English was once informed by more ambitious social and cultural aspirations than is the case today. In the post-war period, a handful of English teachers in the UK hammered out a set of principles and practices that aimed to connect the curriculum subject to their pupils' social realities. Social class was the central concern for certain teachers who aimed to democratise their subject. At a time when the curriculum reflected inherited, ungenerous assumptions about social class and education, a new generation of progressive and radical English teachers, intent on transforming the larger society, struggled to bridge the divide between the school subject, English, and the communities it served.

 
What became known as the 'New English'� in the UK was the product of teacher-led innovation that had a disproportionate influence on English teaching for decades to come. The English teachers who were at the very forefront of change, albeit scrupulously sensitive to issues of religious intolerance and racism, didn't seek to make difference a central principle of English teaching. Attention to matters of ethnicity and gender lagged behind their concern with social class.

'Non standard'� varieties English were generally related to matters of social class rather than region, and hospitality towards non-standard vernacular speech soon became a controversial feature of New English lessons, where students were encouraged to talk about their experiences 'in their own words'�. Their teachers assumed that 'finding a voice'�, a key phrase in the rhetoric of the 'New English'�, might help to foster pupils' linguistic, cognitive and emotional development.
 
Crucially, where linguistic and cultural deficit was used as an explanatory principle to account for poor results in working class students, English teachers often defended working-class speech and culture, identifying the systematic obstacles and barriers,to working class attainment. The sociology of education held out a picture of the underlying class-based structural inequalities in society as a whole and debates concentrated around the issue of whether or not education could 'compensate'� for the underlying structural inequalities. In the United States, where similar debates took place in the context of national concern with poverty and educational underachievement, the focus was largely on ethnicity, specifically the languages and cultures of ethnic groups, rather than social class.

Today, the picture has changed again. The closure of manufacturing industries, the deregulation of the labour market, the sale of social housing, the globalization of labour and the general 'marketization'� of education have not only altered the composition and character of the working class, but also increased disadvantage. The proportion of the working population employed as manual workers in heavy industry has reduced and, as a consequence, the pre-war 'heroic'� image of 'labour'�, which was once a staple of working-class identity, has lost potency. In sum, the symbolic means by which the old working class traditionally recognized itself have dwindled away.

Large-scale immigration in the sixties and seventies, especially from the Caribbean and South Asia altered the ethnic composition of British schools, particularly in urban settings. There was a new recognition, born of the fact that inner-city classrooms were manifestly multi-lingual and multicultural, that the communities the schools served were markedly diverse. Younger English teachers, some radicalised by the student movement of the Sixties, concentrated their attention on responding positively to ethnic diversity and opposing racism. Feminist critiques of education raised further questions about fundamental inequality and social injustice.

Associated with these later initiatives was a new focus on the politics of identity. In retrospect, as an unforeseen consequence of the shift towards a concentration on the micro-politics of difference, debates surrounding ethnicity and educational disadvantage turned attention away from the larger structural inequalities associated with social stratification. Today, the terms of discussion and debate are largely set by central Government. Raising standards measured by national testing arrangements remains the major priority for State education. Misleadingly, comparisons are routinely made between 'white working class students'� and other 'ethnic'� groups in ways that imply that an explanation for lack of achievement lies in specific linguistic and cultural deficiencies within communities rather than in deep, systematic structural inequalities. Maybe English teachers' long-standing concern with class and community has lost focus in a world where parental income, occupation and educational qualifications chiefly determine children's life-chances?

As this issue illustrates, the situation in England since the 1950s described above differs from other educational contexts. As well there are deeply complex repercussions for the teaching of English from social and global movements in the 21st Century, movements that could not have been envisaged by those teachers who struggled to introduce 'New'� English. In asking the question: Is there a divide between English and the communities it serves? the editors of this issued extended an invitation to authors to address particular divisions between English teaching, policies, pedagogies, teachers and diverse versions of community. The resulting collection of papers in this special issue enables further exploration of the question of the intersections between class and ethnicity, and the impact of these interactions on the teaching of English.