What is equity in education? A well developed literature has expanded our understandings of equality in education considering how to interpret the ideal of respect for all in schools, while taking account of differences between children, the gap between children and adults, the significance of cultural and social relations, and the dynamic of family life. However, there is less conceptual writing on the nature of equity in education. Equity appears more frequently than equality in policy texts. For example the World Declaration on Education for All [11] expresses its vision as „universalising access and promoting equity” (World Declaration [11, p. 4]) but does not define equity. Equity is frequently used in national policy documents, but there is no a clear definition of equity. Equity is first among the four goals for the partnership between the Kenyan government and large multilateral and bilateral donors to support the education sector „ensuring equity of access to basic education” [2] but no definition of equity is provided. Similarly the South African Eastern Cape Provincial Minister of Education outlining plans to retrain under qualified teachers and open adult basic education centers in 2002 set these measures as instances of responding to key challenges „the culture of human rights, democracy and equity” but did not explain the connections further. These underspecified definitions make understanding the normative assumptions of equity difficult and this has consequences for implementation. The standard definition of equity is „the quality of being equal and fair” and „that which is fair and right”[12]. Equity might thus be thought of as equality turned into an action, a process of making equal and fair. But the academic literature which uses the term equity in education does not stress this active dimension separating equity from equality, but concentrates primarily on fairness in distribution, collapsing equity into aspects of equality. For example, South Africa define equity as comprising equal treatment for all races, equal educational opportunity and educational adequacy. Eequity is partly the quality of being just and fair and partly as the process that supplies the underlying principles as to why a system is fair. It is not clear from this discussion why equity is preferable to equality in providing this grounding for fairness. Seeing equity primarily as fair distribution opens these discussions to the critique posed by Sen (1992) regarding what the metric of interpersonal comparison in discussions of equality is to be. Are inputs and resources or outcomes to be fairly distributed and is equal distribution fair? Personal heterogeneity in social and historical attributes and conditions and differences regarding conceptions of the good have enormous significance for how we think about why people learn, what is selected for learning and how learning is organized and progresses. This diversity complicates the idea of fairness and without specifying how diversity intersects with equity the term risks becoming either merely rhetorical or impossibly difficult to implement. The author tries to bring together two themes. Firstly, an examination of the historical evolution of the concept of equity in English, the language used in many of the key policy documents that use the term. Through this, to draw out what some different elements of historical ideas about fairness might mean in education. It looks at these different forms of equity for the light they throw on the ways in which Sen enjoins us to think about equality in the space of capabilities. Sen’s capability approach makes the argument that the metric of interpersonal comparison needs to take human diversity as a central concern [4]. Capabilities, which represent the freedoms to achieve combinations of valued functionings are real alternatives to formulate and achieve wellbeing. Capabilities are thus responsive to heterogeneities which are central, not incidental to the ways in which equality is conceived [5]. In looking at different emphases within the idea of equity, it is important to draw out how these might help delineate forms of social arrangement which, given a range of human heterogeneity, can shape expansion of a capability set. In so doing equity works in particular ways to establish conditions for consideration of equality in the space of capabilities. To make this analysis , the author draws on methods suggested by Raymond Williams in Keywords for exploring changing ”formations of meaning... of many of our central experiences” [10, p. 13]. Williams dealt with shifts in the meaning of equality, but did not discuss equity, suggesting possibly this was not the puzzling and contested term in the mid 1970s it is today. Following Williams, we should examine some shifts in the meaning of equity in English. It is possible to connect these with political, economic and social changes in Britain. There are different forms of equity in education associated with selected postcolonial processes in order to indicate how widespread actions of equity in education have been. The term equity appears in English in three different guises associated with three very different forms of social relationships. One of the earliest uses of the term appears in the writings of John Wycliffe in his translation of the Bible from Greek and Latin to English, thereby making it more widely available. In translating the Book of Malachai, the last book of the Old Testament in 1382 Wycliffe used the word equity to mean reasonableness between people, a quality of avoiding insisting on one’s own rights or views too vigorously. As listed in the Oxford English Dictionary the phrase he used was ”In equitee he walkide with me”[12] At about the same time Chaucer expanded the sense of equity to take in the idea of fairness and justice between people. In his translation of the work of the sixth century Platonist scholar Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae into English completed about 1374 Chaucer used the term as follows: ”Amonges bise binges sitte e heye makere..to don equite”. (IV. vi. 144 quoted in Oxford English Dictionary [12]). The middle English is rendered in contemporary English as ”Amongst these things sits the high maker [i.e. God] to do [them] equity”. Equity is thus a virtue you do and perform; it entails God sitting amongst all He has created, treating them equally. The author would like to term this form of equity, equity from below, because it is a way of thinking about equity that is associated with a belief about people’s access to powerful knowledge—the Bible or philosophy or nearness to God—the importance of everyday relations of respecting each other, whatever our differences. In this guise equity says something about a form of conduct people value on an everyday basis between themselves, and the process of establishing this is one of fairness and tolerance. Thus, in this meaning equity in education entails some acceptance of a space of negotiation in which particular concerns of groups or individuals on say curriculum content or the form of assessment or the treatment of girls and boys or the approach to management are negotiated not on the basis of majority rule, or the intensity of one person’s view with regard to another, but through a process of reasonableness and reflection that considers each person participating in the discussion has a valuable opinion, but what is most valued is the process of establishing the considerate and fair relationships that support negotiation, questioning and discussion. Equity from below seems to align with the emphasis in the capability approach on agency and process freedoms and in Sen’s interest in deliberative democracy [6]. My conjecture is that social conditions that foster equity from below would also support the development of agency and process freedoms in education for diverse individuals and thus enhance the range of real alternatives very heterogeneous people can consider for themselves and others in expanding a capability set. Here is an example of equity from below in education depicted in the relationships to support learning associated with an anti-colonial struggle marked by considerable differences of view. Stanley Mabizela, active in the ANC Youth League in the Eastern Cape in the 1950s, recalled some experiences 40 years later [1]: We did query the policy of non-racialism. We were young and we said ”why can’t we fight and drive them away?” But our elders in the organization were very patient people. They told us the history of the ANC and took pains to explain why the ANC must be non-racial. It was something which was not very easy to accept at the beginning, because of immaturity, because of youthfulness. We would tell our seniors that we don’t agree with the policy; but this was a topic that was handled so many times that gradually you got to understand the reasoning behind it: that first and foremost whites in South Africa came over three hundred years ago and they now have nowhere to go. Secondly—and this is the stressed point in the ANC—whites are human beings like ourselves except that they have got the wrong ideology in their heads. And with time they will change and we will stay with them as brothers and sisters, as our fellow human beings [1]. Although this example of equity from below is not in a school, but in the discussions taking place in a political movement, it does exemplify the sense of people working together through their differences, even when, as under apartheid, these were profound and the effects are hugely destructive. We have a sense that the process of discussion and participation in debate goes toward establishing fairness. We also have some nuance regarding the ways in which agency freedom is constituted socially. The enlargement of capabilities through this form of equity expressed Mabizela’s reflective assessment of what was important, his values entailed changing ideas about racism and establishing a community of equals in South Africa. Equity from below thus takes seriously aspects of personal heterogeneity both in circumstances and in conceptions of a good life, as this second example makes clear [7]. Equity from below in this form is not unknown or impractical in schools. There is an analysis of discussions with children and teachers working in the schools of the Brazilian Landless People’s Movement and the Plural School contain many instances of the curricular transposition of equity from below. However ,it is worthy to highlight how fragile and difficult to sustain such initiatives in school settings. Thus expanding a capability set through forms of equity in schools requires enormous attention to the process of curricular transposition, discussion with and support for teachers, and particular attention to issues of management and infrastructure. Equity from below, possibly because it works with everyday social relations, is not ”natural”; expanding a capability set for the very diverse groups that work together in a school demands considerable understanding and reflection to sustain the agency and process freedoms. But while these are necessary, they are not sufficient. The problem of sustainability highlights a second aspect of equity evident in the meaning of the word which came into English in the sixteenth century. During a period of struggles over authority between the King and the Church, equity came to mean a form of law making, an appeal to natural justice or a reasoned set of laws above the existing and contending centers of power and juridical authority. This meaning was first mentioned in English in 1574 in a translation of Thomas Littleton’s work on forms of land tenure, originally written in French in 1481. The English translation of this work during the reign of Elizabeth 1 rendered into English for the first time the notion of equity law. Littleton referred to equity law as a particular form of regulation of land holding „They bee taken by the equitie of the statute” [12]. From the late fifteenth century equity laws which dealt with legal matters appropriate neither to the courts of the Church or the Crown came to be codified and special courts of equity were established. I would like to term this ”equity from above” because it was a form of regulating actions according to rules, guided by reason and later by ideas of rights and fairness that could be recognized in a particularly powerful kind of court. This meaning of equity in education indicates that there are rules that have been decided as fair and reasonable by some widely recognized body of opinion. Issues for regulation in this way might be how many years of instruction constitute an acceptable level of education that provides lives of value for all children across widely differing contexts. Another might be what level of pay should be awarded to teachers relative to the median wage of a country. Seeing equity in terms of reasoned (and potentially revisable) rules implies children or teachers would have rights to have this level of schooling or pay granted to them. Some body therefore carries the obligation to satisfy these rights and to put in place procedures for ensuring their delivery in diverse contexts. Equity from above and the appeal to rules and notions of public good resonates with the concerns in the capability approach with instituting conditions for positive freedoms It also helps to illuminate the ways in which Sen and Rawls have written about capabilities being incorporated within the remit of the principles and processes outlined in A theory of justice [3]. The authority for „equity from above” would come in Rawls’ analysis from the social contract made in the original position and the exercise of the two moral powers-a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good. Other views of the rules that assure capabilities point to processes of participatory discussion and ethical rationality Here are some examples of equity from above. The South African Constitution guarantees all children a right to education and to be treated with dignity. The South African Schools Act [7] specifies that corporal punishment in schools violates dignity and the rights of children not to be treated in a cruel and inhuman way. In 2000 the Constitutional Court responded to a challenge to this law by a group of 196 Christian independent schools. They argued the law violated the views of their community on the importance of corporal punishment. The court ruled that the limitation placed on the values held by members of these churches was justified. It was important to establish norms and standards in all schools consonant with the values of the Constitution on human dignity. Parents had a right to administer corporal punishment in their homes, if this was enjoined by their religious beliefs. But they were not justified in requesting this of teachers, who were employed to ensure fairness in all publicly funded schools [7]. This example of equity „from above” concerns a national jurisdiction and the processes of its parliament and courts. I want to give two more examples of equity from above that show it operating in relation to units of justice that are both larger and smaller than a nation state. In India the women’s empowerment movement, Mahila Samakhya, established in the 1990s, worked with a large government programme to expand education provision, the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP)[9]. Equity from above may also operate above the nation state though, here the process is not likely to have the juridical weight of statutes and Constitutional guarantees. Discussions of global social justice point to its potential as a counterweight to the rampant growth of global corporations often operating with little heed for the rights of people or the effects on the environment. The legal requirements laid down by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women are examples of equity from above associated with global-national relations. While many countries opt out of the clauses of these conventions that are considered too demanding or in contradiction with national customs, the author thinks they point interestingly to the possibilities for thinking about a Convention on Education for All (EFA). This raises the question of whether it is feasible or desirable to establish global mechanisms for equity relating to the provision of education of quality with some of the same clout as those that apply to the strictures associated with the World Trade Organization or the International Criminal Court. In Gender, schooling and global social justice the authors tried to conceptualize how institutionalizing an approach like this that drew on a vocabulary of rights would need to be supplemented by concerns with needs and capabilities that took account of minimum levels of necessary provision of education on the one hand (responding to needs) and the complexity of human diversity and the intricacies of agency (responding to capabilities) on the other. In thinking about education globally through the concept of equity from above and the expansion of capabilities at the supra-national level, one has to take into account many layers of heterogeneity, but the notion that it would be possible to establish principles of fairness that expand capabilities is very appealing [8]. A third meaning of equity is associated with the emergence of capitalism and the social changes that came about as money came to play a central part in economic and social life in Britain. First used in the eighteenth century, this meaning of equity is associated with finance and a process of redeeming money or making investments. Thomas Arbuthnot, in satirising the activities of the archetypical, honest plain-dealing, but short tempered Englishman John Bull, wrote a sardonic tale about the tangled law suits of the gentry describing the comic figure Esquire South and questioning whether he had ”the equity of redemption” in relation to land he had mortgaged (quoted in [12]). By this form of equity Arbuthnot meant a process through which a mortgagor, who had forfeited his estate, might redeem it within a reasonable time by payment of the principal and interest (ibid). Equity is thus a form of share or ownership, but its value is given not by intrinsic worth or a fixed rate of interest, but by the prevailing social arrangements of the market. I would like to term this equity from the middle to draw out the sense in which social arrangements mediate flows of value in education. Equity from the middle in education is associated with the movement of ideas, time, money, skill, organization or artefacts that facilitate „investments” in the learning of children or adults and the professional development of teachers. Just as money or equity stock is not in itself valuable without attendant social arrangements that confer worth, equity from the middle-be it for example forms of teacher training, or user fees, or modes of school transport-is not in itself fair or just without an articulation with equity from below and equity from above. Thus the older meanings of equity as regulation (equity from above) and as participation among equals (equity from below) confer on the new word (equity from the middle), a sense that the social arrangements that make up the market-like flows that facilitate education and learning must be fair. In expanding a capability set, they would need to be attentive to redistribution, particularly when forms of diversity and their history entail discrimination. Just giving equal shares of time or money will not mitigate the unfairness of existing social arrangements with regard to education, in the many societies where the consequences of the past are written in the present. But the ways in which a capability set expands are not laid down by absolute notions about justice or worth or naturally achieved through discussion and dialogue. The process itself has a particular character.