class

• material deprivation (smith and noble's barriers to learning)

  • list the effects of poverty on schooling
  • families are unable to afford uniforms, class materials leads to students being stigmatised
  • no access to internet, a desk
  • marketisation of schools means lower classes are concentarted in unpopular schools
  • more likely to have job to support their studies
• Hirsch (students from better off backgrounds have advantages)

  • more likely to have activities outside of school, e.g. sports, music and theatre groups, gives them confidence and skills
  • more space, bedrooms and desks
  • private education
  • richer set of experience in and out of school
• private school (Kynaston)

  • private schools remain accessible only to the very well off
  • only 7% of people attend private school in britain
  • only 1% get scholarships
  • study by the sutton trust found private school students were 55% more likely to get into Oxford or Cambridge than state school kids entitled to free school meals
  • class inequalities are entrenched within school system
• Reay at al

  • working class students answered they will pick nearest university due to costs of travel and accomodation
  • questionaire
• middle class and private tutors (Britland)

  • use of private tutors booming in britain
  • can buy house in catchment area for very successful state school
• cultural deprivation (Sugarman)

  • working classes are unable to defer gratification e.g. unlikely to sacrifice immediate income by staying in education, and sacrifice higher wages and better job in the long run
  • the fatalism of the working classes- do not believe they can improve their prospects through hard work
• cultural deprivation (sugarman- taca)

  Time orientation- w/c present time, m/c future time

  Attitude to gratification- immediate gratification (spending wages immediately), deferred gratification (deposit on a house)

  collective action v individual action

  attitudes to luck
• Goodman and Gregg (cultural factors for underachievement)

  • parental attitudes to education
  • amount of time spent with parents
  • extent of negative behaviour in children
  • how often books are read to child
• Berntein (restricted and elaborated codes)

  • speech shapes educational achievement
  • elaborated codes are necessary for exam success
  • being socialised in household that largely use restricted code holds back w/c
  • many teachers are middle class and use elaborated code
• restricted code

  • shorthand speech
  • meanings not made explicit
  • short unfinished sentences
  • more typical of working class
• elaborated code

  • meanings filled in and made more explicit
  • sentences long and complex
  • bernstein says this speech code encourages more developed and sophisticated reasoning
• critisisms of berntein

  • gaine and george argue he oversimplifies the difference between working class and middle class speech patterns
  • differences have declined since Berstein did his research
• critisisms of cultural deprivation theory

  • not so big differences between social classes in contemporary world
  • Gillian evans found working classes placed high value on education and encouraged their children
• cultural capital and conflicts (criticism of cultural deprivation)

  • working classes may have different culture, but not inferior
  • working class skills, knowledge, ways of speaking and behaving are devalued by the education system
  • lack the necessary cultural capitol to succeed
• cultural capital (Bourdieu)

  • believes the possession of capital shapes oppotunity in society
  • the education system is biased towards the culture of the higher classes
  • students from higher classes have an advantage because they socialised into the dominant culture
• Gillian Evans (cultural capital)

  • middle class mothers able to use their cultural capital to give children a head start
  • mothers have high level educational qualifications and have good understanding how children should be stimulated
• Ball (cultural capital)

  • middle class parents play system with their cultural capital and ensure children are accepted into good schools
  • strategies like impression with a headteacher on open day, or knowing how to amount an appeal against an unsuccessful application
• sullivan (cultural capital)

  • found that pupils were more liklely to be successful if they read more complex fiction and watched educational TV
  • pupils developed wider vocabularies and greater knowledge of cultural figures
  • pupil's cultural capital strongly correlated with parental cultural capital, strongly linked to their social class
• evaluation of cultural capital theories

  • fail to acknowledge the importance of factors inside of school and the way different groups are treated
  • fail to acknowledge the way material factors shape different cultures
• labelling Hargreaves (internal)

  • found pupils appearance, personality, response to dicipline leads to teachers labelling pupils as 'good' or 'bad'
  • once pupil has a label, teacher interprets the pupils behaviour in terms of the label
  • student internalises label
  • results in a self fulfilling prophecy
• teacher expectations (Rosenthal and Jacobson)

  • conducted field experiment where teachers were told childrens IQ scores
  • found students who were believed to have a higher IQ made greater progress than those believed to have low IQs
  • demonstrated a self-fulfilling prophercy
• Harvey and Slatin (teacher expectations)

  • used photographs of children in different classes and asked teachers to rate their likely preformance in education
  • pupils from higher classes were seen to be more sucessful from labelling on the basis of appearance
• setting and streaming

  • dividing pupils and students by ability level can create or reinforce labels and have significant effects on achievement
• setting and streaming (Ball)

  • found working classes more likely to be placed in lower bands than middle classes even when measured ability at primary school was the same
  • teachers had low expectations of lower bands and directed towards practical subjects and lower level exams
• Ireson and Hallam (setting and streaming)

  • found higher sets were more likely to have a positive self- concept (e.g. believing they could learn things quickly)
  • more likely to look positively at staying on in education
• setting and knowledge (Keddie)

  • observed different streams studying the same humanities subjects
  • in lower streams, teachers simplified the content and misinterpreted questions
  • in higher streams, teachers taught more abstract concepts with greater opportunity to develop their understanding
• setting and knowledge (gillborn and Youdell)

  • working class and black students more likely to be placed in lower sets than middle class and white
  • pupils in lower sets were often denied the chance to sit higher-tier GCSE exams, meaning difficulty in moving on to higher education
• pupil subcultures (Hargreaves)

  • pupils in lower streams, who have been labelled as more likely to be troublemakers, rebelled aginst the values of the school
  • developed non-conformist delinquent subculture, where getting in trouble and not doing homework was valued by peers
• pupil subcultures (Willis' The Lads)

  • studied an anti-school peer group which rejected the values of the school
  • pronounced class divisions, closely linked to the wider inequality of opportunity for different backgrounds
  • the 'lads' were from largely unskilled backgrounds were hostile to the 'ear 'oles' from largely middle class as they saw manual jobs as proper work
  • did not valued acedemic work or values of school
  • position of boys in class structure that shaped attitudes to schooling, not the way schools organised
• Mac and Ghaill (pupil subculture)identified school's 3 sets:

  1. lowest set were the 'macho lads', acedemic failures with unskilled background and hostility to school
  2. middle set were 'new enterprisers' with positive attitude to vocational curriculum
  3. highest set were the 'acedemic achievers', acedemic successes with skilled backgrounds
• evaluation of interactionist perspectives (internal school)

  1. fail to explain where wider class inequalities come from
  2. labelling theory is too deterministic e.g Fuller found group of black w/c girls responded to being labelled as failures by working harder to achieve success
  3. lack of studies on female peer groups
  4. approach does not look at the effect of social policy in any detail
• social policy and social class

  educational policies can be divided into two types:

  1. policies specifically aimed at reducing class inequality, often based on cultural deprivation theory
  2. policies that impact class inequality even though its not their main aim
• social policy and class (compensatory education)

  • positive discrimination
  • w/c are given extra help in education system to compensate for the supposed inadequacy of their socialisation
  • e.g. 1998 Sure Start provided additional pre-school education to try compenstate for lack of educational stimulation from parents
• criticisms for compensatory education

  1. Whitty believes schemes blame child and background for failure, rather than society as a whole
  2. schemes fail to tackle poverty and lack resources
• marketisation and increased competition

  • educational institutions are funded according to how many pupils or students they can attract
  • act they businesses and offer the most attractive 'product' to the 'consumer', assisted via league tables and inspection reports
• marketisation and 'cream-skimming'

  • policies encourage educational insitutions to try attract the best students
  • middle class parents have more resources to manipulate the system and to give their children the best possible chance of getting into the 'best schools'
  • creates a polarised school environment where successful schools are middle class dominated and well funded, while less successful schools are undersubscribed and largely working class
• Lloyds (marketisation and cream skimming)

  • found wealthy parents paid extra to live in catchment area for most successful state schools