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Causes of Differential Attainment
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- About
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About the lecture
In the lecture, we think about patterns of differential educational attainment along class, gender and ethnic lines, and their causes, focusing in particular on: (i) cultural factors, such as attitudes towards school, as outlined by Functionalists and the New Right, as well as Marxists like Pierre Bourdieu; (ii) material factors, centred around students’ access to the resources needed to achieve in school; (iii) factors within schools, notably teacher labelling and school subcultures, which can both motivate students or discourage them from achieving highly.
About the lecturer
Matthew Cole is Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. He is a historian of modern Britain with a particular interest in twentieth century constitutional and party politics, and local history.
Hello. My name is Matt Cole.
00:00:05I'm a social and political historian here at the University of Birmingham,
00:00:07and I've got a particular interest in educational policy and the outcomes of it.
00:00:11Uh,
00:00:17today I'm going to be talking about what we get
00:00:18out of the education system in terms of our examination results
00:00:21and how that fits into sociological theories about the explanations for that.
00:00:25First of all,
00:00:31let's start by acknowledging there are very few people who think there
00:00:33isn't something wrong with the way education works at the moment.
00:00:37Uh,
00:00:41we ought to have a system in which everyone
00:00:42has an equal chance of achieving the exam results,
00:00:44which are in many ways the currency,
00:00:47which allows us to achieve our objectives in life and make choices.
00:00:50And yet those outcomes are very clearly marked by patterns by gender,
00:00:54by ethnicity and by class.
00:01:00Even the most establishment figures think that these patterns are not natural.
00:01:04They indicate that there's an artificial cause to their outcomes.
00:01:10The House of Commons Education Select Committee
00:01:16recently identified white working class boys in coastal
00:01:19towns as being amongst the most disadvantaged
00:01:24in terms of access to higher education.
00:01:27Michael Govan he became education secretary just over 10 years ago,
00:01:29argued that school was actually widening the gap between the rich and the poor and
00:01:33make it easier for those who are richest to do best in life afterwards.
00:01:40So this is not something that merely the property of radicals as an analysis.
00:01:45What people disagree about is what causes this.
00:01:52And
00:01:57in order to examine this, we need to look at three sorts of factor.
00:01:57The first sort of factor is cultural,
00:02:02those causes of our performance in examinations,
00:02:05whether it's in primary school or university,
00:02:09which are to do with our values and our behaviours,
00:02:13mainly values and behaviours which have been learned and are engendered at home,
00:02:17but not exclusively.
00:02:24This includes home life, the structure of our family.
00:02:26The value is passed on to us about work about school by our family.
00:02:31It includes the behaviours of attending school of going to parents evenings
00:02:37of working in the way that a school directs us to.
00:02:43It includes everything from how we speak and how we dress
00:02:47to the obvious events of preparing for the exams themselves.
00:02:51Now these sorts of factors as a cause of performance rather than
00:02:58merit in itself as an inherent cause of our of our performance,
00:03:03and
00:03:10are ones most obviously seized upon by function
00:03:11lists and the new right who want to argue
00:03:16that the way to improve the performance of
00:03:18those groups which are currently under performing is to
00:03:22persuade them and to persuade schools to persuade
00:03:26them to adapt their behaviour to what is required
00:03:28and to support them in adapting their behaviour to
00:03:33what is required to do well in examinations.
00:03:35But these are not exclusively the factor pointed to by the new right.
00:03:38There are those such as Pierre Border neo Marxist,
00:03:43who argue that culture is an important factor in performance in schools,
00:03:46but that culture is owned as it were by the bourgeoisie.
00:03:51It's very difficult for other people to to gain access to it and to
00:03:56imitate it in the way that function less than the right would would suggest.
00:04:01They ought to questions like language, for example,
00:04:05raised by people like Basil Bernstein.
00:04:09Whether whether we use restricted or elaborated
00:04:11code
00:04:16in expressing our ideas can give advantage to one group rather than another.
00:04:17But it's very difficult for some people having become accustomed to one
00:04:22form of language to immediately alter it for the purposes of the education system.
00:04:28So culture is something that function lists and the new right are keen to emphasis.
00:04:34But they're not the only people who point to it.
00:04:39The second kind of factor is material its resources,
00:04:42and this is obviously the factor, which most obviously Marxist to point to.
00:04:47Some people have more educational resources and others.
00:04:53Now that doesn't just mean the obvious things, like having a laptop.
00:04:56A million Children did not have access to a laptop at the start of lockdown,
00:05:00for example.
00:05:04They were clearly at a disadvantage because of their material resources.
00:05:05But it's also the homes that those Children live in.
00:05:08It's the space they have in which to study.
00:05:13It's the access they have to extra curricular or
00:05:17additional activities that some students would find supportive,
00:05:21made available to them for for their preparation for exams.
00:05:26If you're able to go on foreign holidays, if you're able to take extra courses,
00:05:30if you're able to learn a musical instruments, those things, of course,
00:05:36are going to be an advantage to you in
00:05:39pursuing certain ambitions in education and professional afterwards,
00:05:41so resources are about the obvious things.
00:05:47But they're also about the context there about
00:05:51the environment in which study takes place.
00:05:55The government itself, towards the end of the coalition,
00:05:59acknowledged that Children study much better if they've had breakfast,
00:06:03and as a result of that,
00:06:08made plans to provide breakfast for all infants school Children in the hope that it
00:06:10would help those least well resourced outside to
00:06:16be able to take advantage of school.
00:06:20So although this is something that Marxist will emphasis,
00:06:23it's not the only thing they turn to.
00:06:27And although Marxists will turn to it as
00:06:29an obvious explanation for class differences in performance,
00:06:31they will.
00:06:35There are also other people who will acknowledge this,
00:06:36and we'll try to respond with policy initiatives.
00:06:39The last area of causation is in school activity.
00:06:42We have the interactions between the teaching profession
00:06:47and pupils.
00:06:53We have the treatment,
00:06:54the labelling as how Rebecca established it to be in some cases of some pupils,
00:06:56which is different from the treatment and the
00:07:02assumptions made about other pupils in other groups.
00:07:04We know this affects not only teaching sometimes but also the discipline of pupils.
00:07:10We also have the curriculum of schools,
00:07:16which as long ago as the Swan report in 1985 was found to be important in explaining,
00:07:19uh differences between ethnic groups and the
00:07:24attitudes of different ethnic groups towards education.
00:07:28Um, and we have the composition of the teaching profession itself,
00:07:31which in some ways it's argued,
00:07:36has increasingly explained the gender gap which has emerged in education.
00:07:39So a number of the aspect of in school activity
00:07:45not only including the institutions and the teaching staff,
00:07:49but also including subcultures amongst pupils and interactions between pupils
00:07:54and students themselves can have an impact on performance.
00:08:01All of these culture, material resources
00:08:05and relationships within school are capable
00:08:09of influencing the performance of students.
00:08:13We know that these are socially caused not only because
00:08:16it's counterintuitive that some groups do dramatically differently from others,
00:08:19but also because those patterns change over time, Uh,
00:08:24and that groups which were previously performing less well performed better
00:08:28and vice versa.
00:08:32We know that there are social causes to these problems.
00:08:33We have to look at what the differences are so that
00:08:36we can think about what the solution to those problems might be
00:08:40
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Cole, M. (2021, November 11). 4.1.1B Differential Education Achievement - Causes of Differential Attainment [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/4-1-1b-differential-education-achievement?auth=0&lesson=4166&option=3081&type=lesson
MLA style
Cole, M. "4.1.1B Differential Education Achievement – Causes of Differential Attainment." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 11 Nov 2021, https://massolit.io/options/4-1-1b-differential-education-achievement?auth=0&lesson=4166&option=3081&type=lesson