Class Internal Factors

• Becker - labelling and SFP

  • Interactionist approach to education
  • Teachers pass judgement on their students based on pre-existing stereotypes of what constitutes the 'Ideal Pupil'
  • Becker used interviews of 60 Chicago high school teachers and found they stereotype pupils based on their work, conduct and appearance - M/C children closest to the stereotype of the ideal pupil and W/C children furthest away from this 'ideal'
• Rist - American kindergarten study on labelling

  • Ability is ignored, perceived based on how children conformed to the teachers own middle class standards
  • The teacher used information about children's home background and appearance to place into separate groups
  • Tigers - fast learners sat closest to the teacher showing greater encouragement (M/C pupils)
  • Cardinals and clowns - W/C pupils seated further away, given lower level books and fewer chances to show ability
• Keddie study - Unequal access to classroom knowledge

  • Teachers do not distribute knowledge evenly within the classroom but give high ability students 'high status knowledge' and low ability students 'low status knowledge'
  • Low ability groups - W/C, common sense, dumbed down
  • Top ability groups - M/C, abstract, theoretical, detailed
• Gillborn and Youdell - teachers are more likely to see M/C pupils as having the ability to enter higher level exams. This discriminates many W/C pupils who are denied the opportunity to attempt to obtain the higher grades.
• Evaluation of labelling and SFP

  • Labelling theory is deterministic in suggesting the inevitability of failure for those with negative labels attached to them. Fuller found that black girls resisted the label of failures by devoting themselves to schoolwork to be successful
  • Marxists criticise labelling for ignoring wider structures of power where labelling takes place. They are not a result of individual prejudice from teachers but the fact they work in a system that reproduces class divisions
• Rosenthal and Jacobson - SFP study

  • School were told they had a new test specially designed to identify pupils who would 'spurt ahead' and teachers believed this - however this was untrue as it was an IQ test
  • Tested all pupils but then picked 20% at random and told school had identified them as 'spurters'
  • When returning to the school a year later they found 47% of those identified had made significant progress
  • This study demonstrates SFP as teachers beliefs about the pupils had been influenced by the test results
• Banding, setting and streaming

  • Separating children into different ability groups and studies show this leads to SFP
  • Ball, Hargreaves and Lacey have looked at the effects of this and found that M/C pupils are usually placed in higher ability sets and W/C pupils in lower ability sets
  • Teachers have lower expectations for W/C children denying them access to higher level knowledge and only being able to acess foundation tier exams
  • Campbell - subject setting advantages M/C students in top sets as their attainment increases
• Evaluation of banding, setting and streaming

  • Ball refers to setting as social barbarism because it allows well-off parents to separate their children from those they consider socially and intellectually inferior
  • Leads to greater social class inequalities
• Marketisation and selection policies - educational triage

  • Created a competitive climate within schools with M/C students seen as more 'desirable recruits' as they achieve better exam results
  • W/C students are seen as 'liability students' which are barriers to efforts by schools to climb the league tables
  • Bartlett - marketisation allows popular schools to 'cream skim' higher ability students and 'silt shift' lower ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds into unpopular schools who are obliged to take them for funding reasons
• Gillbourn and Youdell - league tables

  • League tables create a A* - C economy in which schools channel most of their efforts into those who are likely to to get 5 or more GCSEs at A*-C
  • Produces a system of educational triage in which W/C students are seen as being lower ability and 'hopeless cases'. This produces a SFP and failure
• Evaluation of educational triage

  • Ball and Whitty claim that marketisation policies such as exam league tables and funding formula reproduce class inequalities
  • Pupils progress is now measured by Progress 8 which compares their attainment at SATs when leaving primary with 8 GCSE scores
• Lacey - pupil subcultures

  • Differentiation - the process by which teachers categorise pupils according to how they perceive their ability, attitude and behaviour eg. streaming
  • Polarisation - pupils respond to streaming by moving towards one of two opposite poles or extremes
  • Lacey's Hightown boys grammar school study:
  • Pro-school subculture - high streamed, M/C, keen on learning
  • Anti-school subculture - low streams, W/C, failure at exams
  • Joining anti-school subcultures creates problems as it leads to SFP of failure
• Hargreaves study on subcultures

  • Interviewed boys in secondary moderns and a subculture formed due to triple failures - failing 11+ exam, placed in low streams and labelled 'worthless louts'
  • They were given high status by peers by flouting school rules but the delinquent subculture helped to guarantee educational failure
• Evaluation of pupil subcultures

  • Too simplistic division of pro and anti school subcultures as there is a variety of pupil responses to school culture
  • Ingratiation - teachers pet
  • Ritualism - going through motions and staying out of trouble
  • Retreatism - daydreaming and mucking about
  • Rebellion - outright rejection of school
  • Furlong states pupils are not committed to one response but act differently to different teachers and subjects
• Archer - pupil identities and the school

  • Researched the interaction of W/C pupils identities and school and how underachievement is produced
  • Draws on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, symbolic capital and symbolic violence to show how educational success is 'losing yourself'
  • W/C pupils feel as if they have to adapt to M/C speech codes and other aspects of cultural capital to access 'posh' spaces such as universities which were 'not for the likes of us'
  • M/C habitus stigmatises W/C identities and constructed meaningful ones for themselves by consuming brand identities
  • Nike identities
• Hidden Curriculum

  • Teaching pupils norms and values eg. being punctual to lessons, dressing smartly in uniform, working hard
  • Functionalists - appreciate the virtues of the hidden curriculum as secondary socialisation
  • Marxists - argue that the hidden curriculum is just an instrument or tool to prepare children for the workplace