Sociological Explanations of Educational Underachievement

Last Updated on November 3, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Why do some children do worse at school than others? This post uses that question to show how sociology works. From a sociological perspective, educational failure is not simply down to the individual.

The easiest way to illustrate the sociological imagination, and to show how sociologists “do sociology”, is to look at how sociology approaches a particular social issue, such as educational underachievement. Most sociologists regard this as a social problem because leaving school with few or no formal qualifications is strongly related to a future of unemployment or low-skilled, low-paid work.

This post has been written mainly for students starting A-level sociology, to read as part of a two-week introduction to sociology. It gives an overview; the explanations are covered in depth in the posts linked at the end.

Why do some children fail where others succeed?

The most obvious place to look for the answer is the children themselves. Either their educational failure is a matter of low intelligence, in which case there’s not a lot anyone can do, or it’s a lack of aspiration and effort, in which case it’s down to the student to pull their socks up.

A second common place to look is the individual school, which could be “letting the students down”: either the teachers are not committed enough, or the school is badly managed, in which case new teachers or new management are needed.

Sociologists don’t dismiss either of these explanations, but they argue that they don’t look deeply enough at the underlying causes. If you dig deeper, using statistics among other methods, you find that achievement is strongly related to social factors such as how much money parents have and what they value.

The clearest example is social class. In 2025/26, 27.5% of disadvantaged pupils in England got grade 5 or above in GCSE English and maths, compared with 54.3% of other pupils (DfE). Gaps like this are far too large and too consistent to be explained by individual differences in intelligence or effort alone.

Poverty and educational underachievement

There is a very strong relationship between the income and wealth of parents and how well their children do at school. To put it bluntly, the poorer someone’s parents are, the more likely their children are to get poor GCSEs.

This is because poverty acts as a limiting factor on educational achievement. Poverty leads to material deprivation, which can mean a poorer diet and more illness, and fewer bedrooms, so there’s less likely to be a private space to study. Later on, teenagers from poorer backgrounds may need part-time jobs while they study for A-levels or degrees, which leaves less time for study.

At the other end of the scale, a higher income can buy private tuition or even private schooling.

So, all other things being equal, if you take two students, one rich and one poor, and the poor student is ill more often, can’t concentrate on homework because he shares a room with his younger brother, and works 15 hours a week while doing A-levels, while the rich student has none of these barriers and has a couple of hours of private tuition a week, it’s hardly surprising that the rich student gets better results.

Parental values and educational underachievement

A second factor which influences how well a child does at school is the values of their parents. It’s parents, after all, who teach their children about the value of education, or not; about the importance of sacrificing pleasure now in order to study, or not; and who inspire them to go to university, or not.

It’s also parents who read to their children when they are young, or not; help with homework, or not; and keep an eye on their children through their 11 years of compulsory schooling, or let them run wild. Once you count holidays, weekends, mornings and evenings, children spend far more time outside school than in it, which suggests that parenting may have more impact on how well a child does than schooling.

Many studies have shown the importance of primary socialisation (the teaching of norms and values in the family) in explaining differences in achievement, and there are differences in how children from different backgrounds are socialised.

Working-class children are more likely to experience what sociologists call cultural deprivation. They are more likely to grow up thinking that university is “not for the likes of them” because their parents never went and so don’t talk about it, which helps to explain why fewer working-class teenagers go to university, even when they get good A-levels. HOWEVER, cultural deprivation theory is heavily criticised for blaming working-class families, and other sociologists argue that the problem is the school’s middle-class culture, not a deficit in working-class homes (see cultural capital).

Ethnicity also matters. Chinese pupils have the highest average GCSE results of any large ethnic group in England: an average Attainment 8 score of 65.5 in 2022/23, against 46.3 for all pupils and 44.9 for White British pupils (Ethnicity facts and figures). Some sociologists explain this partly through family values and parents’ high expectations, but there are other explanations too, and the explanations and their critics are covered in my post on ethnicity and the role of cultural factors.

All of this shows why sociologists don’t rely on individual explanations for social phenomena. How well someone does at school is not just down to their individual talents. It is partly a result of their socialisation and background, and social class, gender and ethnicity all have their own, and combined, influences on how well a child does.

Still, home background isn’t enough to explain differences in achievement on its own. You also need to look at issues of power within the education system.

Power within the education system

The education system is shaped and run by educated people, many from wealthy backgrounds, and Marxist sociologists argue that the middle classes have always come out on top, whatever the changes in policy since the Second World War. On this view, education is mainly about “the reproduction of class inequality”: a mechanism through which middle-class children do well and go on to well-paid middle-class jobs, while working-class children are defined as failures and go on to low-skilled, lower-paid jobs.

The most obvious example is private schools. Only 6.3% of pupils in England go to independent schools (DfE, 2026), but the Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain 2025 found that 62% of senior judges, around half of newspaper columnists and 36% of people across a range of elite roles had been privately educated.

This view is mainly associated with the Marxist perspective on education.

Conclusions: why do some children underachieve?

Sociologists don’t accept that an individual fails or succeeds at school simply because of their individual talents. They succeed or fail at least partly because of their background: the money their parents have and the values their parents pass on, which together shape how well a child can do. Looked at more deeply, Marxists argue that the system itself favours the middle classes, because policies over the decades haven’t broken down these inequalities.

What sociology does next

Firstly, you’re now better equipped to find out more about why some children fail and others succeed. Some children from deprived backgrounds do succeed, and sociologists recognise that people are not determined by their backgrounds; rather, they’re steered down certain paths by them. How those children succeed is a question sociologists are interested in, and so is the question of what, if anything, should be done about the inequality.

Secondly, it changes how you look at success and failure. If background matters this much, you can’t assume that someone who failed at school is stupid or lazy, or that someone who did well deserved all of it.

Thirdly, there’s the question of what to do with this knowledge. Sociologists disagree: some argue for reforms within the system to make it fairer, some for more fundamental change, and some that the inequalities are less unfair than they look. You’ll meet all of these positions in the education topic.

Where to go next

Each of the explanations above has its own post, with the evidence and the criticisms:

• Social class: class statistics, material deprivation, cultural deprivation, cultural capital and in-school factors
• Gender: explaining the gender gap in education
• Ethnicity: ethnicity statistics and cultural factors
• The whole education topic: the education module: start here

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

Signposting

This post has been written mainly for students studying A-level sociology, to read as part of a two-week introduction to sociology. The topic is taught as part of the sociology of education module.

Sources

• Department for Education (2026) Key stage 4 performance, 2025/26.
• Department for Education (2026) Schools, pupils and their characteristics, academic year 2025/26.
• Ethnicity facts and figures (2024) GCSE results (Attainment 8).
• Sutton Trust (2025) Elitist Britain 2025.

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