course

• External factors affecting educational achievement


  • Social class - material and cultural deprivation
  • Ethnicity - material and cultural deprivation and racism in society
  • Gender - for girls: the impact of feminism, changes in the family, changes in women's employment and girls' changing ambitions. For boys: literacy, globalisation and the decline of traditional men's jobs
• Material deprivation


  • Pupils on FSM underachieve compared to everyone else
  • Overcrowding, lack of safe space, temporary accommodation, damp etc.
  • Young people from poorer homes have lower intakes of energy, vitamins and minerals
  • The hidden costs of education place a heavy burden on poor families
• Cultural deprivation


  • M/C parents more likely to use language that challenges their children and praise
  • Language used in lower class homes is deficient
  • Speech codes
  • W/C parents place less value on education, as a result less ambitious, less encouragement, visited school less
  • M/C parents have cultural capital
• Racism in society


  • 45% of black children are growing up in poverty
  • Intellectual and linguistic skills of black families are inadequate
  • Racism leads to social exclusion, minorities are more likely to be forced into substandard housing
  • Ethnic minorities are almost 2x more likely to be unemployed compared with whites
  • Ethnic minority workers are more likely to be engaged in shift work
  • Bangladeshi and Pakistani women more likely to be engaged in low-paid homeworking
• Reasons for ethnic minority underachievement


  • Many live in deprived areas
  • Cultural factors
  • Lack of language skills and foreign qualifications not being recognised
  • Racism in housing and employment
• Girls


  • The impact of feminism
  • Changes in the family
  • Changes in women's employment
  • Girls' changing ambitions
• Boys


  • Boys and literacy
  • Globalisation and the decline of traditional men's jobs
• Internal factors affecting educational achievement


  • Social class - labelling, setting and streaming, subcultures, pupils' class identities, marketisation
  • Ethnicity - labelling, pupil responses and subcultures, institutional racism
  • Gender - for girls: equal opportunities policies, positive role models, GCSE and coursework, teacher attention, challenging stereotypes in the curriculum, selection and league tables. Identity and girls' achievement. For boys: feminisation of education, laddish subcultures, differences in subject choice, pupils' sexual and gender identities
• Labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy


  • Teachers judge pupils according to how closely they fitted to an image of the 'ideal pupil'
  • M/C children closest to this ideal
  • Rosenthal & Jacobson's field experiment showed evidence of the SFP
• Setting and streaming


  • Children placed in a lower stream at age 8 had suffered a decline in their IQ score by age 11
  • Streaming is a form of differentiation, pupils then polarise i.e. respond to streaming in one of two ways
• Subcultures


  • Pro-school or anti-school subculture
  • Anti-school subcultures - invert school values of hard work, obedience and punctuality; they "sabotage the system" and they form an anti-social subculture to gain status
  • Impact on achievement = self-fulfilling prophecy of educational failure
• Pupils' class identities


  • Schools place a higher value on m/c habitus. m/c pupils gain symbolic capital. For w/c pupils – symbolic violence
  • W/C girls reluctant to apply for elite universities, they self-exclude
• Marketisation


  The A-C economy which leads to educational triage
• Labelling (ethnicity)


  • Black pupils seen as disruptive, Asian pupils as passive
  • Racialised expectations, black boys seen as a threat, more likely to be excluded
  • Teachers held ethnocentric views, would assume Asian pupils have poor grasp of English, mispronounce their names etc.
• Pupil responses and subcultures (ethnicity)


  • Black girls who rejected their label
  • Black and Asian A Level students – how they responded to labelling depended on ethnic group, gender and former school
  • Strategies black girls used to counteract racist label, did not work
  • 4 responses – the rebels, the conformists, the retreatists, the innovators
• Institutional racism


  • Marketisation and segregation: application process difficult for EAL parents
  • The ethnocentric curriculum
  • Assessment: baseline assessments replaced with FSP which meant overnight black students did worse
  • Access to opportunities: Gifted and Talented programme included more white students, black pupils more likely to be entered for lower tier GCSEs
• Equal opportunities policies


  GIST and WISE, The National Curriculum
• Positive role models


  Increase in female teachers and heads
• GCSE and coursework


  Girls are more successful in coursework because they are more conscientious than boys
• Teacher attention


  Boys receive more negative attention
• Challenging stereotypes in the curriculum


  Removal of gender stereotypes from textbooks, reading schemes and other learning materials
• Selection and league tables


  High achieving girls are attractive to schools
• Identity and girls' achievement


  W/C don't do as well because of hyper-heterosexual feminine identities, boyfriends and being loud. They gain symbolic capital from their peers
• Feminisation of education


  • Schools do not nurture masculine traits
  • There are a shortage of male primary school teachers
  • Most teachers, female as well as male, used a supposedly 'masculine' disciplinarian discourse
• Laddish subcultures


  • W/C boys are more likely to be harassed, labelled as 'sissies' and subjected to homophobic verbal abuse if they appear to be swots
  • Laddish culture is becoming increasingly widespread as girls move into traditional masculine areas such as careers, boys respond by "becoming increasingly laddish in their effort to construct themselves as non-feminine"
• Gendered subject images


  • Science is seen as a boys' subject, teachers are more likely to be male
  • Computer studies is defined as masculine because it involves machine work and tasks are often abstract and independent which males prefer, whereas females like group work
• Gendered career opportunities


  • Employment is highly gendered, jobs tend to be sex-typed as 'men's' or 'women's'
  • Women are concentrated in a narrow range of occupations including childcare and nursing
• Peer pressure


  Students do not want to risk a negative response from their peers, boys tend to opt out of music and dance because such activities fall outside of their gender domain
• Gender role socialisation


  • From an early age boys and girls are dressed differently, given different toys to play with and encouraged to take part in different activities
  • Children's beliefs about 'gender domains' are shaped by their early experiences and the expectations of adults
• Double standards


  Boys boast about their own sexual exploits, but call a girl a 'slag' if she doesn't have a steady boyfriend or if she dresses and speaks in a certain way
• Verbal abuse


  • Boys use name-calling to put girls down if they behave or dress in certain ways
  • Negative labels such as 'gay', 'queer' and 'lezzie' are ways in which pupils' police each other's sexual identities
• Double standards


  Lees identifies a double standard of sexual morality in which boys boast about their own sexual exploits, but call a girl a 'slag' if she doesn't have a steady boyfriend or if she dresses and speaks in a certain way. Sexual conquest is approved of and given status by male peers and ignored by male teachers, but 'promiscuity' among girls attracts negative labels.
• Verbal abuse


  Connell calls "a rich vocabulary of abuse". For example, boys use name-calling to put girls down if they behave or dress in certain ways. Lees found that boys called girls 'slags' if they appeared to be sexually available – and 'drags' if they didn't.
• Name-calling


  Helps to shape gender identity and maintain male power. The use of negative labels such as 'gay', 'queer' and 'lezzie' are ways in which pupils' police each other's sexual identities.
• The male gaze


  A form of surveillance through which dominant heterosexual masculinity is reinforced and femininity devalued. It is one of the ways boys prove their masculinity to their friends and is often combined with constant telling and retelling of stories about sexual conquests. Boys who do not display their heterosexuality in this way run the risk of being labelled gay.
• Male peer groups


  Reproduce a range of different class-based masculine gender identities. The w/c 'macho lads' were dismissive of other w/c boys who worked hard and aspired to m/c careers, referring to them as the 'dickhead achievers'. By contrast, m/c 'real Englishmen' projected an image of 'effortless achievement' – of succeeding without trying (though in some cases actually working hard 'on the quiet').
• Female peer groups


  Archer's Nike identities.
• Education – topic 4: policies


  • Tripartite system
  • Marketisation and The Education Reform Act
  • New Labour
  • Coalition
  • Current
  • globalisation
• Tripartite system


  1. 11+ exam

  2. Grammar school

  3. Secondary modern

  4. Technical college
• Marketisation and The Education Reform Act


  1. Influenced by the New Right

  2. Ofsted

  3. League tables

  4. National testing

  5. Formula funding

  6. National Curriculum