Tline Some of the Ways in Which Some Marketisation and Selection Policies May Produce Social Class Differences in Educational Achievement. (12 Marks)

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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. Consequently, this means the less successful schools have the less able, working class students putting them in a spiral of decline. Cream-skimming is when a higher achieving school selects higher ability pupils, who gain the best results and cost less to teach. This then means they have more money to pay for better equipment and more facilities for the students to achieve higher thus keeping up the standards of the school allowing the school to cream-skim the very best pupils making the school more popular because it has a better rank in the exam league tables. Exam league tables rank each school according to its exam performance but it makes no allowance for the level of ability of its pupils. This means that the schools
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