Payne stated that students should learn the “hidden rules” of the middle class from their educators so that they have another set of rules to use if they choose to do so. Impoverished students, compared to students of middle or upper class, often have a lack of proper funding, thus, a lack of appropriate resources to use in their education. Due to this, they are often unprepared for school, not having the money to purchase books and other educational tools. Both authors realize this, but argue that the responsibility lies on different shoulders. Payne states that impoverished students face inequality at school, insinuating that the school should be responsible for helping to provide for these students so that they can have a better education.
A funding formula is a formula that gives a school the same amount of funds for each pupil. This can affect a working class child’s education because if other schools have a higher fund because they are more popular due to better exam results then working class children are unlikely to be able to get a placement at that school so they will be silt-shifted to a less popular school which has lower exam results because of its lack of funding due to its lack of pupils. However, this idea can be criticised because if an unpopular school gets too bad they will be put into special measures by ofsted, this then gives them more funding to try and help improve the school, if this is achieved then their popularity will improve. Silt-shifting is when a school off-loads pupils with learning difficulties who are expensive to teach and so get poor results. This benefits middle class pupils as all the troublesome students are removed from their school it means the teachers have more time for them to improve their grades thus making the school more popular because of their rank in the league tables then letting them cream-skim thus improving the school further.
Agree with the question Paragraph 2 On one hand sociologists would agree that a pupil’s home situation is more important than the type of school they attend. Parents who get involved in the students education by showing an interest and helping with homework are more likely to encourage a child to do well at school. Parental influence can affect someone’s educational achievement as if a student’s parent hated school as a child and didn’t get the grades they needed, it can cause the student to act the same. On the other hand it could cause them to progress better in school as they will want to achieve more than their parents Marxists believe students who come from a working class background tend to do worse than students who come from a high class background; this could be because of material deprivation. This is a big influence on student’s educational achievement as they do not have enough money to buy the necessary equipment for school such as revision guides.
Some schools, like the grammar schools, require a good result on the 11+. This leads to cream skimming, but also off-loading of ‘bad’ students, that for example will refuse children with learning difficulties good education, because they are “those students who won’t do well anyways”. The top students often seem to be from the middle class. They don’t suffer from material or cultural deprivation and often use the elaborated code, which makes education easier for them. This makes the schools trying to appeal to the middle class parents, to make the middle class parents choose their school and help them get their own results better.
One of the arguments of co-education is the idea that it provides too many distractions for students. Several scholars have argued that these distractions have led to less attention on school work and class participation, due to girls and boys trying to impress each other. Furthermore, it has also been argued that students who are intimidated by the opposite sex may also be affected by low performance and low grades. Many educators believe that single-sex education does not enforce any type of gender-based stereotypes or adolescent subculture. Due to this, single-sex schools have been established to combat these issues.
Cultural deprivation means when children are deprived from things what they need. This can include the lack of values and support they get from their parents, which can influence on socialisation skills. It can be argued that due to lack of family structure, social cultural and soft skills pupils are less likely to underachieve. Cultural deprivation is a theory that many working-class children are inadequately socialised and therefore lack the ‘right’ culture appropriate for a successful education. Many people argue that development is vital in the younger years in the child’s life, and the ability to solve problems and apply ideas help in the long-term.
Children coming from little advantage miss out on an amount of things. One being education, coming from a low income schooling system that means that the education is not always up to par. Children that attend these schools will not be academically prepared for college if they do not have the skills they need. Coming from a low income schooling system where there are not enough books to go around and things of that matter are sometimes not skillfully prepared for furthering their education. Children are hindered by these kinds of schools, teachers and peers lay a big role in the children’s lives.
Working class pupils tend to be labelled negatively and teachers tend to see them as lacking ability and therefore have low expectations of them hence they will be in the lower stream. Once they are streamed, it is hard to move up to a higher stream because of the low expectations of them. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which pupils live up to their teacher’s low expectations of them by under-achieving. By contrast, middle class pupils tend to benefit from streaming as they are likely to be in the higher streams and having high expectations from teachers. In Stephan Ball’s a study of banding, he showed that banding had similar effects to streaming.
Marxists would also say that the National Curriculum does not ensure a standard education throughout the education system because the education system places more value on middle class knowledge than on working class knowledge and so they are disadvantaged and receive a different education to other classes. Bernstein would also argue that due to the elaborated code used by the middle class, the education received by middle class children is different and more fluid because they are more likely to understand everything the teacher says. Nationwide exams (SATs, GCSEs, and A Levels) and literary tests also support the
Many schools believe that having a structured learning environment contributes to how pupils behave. Generally, students who attend school with dress codes tend to have better attendance rates, high test scores, and excellent mannerisms. Students who do not have dress codes tend to have low attendance rates, lower scores, and no manners. Wearing uniforms in school helps to prevent pupils from acting up. Some teachers state that children who have good behavior skills are the key to success.