summarised notes
1. Functionalism and Education
Functionalism emphasizes the role of education in maintaining social order and stability.
1.1 Social Solidarity (Durkheim)
Durkheim believed that education socializes individuals by teaching them shared norms and values.
This promotes social solidarity, the feeling of togetherness and belonging in a society.
Examples of practices promoting social solidarity in schools:
Assemblies: Shared spaces where students are taught common values and messages.
Homework: Instills discipline and common academic goals.
Uniform: Creates a sense of unity and equality.
Attendance: Reinforces the importance of participation and commitment.
Marxist criticism: Skills taught in schools are ideologically driven, indoctrinating students into passive acceptance of rules. Assemblies provide false consciousness, masking the true nature of exploitation.
1.2 Bridge Theory and Meritocracy (Parsons)
Parsons viewed school as a bridge between the family and wider society.
Family teaches particularistic standards (individual-specific), while school teaches universalistic standards (collective-applicable).
Particularistic standards: Individual standards applied within the family unit. E.g., different expectations for siblings.
Universalistic standards: Collective standards applied in broader society. E.g., classroom rules.
Education helps students achieve status based on merit, contrasting with the ascribed status fixed at birth by the family.
Meritocracy: A system where social advancement is based on individual talent, effort, and achievement, rather than social class or wealth.
However, not all students have equal opportunities due to factors like parental involvement, disabilities, social class, gender, and catchment areas.
Marxist criticism: Meritocracy is a myth that masks inequality.
1.3 Specialized Skills (Parsons)
School teaches skills required for specific future occupations, maintaining consensus in society.
Examples:
Nursing: Math for dosages, English for communication, health and social care for employability.
Criticism: Skills are often required beyond GCSEs, necessitating further training or higher education.
1.4 Role Allocation (Davis and Moore)
Davis and Moore argued that education sorts individuals into appropriate roles in society.
Education sifts and sorts students, allocating high achievers to top positions.
School allocates students via awards, certificates, and the exam system, encouraging competition, individual achievement, and hard work.
Marxist and Feminist criticism: Not everyone has the same opportunities; powerful jobs are often dominated by middle/upper-class, white, middle-aged men. The definition of "better" jobs is subjective.
1.5 Evaluation of Functionalist Ideas
New Right support: Meritocracy makes individuals responsible for their own achievements, reducing the burden on the state.
Criticisms:
Overlooks inequalities: Meritocracy overlooks racism, sexism, middle-class bias, and disabilities.
Shared norms and values: Multicultural societies lack universally shared norms and values.
Specialized skills: Education doesn't always teach the specialized skills needed for work.
2. Marxism and Education
Marxism focuses on how education perpetuates social inequality and serves the interests of the ruling class.
2.1 Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser)
Althusser described education as an ideological state apparatus (ISA), which reproduces and justifies inequalities to keep the bourgeoisie in power.
Ideological State Apparatus: Institutions that spread dominant ideology and maintain the status quo (e.g., education, media).
Education reproduces inequalities through unequal access to resources, an ethnocentric curriculum, and the hidden curriculum.
Government policies, like banning teachers from promoting anti-capitalist views, further support education being an ISA.
Ethnocentric curriculum: Curriculum that reflects the values and beliefs of one culture, often the dominant one, while marginalizing or ignoring others.
Hidden curriculum: Implicit lessons taught in schools, such as obedience, conformity, and acceptance of hierarchy.
2.2 Specialized Skills (Marxist Perspective)
Marxists believe skills are predetermined by social class and labels, limiting upward social mobility.
Criticism: This perspective is too critical, and individuals can overcome labels and enter high-paying jobs.
Feminist criticism: Marxism overlooks gender inequality and social mobility issues for women (e.g., the glass ceiling).
Glass Ceiling: Invisible barriers preventing women and minorities from reaching top positions in organizations.
2.3 Meritocracy as a Myth
Marxists view meritocracy as a myth. Social class is more likely to determine job prospects than grades.
Working-class students are disadvantaged: Failing schools are often in deprived areas, leading to problems recruiting the best teachers.
Impact of teacher quality: Lack of specialist teachers can negatively impact grades, regardless of student effort.
2.4 Correspondence Principle (Bowles and Gintis)
Bowles and Gintis's Correspondence Principle: The way we learn in school mirrors the way we are expected to behave at work.
Achieved through the hidden curriculum.
Examples of the hidden curriculum:
Hierarchy
Competition
Motivation by external rewards
Fragmentation of the curriculum
Acceptance of authority
Students are taught to be passive and obedient, unaware of their exploitation.
2.5 Indoctrination
Pupils are brainwashed by the ruling class to be ideal workers.
Students are taught to be obedient and passive, respecting authority.
This leads to false consciousness: the belief that the system benefits them, when it actually benefits the ruling class.
Chomsky argued that school is a filtering system where the most compliant reach the top of politics, business, and media.
2.6 Learning to Labor (Paul Willis)
Paul Willis, a neo-Marxist, criticized the concept of brainwashing.
Many students rebel from education.
Willis's study:
Investigated 12 working-class boys in the Midlands.
They formed an anti-school subculture.
They engaged in behaviors like smoking, truancy, and bullying.
They sought alternative means for status due to failing in school.
Willis argued that the lads were not passive victims of indoctrination, but actively chose to reject the values of the school.
Willis also argued the system encouraged students to actively and critically think about society.
It can be argued that academic subjects encourage students to think critically about society.
2.7 Strengths and Weaknesses of the Marxist Approach
Strengths:
Exposes the myth of meritocracy.
Highlights how education is an ideological state apparatus legitimizing capitalism.
Willis's research led to examination of gender, ethnicity, and class inequalities.
Weaknesses:
Marxists disagree on how class inequality is achieved.
Bowles and Gintis take a top-down structural approach, arguing that students are passive.
Willis argues that students are active and can overcome indoctrination by rebelling.
Marxism is very class-centered and can ignore gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
3. Social Policy and Education
Social policy refers to government actions designed to address social problems. This section covers key education acts and their impact.
3.1 1944 Education Act
Features:
Introduced compulsory state education up to age 14.
Implemented a tripartite system of supposedly equal status schools: grammar, secondary modern, and technical.
Introduced the 11-plus exam, an IQ test to measure innate ability.
Grammar schools admitted approximately 20% of students.
Aims:
Post-World War II reconstruction.
Tackling "ignorance" as part of the postwar welfare state.
Abolishing inequality in state education.
The 11-plus exam was seen as a fair way to measure ability.
Evaluation:
Strength: Provided upward social mobility for working-class children who passed the 11-plus.
Criticism: Secondary modern and technical students were labeled as failures.
Feminist criticism: Fewer grammar school places for girls meant they required a higher pass rate.
3.2 1965 Comprehensive Education Act
Features:
Abolished selection at age 11.
Aimed to educate all children in the same secondary school, regardless of class, ethnicity, gender, or ability.
Aims:
Address the failure of the tripartite system in creating equal opportunity.
Criticize the highly divisive tripartite system.
Promote democratic ideals in a comprehensive system.
Strength: Recognized that children develop at different rates.
Weaknesses:
Private schools still exist for the wealthy.
Grammar schools still exist.
New Right criticism: Lack of discipline, poor results, failure to prepare children for work, and lack of parental choice.
3.3 Education Reform Act 1988
Features:
Testing, national curriculum, league tables, and Ofsted.
Open enrollment.
Aims:
Marketization: Increase competition between schools to drive up standards.
Address failing local authority-run schools.
Provide an incentive for schools to improve.
Impact:
School results improved.
Significant gender, class, and ethnicity disparity in results.
Increased stress on pupils due to testing.
Money spent on marketing, not education.
New Right Perspective:
Reduction of state control over education.
Increasing competition between and within schools.
Greater parental choice of schools (parentocracy).
Parentocracy: A system where parents have greater choice over the schools their children attend.
3.4 New Labour Policy (1997-2010)
Specialist Schools:
Schools specializing in one of ten subjects (e.g., sports, business, math).
Continued the market force agenda, giving parents more choice.
Problems: Schools often used funding to improve a broader area rather than truly specializing.
City Academies:
Introduced to improve standards in deprived working-class inner-city communities.
Provided additional funding, superheads, and expert teachers.
Removed from local authority control and ran independently with direct government funding.
Sure Start Centers:
Offered child care, play sessions, parenting advice, and employment coaching.
Designed to boost the reading age of children.
Problems: Middle-class parents often hijacked the system, leading to a decline in Sure Start centers.
Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA):
Paid to sixth-form students for attending college, meeting deadlines, and achieving good grades.
Aimed to boost sixth-form and university participation, especially for working-class students.
Criticisms: No monitoring of how the money was spent.
3.5 Conservative Education Policies
Coalition government (2010-2015) and Conservative government (2015-2024).
Trebling of Tuition Fees:
Marketization policy to increase university standards.
All universities charged top fees.
Pupil Premium:
Additional funding given to schools to help improve the attainment of disadvantaged groups.
Eligible groups: those in care, adopted, on free school meals, or income support.
Criticisms: Parents often don't know their child is entitled to this money. Funding isn't always used for the individual child.
GCSE and A-Level Reforms (since 2016):
Removal of coursework due to schools rigging it.
More exam-based assessments.
Exams made more difficult to compete on the international stage.
4. Globalization and Education
Globalization refers to the increasing interconnectedness of societies.
4.1 Defining Globalization
Giddens: Globalization is the increasing interconnectedness of societies.
Waters: It is a social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social, and cultural arrangements have declined.
Facilitated by advances in communication, information technology, social media, and international migration.
4.2 Impacts of Globalization on Education Policy
Kelly: British education policy aims to allow students to compete internationally.
The British economy is global, and skilled workers are required to keep the G7's richest nations.
Michael Gove and the coalition government used Britain's foreign position on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) league tables.
PISA: A triennial international survey that evaluates education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students.
4.3 Impact of Globalization on Education Policy
Commodification of Students:
British universities compete to attract overseas students who pay higher fees.
Universities have set up overseas based on their British brands.
Many British students study in foreign universities.
Students are being treated as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit.
Multicultural Curriculum:
Schools must teach students about other faiths and cultures.
Lessons teach about world faiths.
Geography lessons teach about indigenous cultures.
Increased emphasis on equality for minority groups and students with special needs.
British Values:
Focus on liberty, democracy, rule of law, mutual respect, and tolerance.
The concept of British values are arguably human rights.
5. International School Relationships and Processes
This topic covers the informal and less visible aspects of education.
5.1 Hidden Curriculum
Refers to the things taught in school that are not explicitly part of the formal curriculum.
Links to the Marxist concept of the correspondence principle.
Examples:
Students are taught the value of extrinsic rewards, such as exams.
In the workplace, they are willing to stay at the job for money rather than intrinsic value.
Arguably, the hidden curriculum is no longer hidden, as it is discussed in subjects like sociology.
5.2 Labeling Theory
Suggests that teachers judge pupils based on characteristics such as appearance, gender, behavior, class, and ethnicity.
Interactionalists argue that individuals develop a low self-concept based on how others react to them.
Cooley: Concept of the looking-glass self—our self-image is based on how we perceive others see us.
5.3 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
A process where labeling someone in a certain way causes them to live up to the label.
Rosenthal and Jacobson's "Pygmalion in the Classroom" study:
A field experiment in an elementary school.
20% of students were randomly selected and labeled as intellectual spurts.
Teachers were told these were the clever kids who would excel.
At the end of the year, the children's progress fulfilled the prophecy.
Criticism: IQ tests are a poor way to measure ability, and teachers were not observed in the classroom.
5.4 Setting and Streaming
Setting: Students are placed into sets based on their ability and differ across subjects.
Streaming: Pupils are split into groups based on their ability, which they stay in across all subjects.
Setting and streaming have become more common due to marketization.
Gilborn and Youdell's educational triage:
Pupils are labeled by teachers.
Those who will pass anyway are left alone.
Those who will fail are ignored.
Borderline pupils are given extra help.
Criticisms:
Lower teacher expectations for students in lower streams.
Labeling and increased stigma.
Reduced access to opportunities.
Difficulty removing labels.
5.5 The Ideal Pupil
Refers to the student profile teachers implicitly hold in their minds, representing their expectations of the model student.
Gilborn and Youdell: Working-class pupils are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while middle-class pupils are seen as cooperative.
This leads to working-class students typically being in lower sets.
Lacks representativeness because it was based purely on two schools in London.
5.6 Subcultures
A pupil subculture is a group of pupils that share similar norms, values, and patterns of behavior.
Lacey argues that these develop through differentiation and polarization.
Pro-school subcultures gain status and academic success.
Anti-school subcultures must find ultimate means to gain status.
6. Social Class and Education
This section examines how social class affects educational achievement.
6.1 Material Deprivation
The inability to afford basic resources, which can impact a pupil's educational achievement.
Pupils cannot afford sufficient food, heating, clothing, and educational resources.
Key Statistics:
33% of children in receipt of free school meals achieved five or more A*-C grades compared to 61% of students who are not in free school meals
Middle class children have a reading age of about 2 and ½ years ahead of working class students by the age of 15
90% of Ofsted-rated fail schools are in deprived areas.
Housing: The quality of housing a people lives in can affect achievement, the quality of housing a people lives in can affect achievement
6.2 Poverty and Poor Diets (Howard)
Children from poor homes have lower intakes of vitamins and minerals.
This may result in more absences from school.
When they are in lessons, they might have a lower level of concentration.
6.3 The Cost of Education (Bull)
A lack of financial support means children from poor families have to go without equipment.
They miss out on experiences, such as school trips.
This is known as the hidden cost of free education.
6.4 Oxford Dropout Rates
16.6% of students drop out of the London Metropolitan University, compared to a low of 1.5% at Oxford.
Over 50% of Oxford students come from private education.
6.5 Fear of Debt (Callender and Jackson)
Working-class students are more debt-adverse.
They saw costs as more cons than benefits going to university.
Government-tried to compensate for students from low income backgrounds with things like education maintenance loans as we discussed and you have your burseries pupil premium and for uni student you have your student loans.
6.6 Cultural Deprivation
The concept that working-class families fail to primary socialize their children adequately.
Bernstein argues that speech patterns of those at the bottom of the class system are inferior.
Restricted code: Used by the working class, limited vocabulary and simple grammar.
Elaborate code: Used by the middle class, complex vocabulary and grammar.
However, Bernstein devalues working-class speech as inadequate.
6.7 Cultural Attitudes (Sugarman)
Fatalism
Collectivism
Immediate Gratification
Present Time Orientation
6.8 Cultural Capital
Bourdieu: Capital is something useful to help you achieve your goals in a particular group or society.
Cultural capital
Educational capital
Economic capital
Cultural capital is the knowledge of values, attitudes, tastes, abilities, and language of the dominant culture of society.
7. Gender and Inequality in Education
This section examines how gender affects educational achievement.
7.1 Feminization of the School Environment (Epstein)
Poor boys discourse that blames the school environment for failure of boys.
90% of primary school teachers are female, meaning that there is a lack of positive role models for boys.
Abraham argues that deviant boys receive more attention from some teachers.
7.2 Subject Choice
Men are more likely to go into careers such as engineering, computing, and maths.
Females are more likely to go into veterary science psychology humanities
Skelton and Francis: there are considerable differences between boys and girls in subject choice at A level boys follow technical and science-based courses while girls follow caring subjects such as arts humanities and social sciences.
8. Ethnicity and Inequality in Education
This section examines how ethnicity affects educational achievement.
8.1 Cultural Deprivation
Ethnic minorities can be held back with a lack of reasoning skills.
Black students are more confident to place success or failure in exams down to the teachers or the exam questions neglecting their agency or free will to affect the outcomes of exams family set up over 50% of Afro-Caribbean families are loan parent with 90% of them being metro focal which basically means that they're headed by a woman this can lead to financial struggles which links to the hidden cost of free education a lack of a father figure means a lack of role models in terms of achievement.
8.2 Material Deprivation
BAME members of society are more likely to face material deprivation for example 50% of BAME children live in low-income households versus 25% of white children BAME unemployment doubled that of the white community bangladesh and Pakistani workers are twice as likely to be on the minimum wage than a white counterpart BAME communities are more likely to work shift patterns so this could be night shifts and this means that there's less time to discuss issues on a dinner table so say if a child is struggling at school they don't have the opportunity to tell their parents because they simply aren't seeing them and they also receive less help with homework or cultural capital activities such as museum visits cuz the parent is obviously going to be catching up sleep and doing all the things they need to do at home whilst they could be doing them and also parents may miss parents evenings or opening evenings things like that it can also impact sleep patterns causing a lack of cont concentration at schools again live more likely to live in deprived areas this links to the Ofsted more likely to be fed in schools leading to anti-school culture anti-school subcultures and overseas qualifications are less valued or recognized by employees affecting the children of migrants asylum seekers are usually not allowed to work so this could drive fatalism into children if parents have worked hard at schools overseas but yet their qualifications are not recognized by the UK industries because they might be like well my parents put all in that hard work and there's nothing to show for it so I might as well not work hard.