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.
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.
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.
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. Also, if a student comes from a poor background, the house is more likely to be overcrowded. This means that they do not have a quiet place to study and do their homework which puts them at a disadvantage. Thay may not be able to afford educational trips etc. this is known as cultural deprivation.
| Poverty | Economic Factor | Poverty is an Economic Factor because without the money to pay for good education or extra support the child may not do very well academically it has been proven that children who live in poverty do not perform as well as more affluent children. | Housing and Community | Economic Factor | Housing is an Economic Factor and can have an impact on the safety of the children brought up in the area. If they live in a poor area and live in bad conditions this will have a detrimental effect on the child. | Educational Environment | Economic Factor | The Educational environment is an Economic Factor. Affluent children may go to private school and perform really well.
1) Suggest three factors within schools that may lead to the educational under-achievement of pupils from some minority ethnic groups. (6marks) 2) Suggest three material factors that might cause working-class educational underachievement. (6 marks) One material factor that may cause working class underachievement is lack of workspace at home. Poverty leads to material deprivation whereby this involves cramped housing, an environment where the child has no space for homework and where illnesses spread quickly. This means that the children are unable to do homework, thus fall behind on work in class, which in turn leads to low educational attainment.
Children are hindered by these kinds of schools, teachers and peers lay a big role in the children’s lives. Some teachers are there for the income it will bring into their house hold and not the well-being of the child and students are pressued by their peers into thinking that education is lame and for losers. In most cases this is what children of low income go through but not all. Many may not realize that the surroundings of children may sometimes affect their future. Being raised in a low income area surrounded by people living the same lifestyle as you as if struggling is the norm of society.
Students who drop out often have many factors that influence their decision. Research shows that key factors for students who are at highest risk of dropping out are: poor grades in core classes, low or poor attendance, failure to be promoted to the next grade, disengagement in the classroom, and behavioral problems (Kennelly, 2007). Student boredom, lack of challenging material, and disengagement due to lack of academic rigor have also been identified as indicators of academic failure. In recent years; the legislation of No Child Left Behind Act has contributed to a situation in which educators are caught between a rock and a hard place. Knowing that students are a greater risk of dropping out when they perform poorly in school, yet increased rigor in the classroom as a strategy to decrease the dropout rate, as identified in the No Child Left Behind Act has created a “Catch-22” situation for educators (Bridgeland J. D., 2009).
Students who live and study in an unusual way cannot outperform at school, and this is one reason in which students decide to leave school. So, it will be a nice windfall if government could solve these issues. As a matter of fact, poor students are not able to be a kind of overachiever’s students that the government seeks. The fact that they leave school can be caused by different reasons, but poverty is still the major cause of attritions. Getting bad grades can be another reason to leave school; in other words, failing a course and getting bad grades tend to yield attrition, and it may result from different issues that students face.
Also, because the teachers have middle class values as well, the cultural deprivation theorists believe that they will have a bias against the working class kids and therefore they will not be able to teach them properly since their values and cultures conflict. Compensatory education is a policy that was designed to deal with the problem of cultural deprivation, by providing extra resources to schools and communities in deprived areas. Compensatory education programmes were introduced to intervene early in the socialisation process to compensate children for deprivation they experience at home. The most comprehensive programme was Head Start. It involved health care, social services, and education.