The Functionalist Perspective on Education

Last Updated on October 23, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Functionalists focus on the positive functions performed by the education system. There are four positive functions that education performs:

1. Creating social solidarity
2. Teaching skills necessary for work
3. Teaching us core values
4. Role allocation and meritocracy

The functionalist perspective on education is usually the first discrete topic taught within the sociology of education module, which is examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1). The two key functionalists are Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, with Davis and Moore adding the theory of role allocation.

Education Creates Social Solidarity

We have social solidarity when we feel as if we are part of something bigger. Émile Durkheim, writing in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, argued that school makes us feel like we are part of something bigger. This is done through the learning of subjects such as history and English, which give us a shared sense of identity. In American schools, children also pledge allegiance to the flag.

Durkheim saw the school as a society in miniature, preparing us for life in wider society. For example, both in school and at work we have to cooperate with people who are neither friends nor family, which gets us ready for dealing with people at work in later life.

Durkheim’s own account of how school builds solidarity, with what he said in his own words, is on the Durkheim’s perspective on education post.

Learning specialist skills for work

Durkheim noted that an advanced industrial economy required a massive and complex division of labour. At school, individuals learn the diverse skills necessary for this to take place. For example, we may all start off learning the same subjects, but later on we specialise when we do GCSEs.

The most obvious examples of this function of education are in the post-16 sector, especially vocational education, where students learn the specific skills required for particular professions — everything from engineering and construction to media and IT technicians and beauty therapy. There is more on this in my post on sociological perspectives on vocational education.

Durkheim believed that one of the most impressive things about modern education systems was that they simultaneously taught us core values and a sense of belonging to the whole (see below) while at the same time teaching us the DIFFERENT and DIVERSE skills that a modern economic system requires to function.

Education teaches pupils core values

Talcott Parsons (1959) argued that the school class is the ‘focal socializing agency’ in modern society. School plays the central role in the process of secondary socialisation, taking over from primary socialisation in the family. He argued this was necessary because the family and the wider society work on different principles, and children need to adapt if they are to cope in the wider world.

In the family, children are judged according to what he calls particularistic standards by their parents — that is, they are judged by rules that only apply to that particular child. Individual children are given tasks based on their different abilities and judged according to their unique characteristics. Parents often adapt rules to suit the unique abilities of the child.

In contrast, in school and in wider society, children and adults are judged according to the same universalistic standards (they are judged by the same exams and the same laws). These rules and laws are applied equally to all people irrespective of the unique character of the individual. School gets us ready for this, acting as a bridge between the family and wider society.

The above ties in quite nicely with the modernisation theory view of development — achieved status is seen as a superior system to the ascribed status found in traditional societies.

Role Allocation and meritocracy

Education allocates people to the most appropriate job for their talents using examinations and qualifications. This ensures that the most talented are allocated to the occupations that are most important for society. This is seen to be fair because there is equality of opportunity — everyone has a chance of success and it is the most able who succeed through their own efforts. This is known as meritocracy.

Functionalists believe that meritocracy is extremely important for peace in society, because people will only accept status and wage differences if those in lower status jobs believe they themselves had (or have) a fair chance to climb the ladder and get a higher status and better paid job themselves.

Davis and Moore: role allocation and unequal rewards

The clearest statement of role allocation comes from Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945), in an article about social stratification rather than education. Their starting point is that some jobs are more functionally important to society than others, and that only a limited number of people have the talent to do them well. Training for these jobs takes years and means giving things up, so society has to offer higher rewards — pay and status — to motivate the most able people to put themselves through it.

For Davis and Moore, then, unequal rewards are functional: they make sure the most important positions are filled by the most capable people. Education is the mechanism that does the sorting. Exams and qualifications sift pupils by ability and allocate them to the positions that suit their talents. The whole argument only works if the system is meritocratic, which is exactly where its critics attack it.

The classic criticism came from Melvin Tumin (1953). He argued that functional importance is very hard to measure, and that inequality actually stops a society discovering its talent, because, as he put it, “access to education depends upon the wealth of one’s parents.” Davis replied that he and Moore were explaining inequality, not justifying it. For the modern version of this debate, see my post on whether schools are meritocratic.

Positive evaluations of the Functionalist perspective on education

School performs positive functions for most pupils most of the time. Even though students might not want to go to school sometimes, and might not enjoy it some of the time, the majority come out after more than a decade of formal schooling as reasonable human beings.

There does seem to be a link between education and economic development, suggesting a good education system benefits the wider society and economy. Worldwide, most young people now complete upper secondary school, while in sub-Saharan Africa only around a quarter do (see the contemporary evidence section below).

Most pupils attend school most of the time, which suggests little active resistance to schooling. HOWEVER, absence has risen sharply since the pandemic, and nearly one in five pupils is now persistently absent (see below), so this point is weaker than it used to be.

Schools do at least try to foster ‘solidarity’ — through PSHE lessons and teaching British Values, for example.

Education is more ‘work focused’ today, with increasing amounts of vocational courses. If you look at post-16 education especially, there is a wide range of courses offered, and it is difficult to see how technologically advanced post-industrial economies could function without thriving post-16 and university sectors.

Schooling is more meritocratic than in the 19th century.

Criticisms of the Functionalist View of Education

It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using other perspectives, but in the case of Functionalism there are many more stand-alone criticisms that we can make!

Marxists argue the education system is not meritocratic. Wealthier students from higher socio-economic backgrounds still get better results than poorer students: in 2025/26, 27.5% of disadvantaged pupils in England got grade 5 or above in English and maths, against 54.3% of other pupils (DfE). This is true within the state school system, but there is also a large divide between the small minority who attend fee-paying independent schools (6.3% of pupils in England in 2025/26) and everyone else. The Marxist perspective post has the latest evidence on this, and this post asks whether schools are meritocratic.

HOWEVER, the disadvantage gap widened after the school closures of 2020 and 2021. The DfE’s disadvantage gap index was 3.70 in 2019, rose to 3.92 in 2025, and stood at 3.82 in 2026. This actually suggests that when schools are open as usual, they at least hold that achievement gap down to an extent!

Marxists would also argue that the Functionalist view of education is ideological. Because it focuses on the positive functions of education, it reflects the views of the powerful: the education system tends to work for them, and the theory suggests there is nothing to criticise.

The Functionalist perspective on education was developed in the late 19th century (Durkheim) and the 1950s (Parsons) — during modernity. With the shift to postmodernity society has changed, and the British school system seems to have adapted with it.

For example, schools today focus more on developing the individual rather than teaching duties and responsibilities that individuals should adopt towards society — it’s more about the individual and less about solidarity (following the shift from modern to postmodern society).

Functionalism ignores the negative sides of school — for example bullying — and there is a minority for whom it doesn’t work, such as those permanently excluded. If we were to do the kind of in-depth research interactionists prefer, we might find that a significant minority of children are harmed during school in more subtle ways, through teacher labelling and the anti-school subcultures that can follow from it.

It is difficult to argue that schools performed the four functions above during the disruption of the pandemic, especially being judged by universalistic standards (there were no standardised exams in 2020 or 2021) or meritocracy. When teachers assessed grades in 2021, the share of A-level entries graded A or A* rose more in independent schools (from 60.8% to 70.1%) than in comprehensives (from 33.1% to 39.3%), according to Ofqual’s analysis.

Video summary of the Functionalist Theory of Education

Contemporary evidence to evaluate Functionalism (2026 update)

Students need to be able to evaluate sociological perspectives using contemporary evidence, and a lot has happened in the last few years. Most of the evidence suggests that the Functionalist view of education is limited in helping us to understand the role of education in society, though not all of it points that way.

Below I consider recent evidence on the curriculum, values, the labour market, attendance and exclusions, and what each suggests about the key ideas of Functionalism as applied to education.

The end of the EBacc

The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) was a school performance measure based on a narrow set of GCSE subjects: English, maths, the sciences, history or geography, and a language. The government’s ambition was for 90% of pupils to be studying this combination by 2025.

On the surface, steering more students into the same subjects could have led to more of a shared collective conscience, and thus more solidarity and value consensus. More students might have finished their GCSEs having studied more similarly.

HOWEVER, critics argued the measure squeezed out creative subjects, and in November 2025 the government announced that the EBacc would be removed, following the Curriculum and Assessment Review. It said the measure had failed to encourage take-up of subjects including languages, and wanted pupils to study a wider range of GCSEs. The new curriculum is due to be taught from September 2028.

For a functionalist, this is an interesting case. A policy designed to give everyone the same core of knowledge has been dropped in favour of more choice and breadth. That fits the postmodern criticism above — the system is moving towards the individual and away from a single shared curriculum.

British Values and the Prevent duty

Schools have been required to promote fundamental British Values since the government published guidance in 2014, and the Prevent duty, which requires schools to help stop pupils being drawn into terrorism, has applied since 2015.

The government defines British Values as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. The theory behind getting students to think about what ‘being British’ means is that it might help to create a tolerant and respectful national identity based on these values — which is a very Durkheimian idea.

Ofsted’s vision is that British Values are embedded into the curriculum and taught through subjects such as history and English, through which students learn about the historical struggles for democracy and the emergence of civil society. Ideally, students would also be taught to think about whether these values are universal beyond Britain.

HOWEVER, according to an article in The Conversation, it is highly unlikely that the requirement on schools to teach British Values is going to promote value consensus in any meaningful way.

Some schools, for example, confuse British Values with British stereotypes and get students to do projects such as collages of what Britishness involves, with pictures of the King and fish and chips, which hardly promote critical thinking.

A second problem is that these values are so general that each of them can be interpreted in many different ways, and they are also full of contradictions. For example, there are different forms of democracy other than our first-past-the-post system, and ‘individual liberty’ is context dependent and clearly has its limits — but where? Hence any discussion of what these values should mean in practice could reveal, or even open up, divisions between pupils.

When the Prevent duty was introduced, a common objection was that it would fall mainly on Muslim pupils and add to their marginalisation in school. The pattern of referrals has changed a great deal since then. My post on education and social control has the latest Prevent figures and what they suggest about schools as agents of social control.

Brexit and value consensus

The EU referendum in June 2016 split the UK almost down the middle: 51.9% voted to leave and 48.1% to remain.

UK-wide referendums are rare — this was only the third, after the 1975 vote on staying in the European Community and the 2011 vote on the Alternative Vote system. The fact that this one divided the country almost in half suggests there is no meaningful value consensus on how Britain should relate to the wider world.

If there is no value consensus on this in adult society, that is a problem for the claim that schools produce shared values. HOWEVER, a functionalist could reply that schools aim to pass on shared values about how we disagree — democracy and the rule of law — rather than agreement on particular political questions.

Graduates and the labour market

The DfE’s Graduate Labour Market Statistics suggest some broad support for education performing the role allocation function, where a tiered education system sifts and sorts people into more and more skilled roles. In 2024, among people of working age (16–64):

• 87.6% of graduates were employed, compared with 68.0% of non-graduates
• 67.9% of graduates were in high-skilled jobs, compared with 23.7% of non-graduates — almost three times as likely
• graduates’ median salary was £42,000, against £30,500 for non-graduates

HOWEVER, about a third of graduates were not in high-skilled jobs, so the sorting is far from perfect, and it’s also clear that going to university is NOT the only way to secure a higher-skilled job. The salary figures don’t control for prior attainment or family background either, so they show that qualifications and pay go together, not that the sorting is meritocratic.

A methods note: the DfE stopped publishing this series after the 2024 figures and now uses its Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data instead.

Apprenticeships

According to the DfE’s apprenticeship statistics for 2024/25, 761,480 people were doing an apprenticeship in England, and there were 353,500 new starts. The biggest subject areas were business, administration and law, followed by health, public services and care.

Apprenticeships work alongside colleges and universities as another route into skilled work, which fits the role allocation idea. HOWEVER, more than half of all starts (51.3%) were by people aged 25 and over, and only 21.2% by under-19s. So most apprenticeships now train adults who are already in work, rather than sorting school leavers into their first jobs, which complicates the picture of education allocating young people to their roles.

Absence: which statistic you use matters

You get a very different picture of absence depending on which set of statistics you look at!

The DfE’s absence statistics for 2024/25 give an overall absence rate of 6.78% — the share of all possible school sessions missed. On that measure most pupils attend most of the time, which looks like support for Functionalism.

HOWEVER, the persistent absence rate — pupils missing 10% or more of their sessions — was 18.14%, or about 1.34 million pupil enrolments. Before the pandemic, in 2018/19, the two figures were 4.73% and 10.86%. Pupils eligible for free school meals were more than two and a half times as likely to be persistently absent as other pupils.

So whether you see these statistics as supporting or criticising Functionalism is open to interpretation — and the fact that absence falls hardest on poorer pupils is a point Marxists would make.

Exclusions

Exclusion statistics suggest that the education system doesn’t act as an effective agent of secondary socialisation for every child. Suspensions in England are still running far above their pre-pandemic level, and they fall much more heavily on pupils eligible for free school meals and pupils with special educational needs — which suggests school works better for some types of pupil than others, something Functionalists do not consider. The latest figures are in my post on education and social control.

[FOLD-IN] The cross-national section below comes from https://revisesociology.com/2015/12/28/evaluating-the-functionalist-perspective-on-education-2/ (its “Cross National Comparisons” section). The old image and the “Google Public Data” link are replaced with UNESCO figures. That post will 301 here.

Cross-national comparisons

Cross-national comparisons suggest support for the Functionalist view that formal education and qualifications are functionally advantageous for society as a whole, as they go together with a society’s level of economic development.

According to UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, 59% of young people worldwide completed upper secondary education in 2021, but in sub-Saharan Africa the figure was only 27% — and sub-Saharan Africa is also one of the poorest regions of the world.

Of course, as a counter-criticism, it’s worth keeping in mind that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation: richer countries can afford more education, so the link may run both ways.

Private schooling and top jobs

Research following graduates into work has found that those who went to private schools are still more likely to land the highest-status jobs, even compared with state-educated graduates from the same type of university with the same degree class. That is hard to square with the idea that role allocation is based on merit alone. The research is covered in more detail on the Marxist perspective on education post.

Educating Yorkshire: a positive case study

Educating Yorkshire was a Channel 4 documentary series from 2013, filmed in a secondary school in Dewsbury. In terms of methods, it used filmed non-participant observation and interviews, mainly with students.

Musharaf, a Year 11 pupil with a severe stammer, was one of the main characters in the first series, and his story is one of the best pieces of supporting evidence for the functionalist view of education. With the help of his English teacher he found a way to speak in front of others, and the school community’s response to him at the end of the series is about as clear an example of solidarity as you’ll find on television.

One case study can’t tell us how typical this is, of course — but it is a useful reminder that school can work exactly the way functionalists say it does.

[FOLD-IN] The Ken Robinson section below comes from https://revisesociology.com/2015/12/28/evaluating-the-functionalist-perspective-on-education-2/ (its “Ken Robinson (a Post Modern View)” section), with his four points kept. That post will 301 here.

Ken Robinson: does school kill creativity?

Ken Robinson’s RSA talk on changing education paradigms offers several criticisms of the contemporary education system. You could loosely call this a postmodern or late modern criticism of modernist education, and it also challenges the functionalist claim that school performs positive functions. In short, Robinson argues that modern education lets many children down in four ways:

1. It stifles creativity by focusing too much on academic education and standardised testing: children are taught that there is one answer and it’s at the back, rather than being taught to think divergently.
2. It tests individual ability rather than the ability to work collaboratively in groups, which is what people do in the real world.
3. Lessons are dull and out of touch with children who are living in the most information-rich age in history.
4. It treats restless children as a medical problem — Robinson is critical of how many children are diagnosed with ADHD and given medication, when he thinks school should be stimulating them in different ways.

Using the Functionalist perspective in the exam

Functionalism comes up on Paper 1 (7192/1) both in its own right and as a perspective to compare with others. Three AQA questions show the range:

• November 2020, Q02: Outline three functions that the education system performs for society. [6 marks] — worked answer
• June 2023, Q01: Outline two similarities between the functionalist and Marxist views of education. [4 marks] — functionalism vs Marxism
• June 2017, Q04: Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate sociological explanations of the role of education in transmitting ideas and values. [30 marks] — a 28/30 student answer with examiner commentary

For a full 30-mark essay on Functionalism, written using the PEAC system (Point – Explain – Analyse – Criticise), see my essay on evaluating the functionalist view of the role of education in society. The short version of that essay is below.

Short version of the essay

• Point – simply state something Functionalists say about education
• Explain – explain what is meant by the ‘function’ of education mentioned previously
• Expand – this could mean giving examples, evidence, or explaining in more depth
• Criticise – criticise with evidence against or limitations

(P1) Secondary socialisation and value consensus

• The teaching of norms and values after the family, leading to agreement around these norms and values
• Formal curriculum: shared history, shared language, shared religion
• Team sports: working together towards a shared aim
• Ethnocentric curriculum
• Subcultures
• More school types means more diversity — surely that means less value consensus?

(P2) Teaching skills for work — the economic function

• Diverse subjects
• Punctuality
• Vocational courses and apprenticeships have expanded
• Are apprenticeships useful, and who are they for?
• Graduates in jobs that don’t need a degree

(P3) A bridge between home and society

• School prepares us for the world outside the family: it acts like a society in miniature
• Particularistic and universalistic standards
• Doesn’t apply to everyone, e.g. home education

(P4) Role allocation

• Different qualifications sift people into appropriate jobs
• Does this through exams: sifting and sorting (Davis and Moore)
• Meritocracy
• Marxism: not meritocratic — the myth of meritocracy
• Private schools
• Feminism: gender stereotyping and subject choice

Evaluate using other perspectives

• Marxism – agrees with Functionalists that school socialises us into shared values, but argues these values benefit the ruling class: we are taught that inequality is natural and inevitable, we believe in the myth of meritocracy, and so we end up passively accepting society as it is.
• Feminism – Functionalism ignores the gender divide in school.
• Interactionism – argues Functionalism is too deterministic. It sees individuals as passive, but there is a lot of evidence that pupils are active and aren’t just moulded by the school system.

Conclusion – you must point out that this perspective is too optimistic and overgeneralises!

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle – which contains the following:

1. 34 pages of revision notes
2. mind maps in pdf and png format – 9 in total, covering various topics within the sociology of education
3. short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
4. how to write sociology essays, including 7 specific templates and model answers on the sociology of education

Signposting/ Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.

For more depth on the two key functionalists, see Durkheim’s perspective on education and Talcott Parsons’ perspective on education.

After Functionalism students usually study The Marxist Perspective on Education, which criticises much of what Functionalists say about the topic. Functionalism vs Marxism sets out the similarities and differences between the two.

A related perspective is The New Right View of Education, which is usually taught as an updated and modified version of Functionalism, more relevant to society today. The social democratic perspective shares the functionalist interest in education and the economy, but argues the state must work to make equality of opportunity real.

You might also like this summary grid of sociological perspectives on education.

Explore more examples and core theory in my Functionalist Theory in Sociology hub.

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