4.5 Theorists

Question 1

Ramachandran

Answer 1

argues that in India, material deprivation is very serious:
* 50% of schools have a leaking roof or no water supply
* 35% have no blackboard or furniture
* 90% have no functioning toilets

She further argues that ‘Malnutrition, hunger and poor health remain core problems, which comprehensively affect attendance and performance in classes. The added burden of home chores and child labor influence a large number of children, especially girls, to drop out of school’.

Question 2

Smith and Noble

Answer 2

Identifies barriers of learning:
* Families who cannot afford uniforms, trips, or equipment are more likely to be isolated and bullied - their learning suffers.
* Low income makes it less likely that a child has access to internet and resources outside of school.
* Marketisation: Better resourced schools are oversubscribed and are in wealthier areas.
* Older siblings may have part-time jobs or have to look after youngers.

Question 3

Hirsch

Answer 3

identified that the wealthy are more likely to succeed because:
* More likely to have structured out-of-school activities.
* These activities meant they learned life skills and gained confidence.
* More space at home to complete school work.
* More likely to benefit from private ed.

Question 4

Hirsch

Answer 4

Stated that material deprivation was a key factor to explain underachievement. The quality of the school only accounted for 14% of class differences in achievement.

Question 5

Kynaston

Answer 5

The wealthy can afford private education.

Only 7% of pupils in Britain attend private schools - it’s not accessible (only 1 in 12 gets a means-tested bursary).

The Sutton Trust argued that private schooling gave major benefits to the pupils; Private-school students were 55x more likely to go to Oxbridge than those entitled to FSM and 22x more likely to get into a high-ranked uni.

However, Kynaston and Sutton Trust found that once the pupils make it to uni, state school pupils tend to do better. Kynaston concluded that private school pupils are over promoted.

Question 6

Mike Britland

Answer 6

Argues that mc students get an advantage in state schools as they can afford tutors.

Question 7

Douglas

Answer 7

Argued that material deprivation is too broad of an explanation for all forms of underachievement, because some materially deprived children, succeed.

Question 8

Gazeley and Dunne

Answer 8

Suggest that schools can make a difference. Levels of working class achievement can be raised, but the behaviour and expectations of teachers can also increase (compound) the levels of material deprivation and cultural disadvantage that many wc children bring to school.

Question 9

Douglas

Answer 9

Focuses on cultural deprivation as the main source of wc underachievement. He notes the impact of educational attainment of variables such as:
* parental attitudes, expressed in terms of levels of encouragement and interest in a child’s education.
* family size– larger wc familie smean fewer parental resources for each child.
* position within the family– older children tend to achieve more than younger members of large families.
* limited (deficient) care of babies in large families with fewer social and economic resources to devote to their care and upbringing.

Question 10

Barry Sugarman

Answer 10

• WC don’t defer gratification - will take an immediate income rather than go to uni and get a higher income job.
• Fatalism: Don’t believe they can improve through hard work.
• Collectivism: Less likely to seek individual success in education.

Question 11

Leon Fernstein

Answer 11

used data from the National Child Development Study and concluded that the most important factor in shaping educationnal achievement was the extent to which parents supported and encouraged their children.

Question 12

Bernstein

Answer 12

Argued that wc restricted speech codes clashed with the elaborate speech codes of mc teachers. This influences teachers assessments: mc students, able to express themselves in the langauage of education, were consequently over-represented in top streams , sets and bands.

Question 13

Goodman and Gregg

Answer 13

found that around 80% of the most affluent mothers assumed that their child would go to university, while around 40% of the least affluent mothers only hoped their child would go to university.

They also found that children from poorer families were ‘less academic’ and consequently less concerned about doing well academically compared to their mc peers.

Question 14

Blackstone and Mortimore

Answer 14

Criticise the notion that mc parents are not invested in their children’s education;
* Parental interest hasn’t been measured adequately, since teacher assessments have been used, not giving the full picture.
* Further, wc parents may not visit school events as they are uncomfortable around the mc teachers - inferiority.

Question 15

Gillian Evans

Answer 15

She carried some qualitative research by interviewing those on a London Council estate and found that most wc parents encouraged their children and placed high value on education.

She is a middle class parent and found that there was no difference in positive attitudes to education amongst mothers of different social classes.

Question 16

Westergaard and Resler

Answer 16

Argued that while wc parents ‘have a high and increasing interest in children’s education they lack the means to translate into effective influence on their children’s behalf.’

Question 17

Bernstein

Answer 17

He was one of the first to investigate how the use of language gave students certain cultural advantages and disadvantages. He argued that education was based on a particular language code that either needed to be learnt or used if students were to succeed in the terms set by modern education systems.

In this respect, Bernstein argued that there are two basic language codes; restricted and elaborated– that while not class specific are used in different situations and for different purposes.

Question 18

Bernstein

Answer 18

Argued that restricted codes are used by all social classes. However, elaborated speech codes are more likely to be used by the middle classes and this is significant because education systems are based on the use of both restricted and elaborated speech codes.

Question 19

Gaine and George

Answer 19

He oversimplifies the difference between mc and wc speech patterns.
Class differences in speech patterns have declined and other factors affect educational achievement more than language codes.

Question 20

Bernstein

Answer 20

Acknowledged that his research only showed differences between working and middle class language codes. This could be interpreted as cultural deprivation alternatively, could be explained by schools failing to develop a truly meritocratic system.

Question 21

Hanafin and Lynch

Answer 21

Suggest that the idea of parental deficiency; in the form of wc (or minority ethnic) parents not valuing education, is not correct. They argue that many wc parents, both black and white, take a keen interest in their child’s education, but feel excluded from participation in decision making within schools.

Question 22

Mirza

Answer 22

Cites the development of ‘Saturday Schools’ among Black Carribean Communities as evidence for for a commitment to education not being recognised within the state school system.

Question 23

Mac an Ghaill

Answer 23

Argued that working class underachievement is not explained by the culture of working boys but by changes in the labor market. for example, the decline in manufacturing jobs have effectively excluded wc boys from traditional forms of industrial employment and left them as a relatively marginalised group in the education system.

Question 24

Padfield

Answer 24

Explores how ‘informal reputations’, such as being labelled a swot or a ‘naughty child’, gained within the school influenced official definitions of students.

Question 25

Brimi

Answer 25

Labelling processes have 2 distinctive features.

First, Brimi suggests that they involve cultural capital. A student’s home and family background has a significant impact on their experiece of education and how successfully or otherwise they negotiate the various barriers to success, such as exams or negative labelling.

Question 26

Nash

Answer 26

Second, Nash suggested that ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in exams is not simply a matter of a person’s background or how wealthy their parents are. There are more subtle processes at work in the classroom, relating to how teachers and students manage their impressions of each other.

Question 27

Nash

Answer 27

Studied how teacher’s beliefs about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were transmitted to students through teacher attitudes and behaviour. He concluded that teacher expectations are a determining factor in a student’s educational success or failure. Teachers made conscious and hidden (subconscious) predictions about the ability of their students that affected the behaviour of those students. Where they associated wc students with low levels of attainment, they reinforced this cultural stereotype through their lowered expectations.

Question 28

Keddie

Answer 28

Found that labels followed students throughout their schooling and was a crucial influence on how they were thought of by new teachers. Their behaviour and ability was interpreted in the light of the label students that brought to the classroom rather than simply assessed as new.

Question 29

Gewirtz

Answer 29

argued that the type of school attended can create a self fulfilling prophecy of success or failure even before a student enters the classroom. Top performing schools, whether private or state maintained, create a climate of expectation that pushes students into higher levels of achievement.

Question 30

Hallam etal

Answer 30

Noted that setting has both benefits and drawbacks. Drawbacks include stigmatising lower-set students as academic failures and the long term association between lower sets and unemployment, higher sets amd good exam grades.

Keddie also notes how teachers give the more creative work and privileges to higher set students while restricting lower sets to tedious, routine task.

Question 31

Hargreaves and Willis

Answer 31

refer to pro and anti school subcultures as homogenous, coherent groups that share their own sets of values.

Woods criticises them; believes they are being too simplistic.

Pupils adapt in a variety of ways - study of subcultures is more complex than Willis and Hargreaves made it out to be.

Question 32

Woods

Answer 32

Argued that there is a range of subcultural responses or adaptations to school culture, with those who want to please (ingratiators) at one extreme- themost positive adaptation that involves students who try to earn the favour of teachers, and form a pro school subculture and rebels at the other– those who explicitly reject the culture of the school and may even develop a counter school culture.

Question 33

Woods

Answer 33

Peter Woods (1979) found the pro-and anti-school subculture division too simplistic. Instead of this categorisation, he looks at a great variety of student reactions to school and discovers how students change their attitudes and behaviour as they go along their educational path.

Question 34

Woods

Answer 34

identified 8 different adaptations of subcultures;
* ingratiation- Those who try to win teacher’s approval and are positive about school.
* compliance- students who are rather neutral to school. They see it as useful, but they are neither overly positive nor overly negative about it. Usually, first-year students fall into this
* opportunism- students who in one moment try to please the teachers and in the next try to win popularity among their classmates.
* ritualism- students who attend school without fault, but who are not overly enthusiastic about it.
* retreatism- students who do not seek academic success and are caught daydreaming sometimes instead of paying attention, but who do not aim to challenge the school authorities.
* colonisation- Trying to get away with as much as possible without getting into trouble (common in 6th formers). These students who are hostile toward school, but who still try to avoid trouble.
* intransigence- troublemaker students, who do not want to conform to the school ethos.
* rebellion- Reject school and try to pursue other goals.

The thing that all subcultures have in common are the fact that their members gain a sense of status, belonging and mutual support.

Woods got his idea of adaptations from Merton’s strain and anomie theory; The strain theory states that society puts pressure on individuals to achieve socially accepted goals (such as the American Dream), even though they lack the means to do so.
Its essence is that anomie is a social response, or adaptation, due to a disjuncture between socially approved means (e.g., education) and culturally accepted goals (earn high income). Anomie is a strain placed upon people to behave in ways that are not conducive to societal stability.

Question 35

Hughes and Church

Answer 35

Note that there are around 8000 permanent exclusions from UK schools each year. The majority of these exclusions are working class children. Around 50,000 students take an unauthorised absence each day. The majority of these absentees are wc and according to Babb etal, highly likely to leave school with no qualifications at all.

Question 36

Griffin

female subcultures

Answer 36

They formed small friendship groups rather than large anti-authority groupings.
Their deviance was defined by sexual promiscuity, not trouble-making, and their school cultures did not continue into the workplace.

he also determined these girls took one of 3 routes:
1 - Labour market to secure a job.
2 - Marriage market to find a husband.
3 - Sexual market whereby they’d have lots of relationships but keep reputation intact to not hinder marriage prospects.