The Poverty & Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) project in Bangor, Wales: a case of human rights

This paper takes a cue from UN Special Rapporteur Professor Philip Alson’s special probe into Poverty and Human Rights in the UK to develop a conceptual and methodological framework for an ethnographic case study in Bangor, Wales. This builds on findings from the needs assessment of a local school community in the Marchog area that ranks in the top 10% of the Wales Index of Multiple Deprivation, done over 14 months by co-author Caryl Lewis under the auspices of theChildren First initiative, sponsored by Welsh government with oversight by Gwynedd Council. In doing so, Lewis brought together the school executive and allied multi-agency workers, who agreed to continue work with academic partners. At issue is a [first] series of six-monthly seminars run to map the potential and possibilities of anti-poverty school programs and the institutional structures to support them (see Mills and Morton, 2014), including efforts to agree on ‘rights talk’ (see Moyn, 2018; Pogge, 2007) and engage politicians, policy-makers and power-brokers.