Pupil subcultures

• Mac an Ghaill pro-school subcultures 1994

  1. the academic achievers - middle class and pursuing success through traditional a levels
  2. the new enterprisers - mainly from working class backgrounds and pursuing success through vocational subjects
• Laceys 1970 theory of pupil subcultures

  • pupils subcultures - groups of students who share values, norms and behaviour
  • these subcultures give them a sense of identity and provide them a status through a peer group affirmation
  • they often emerge as a response to a way pupils have been labelled and in particular as a reaction to streaming
  • can use Laceys concepts of differentiation and polarisation to explain how pupil subcultures develop
• differentiation

  • the process of teachers categorising pupils according to how they see their ability, attitude and or behaviour
  • streaming is a form of differentiation sine it categorises pupils into separate classes
  • those that the school deems 'more able' are given high status by being placed in a high stream whereas those deemed 'less able' and placed in low streams are given an inferior status
• polarisation

  • the process in which pupils respond to streaming by moving towards one or more opposite 'poles' or extremes
  • Lacey found that streaming polarised boys into a pro school and anti-school subculture
• pro-school subculture

  • pupils placed in high streams (MC) tend to be committed to the values of the school
  • they gain status in the approved manner through academic success
  • their values are those of the school: they tend to to form a pro-school subculture
• anti-school subculture

  • those placed in low streams (WC) suffer a loss of self-esteem: the school has undermined their self-worth by palcing them in a position of inferior status
  • this label of failure pushes them to search for alternative ways of gaining status
  • usually this involves inverting the schools valiues of hard work, obedience and punctuality
  • such pupils form an anti-school subculture to gain status from their peers through things such as truanting, not doing their homework etc
  • although joining an anti-school subculture may help with gaining status it causes further problems such as leading to work becoming poor and underachieving being more likely
• abolishing streaming

  • Ball 1981 takes the analysis of streaming further
  • found that when streaming was abolished, anti-school subcultures declined
  • nevertheless although pupil polarisation all but disappeared differentiation continued
  • this is because teachers continued to categorise pupils and labelled the MC as co-operative and able
  • since Balls study and especially since the education reform act 1988 there has been a trend towards more streaming and towards a variety of types of school some of which have a more academic curriculum than others
• the variety of pupil responses - Wood 1979

  • Variety of pupil responses to labelling/streaming including
  • Ingratiation
  • Ritualism
  • Retreatism
  • Rebellion
  • as Furlong 1984 observes many pupils are not committed to one response but may move or change between different types of responses, acting differently in lessons with different teachers
• ingratiation

  • being the teachers 'pet'
• ritualism

  • going through the motions and staying out of trouble
• retreatism 


  • daydreaming and mucking about
• rebellion

  • outright rejection of everything the school stands for
• criticisms of labelling theory

  • these studies on the labelling theory and self-fulfilling prophecy are useful in showing that schools are not neutral or fair institutions as cultural deprivation theorists assume
  • on the contrary the interactions within schools can actively create social class inequalities
  • however labelling theory has been accused of determinism as it assumes that pupils who are labelled have no choice but to fulfil the prophecy and will inevitably fail
  • However studies such as Fullers 1984 show that this is not always true
  • marxists also criticise labelling theory for ignoring the wider structures of power within which labelling takes place
  • marxists argue that labels are not merely the result of teachers individual prejudices but stem from the fact that teachers work in a system that reproduce class divisions
  • labelling theory tends to blame teachers for labelling pupils but fails to explain why they do so