Achievement in British Education

Achievement in BritishEducation is a branch of British sociologywhich examines and discusses the factors influencing the achievement of pupils who are taught by the British education system.

As in most countries, there are strong class-based inequalities in educational outcomes in Britain. Genderand ethnicityalso affect outcomes strongly.

The effect of intelligence

Measured IQis strongly positively correlated with educational outcomes. Nevertheless, class factors may intervene in that measures of intelligencesuch as IQ may not be immune to contamination from cultural differences and acquired characteristics. For instance, there are class differences in the profile of IQ over time, with inter-class differences increasing through the school career.

The effect of class

Being born into a higher class family is the greatest determinant of educational achievement in Britain, understood as success in national GCSEand A levelexaminations, with the average child of a higher class family doing far better than an average working class child.

There are many factors that may be involved in this effect:

Financial factors

• Wealthy families can send their children to private schools, where the achievement rates are far higher than even the most prestigious state schools.
• Working-class children are far more likely to go to schools with poor funding and other problems (due to geographical proximity), which middle-class parents have the resources and awareness to avoid. Middle-class parents are more likely to move houses and go to other extremes to place their children in a high-performing school. In fact, research conducted by Halsey, Heath and Ridge in 1980 found that family climate was the most important factor in determining what type of secondary school a child attended.
• Possible cultural deprivation of working-class children, both before and during their school years, due to financial constraints e.g. lack of foreign travel, restricted exposure to the arts
• Material factors evident in working-class families may also adversely affect educational achievement:
  • Poorer housing - This usually means smaller housing, which means that children may not get a quiet place in which to study. Damp housing also increases the likelihood of illness.
  • Diet - Malnutrition reduced a child's ability to concentrate.
  • Sickness - A working-class child is statistically more likely to get sick, and then miss lessons at school.
  • Low income - This means that certain extra school activities which must be paid for, such as excursions, may not be available to working class children.
  • Part-time work - Because of the (usually) greater financial pressures on working-class families, children may take part-time work, either to give themselves an income ot to supplement their parents' income. The added pressure of part-time work on a child can affect their achievement in school.

Cultural factors

• Working-class families may lack cultural capital, which means that their culture could be incompatible with that of schools which have adopted the middle or upper class culture.
• Parents in some working-class families may have more negative attitudes toward education than their middle-class counterparts, meaning that they would not try as hard to get the most out of the system (e.g. checking on their child's achievement, making sure they get into good schools etc.).
• Working-class parents are likely to be less educated than their middle-class counterparts, and therefore may not be as well-placed to help their children with pre-school learning and school homework as middle or upper class parents.
• Teacher expectations of working-class children may be lower.
• One practice in British education is to group children according to their ability, either in all subjects (called streaming) or in particular subjects (called banding or setting). It has been claimed that working-class children end up in the lower streams/bands/sets more often than their middle class peers. Being put in lower bands may make children achieve less, as teachers believe they are teaching a less able group, and the children may be demotivated by their placement.
• A "present-time orientation" that may be present in working-class culture - living from day to day with no long-term goals - may make education, which involves present sacrifice (such as staying out of the workforce to study) in the pursuit of long-term goals seem less important. (Hyman and Sugarman)

None of these factors is strictly deterministicand many working class children achieve high results in British education. Nevertheless, it may be harder for potential high-achievers from a working-class background to reach the same level of educational achievement as children of similar natural ability from higher classes.

The effect of gender

After ethnicity, gender is the next greatest determinant of achievement.

Up until recently, girls did not do as well as boys. However, in the 1980s this trend reversed, with girls doing better than boys in education, on average. However, the statistics have varied significantly from year to year, between subjects and between age groups.

There are many factors that may be involved in this effect:

• Girls may be more motivated and work harder than boys.
• The equal opportunitiesmovement has (by necessity) concentrated more on improving opportunities for girls than for boys.
• There may be an anti-learning sub-culture among some boys.
  • A consequence of this may be that teachers often do not expect as much of boys as they do of girls both academically and behaviourally.
  • Relatedly, boys' behaviour and concentration in the classroom may be poorer than that of girls.
• Boys tend to mature later than girls

While girls currently achieve better results than boys across the spectrum, it is still argued that girls are denied equality, perhaps by lingering stereotypesabout male-dominated subjects such as the sciences.

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