Last Updated on October 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Each sociological perspective sees the relationship between education and work differently. Functionalists and social democrats see education as preparing people for work in ways that benefit everyone; Marxists see it as preparing a workforce for capitalism; feminists see it as steering girls and boys into different jobs; and the New Right want it to serve the needs of employers more directly.
The relationship between education, the economy and work is part of the first topic in the sociology of education module, examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1). This post summarises each perspective and links to its own post for the detail.
Functionalism
Main post on the functionalist perspective on education.
Education teaches us specialist skills for work. At school, individuals learn the diverse skills a complex division of labour needs. For example, we may all start off learning the same subjects, but later on we specialise when we choose GCSEs and A-levels.
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.
Evaluation: qualifications clearly sort people into different kinds of work — in 2024, 67.9% of graduates were in high-skilled jobs, against 23.7% of non-graduates (DfE). HOWEVER, about a third of graduates were not in high-skilled jobs, and Marxists argue the sorting reflects class background as much as ability.
The social democratic perspective
Main post on social democratic perspectives on education.
Human capital. Social democrats argue that skills and knowledge are a form of capital. The economist Theodore Schultz (‘Investment in Human Capital’, 1961) argued that spending on education is an investment in people: the more a society invests, the more skilled and productive its workforce becomes. So the state should spend heavily on education — and should make sure everyone has the chance to develop their talents, because wasted working-class talent is lost to the economy.
Evaluation: Alison Wolf (2002) questioned whether spending more on education really drives economic growth, and the New Right argue that more spending does not by itself raise standards.
Marxism
Main post on the Marxist perspective on education.
The reproduction of class inequality and the myth of meritocracy. In school, the middle classes use their material and cultural capital to ensure that their children get into the best schools and the top sets. This means that wealthier pupils tend to get the best education and then go on to get middle-class jobs. Meanwhile working-class children are more likely to get a poorer standard of education and end up in working-class jobs. In this way class inequality is reproduced.
School teaches the attitudes future capitalist employers need through the hidden curriculum: pupils learn to accept authority, to accept hierarchy, and to be motivated by external rewards. This is Bowles and Gintis’s correspondence principle.
Evaluation: the correspondence principle was developed for 1970s factory work. Many jobs today, especially in the creative industries, need workers who are creative and independent rather than obedient.
Paul Willis
Main post on Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour.
Willis described the friendship group of the 12 working-class boys (the ‘lads’) he studied as a counter-school culture. Their value system was opposed to that of the school. They looked forward to paid manual work after leaving school, identified non-school activities (smoking, going out) with this adult world, and valued such activities far more than school work. The lads believed that manual work was proper work, and that the jobs hard-working pupils would get were all the same and generally pointless.
Evaluation: the irony Willis identified is that by rejecting school, the lads guaranteed themselves working-class jobs — so they reproduced class inequality without being passively socialised into it, which is a challenge to Bowles and Gintis. But the study is of 12 boys in one school in the 1970s, when manual jobs were still plentiful.
Feminism
Main post on the feminist perspective on education.
Stereotypical views of teachers and careers advisers, as well as peer group pressure, mean that subject choices are still shaped by traditional gender norms — which limits the kinds of jobs boys and girls go on to do in later life.
Even though girls do better at school, women are still paid less than men on average, so qualifications do not necessarily result in more pay!
Evaluation: liberal feminists would point to girls’ rising achievement and the growing number of women in professional jobs as evidence that education is helping to break down gender inequality at work, even if it hasn’t finished the job.
The New Right
Main post on the New Right and education.
The mid-1970s was a time of rising unemployment in Britain, particularly among the young. It was argued that the education system was not producing a skilled enough workforce and that the needs of the economy were not being met. From the mid-1970s both Conservative and Labour governments agreed that education should be more focused on improving the state of the economy by providing training courses for young people in different areas of work.
This emphasis on meeting the needs of industry became known as ‘new vocationalism’, which first took off in the 1980s. For how vocational education has developed since, including apprenticeships and T levels, see my post on sociological perspectives on vocational education.
Evaluation: critics on the left argue that vocational courses were often low-status and steered working-class pupils into low-paid work, and Alison Wolf’s 2011 review of vocational education for the government estimated that between 300,000 and 400,000 16- to 19-year-olds were doing courses of little value in the job market.
Using this in the exam
The relationship between education and the economy comes up on Paper 1 in its own right and as evaluation in essays on the role of education. In a 30-mark essay, comparing two perspectives on the same point — for example, functionalist role allocation against the Marxist myth of meritocracy — is the quickest way to show the examiner explicit evaluation. All the perspectives are compared side by side in my summary grid of sociological perspectives on education.
Sociology of Education Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.
Signposting
This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.
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