative Belonging’, Reading Research Quarterly, 57(4).

Sriprakash, A. (2023) ‘Reparations: Theorising Just Futures of Education’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5).

Stovall, D. (2018) ‘Are We Ready for “School” Abolition? Thoughts and Practices of Radical Imaginary in Education’, Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 17(1).

Winn, M. (2018) ‘A Transformative Justice Approach to Literacy Education’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(2).

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