Meritocracy and Education: Are Schools Meritocratic?

Last Updated on November 2, 2026 by Karl Thompson

A meritocracy is a system in which people’s rewards depend on their ability and effort, not on who their parents are. Whether education in Britain works like this is one of the central debates in the sociology of education. The key points are:

1. Functionalists such as Durkheim, Parsons, and Davis and Moore argue that education is broadly meritocratic, and that this is what makes inequality fair.
2. Melvin Tumin argued that unequal rewards stop a society finding its talent, because access to education depends on parents’ wealth.
3. Marxists Bowles and Gintis argue that meritocracy is a myth: class background, not ability, mainly decides who succeeds, and the myth persuades people to blame themselves.
4. The evidence today shows a persistent class gap at every stage of education, and a heavy over-representation of the privately educated in elite jobs.
5. Robert Frank adds that luck, much of it structured by class, plays a bigger part in success than most people admit.

Meritocracy is part of the role and functions of education within the sociology of education, examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1). It also links to the topic of social class differences in achievement, because the class gap is the main evidence on whether the system is fair.

What meritocracy means

In a meritocracy, everyone has the same chance to succeed: equality of opportunity. Rewards then go to those with the most talent who work hardest. Outcomes are unequal, but because the competition was fair, the inequality is seen as deserved.

Two things are worth separating from the start. Equality of opportunity means everyone starts the race from the same line. Equality of outcome means everyone finishes together. Meritocracy only promises the first. That’s why the debate in this topic is mostly about whether the starting line really is the same for everyone.

Education matters to the debate because qualifications are the main route into well-paid jobs. If schools reward ability and effort fairly, then a society that allocates jobs by qualifications is meritocratic. If schools reward class background, then qualifications simply pass advantage on while making it look earned.

The functionalist view: education as meritocracy

Functionalists see education as broadly meritocratic, and see that as essential to the stability of society.

Émile Durkheim saw school as a bridge between the family and wider society, teaching children to work with people they aren’t related to and to judge themselves by impersonal rules.

Talcott Parsons made the meritocracy argument explicit. In the family a child is judged by particularistic standards: as their parents’ particular son or daughter. At school every pupil is judged by the same universalistic standards: the same exams, the same mark schemes. Status at school is achieved, not ascribed. Pupils who accept this at school will accept that rewards in adult life go to those who achieve the most. There’s more in my post on the functionalist perspective on education.

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) took the argument further. Some jobs are more important to society than others, and only a limited number of people have the talent to do them well. Society has to offer higher rewards to motivate the most able to train for them. Education sorts pupils by ability and allocates them to the positions that suit their talents. This is role allocation, and it only works if the sorting is meritocratic.

Tumin’s critique (1953)

The classic reply to Davis and Moore came from Melvin Tumin (1953). He argued that the functional importance of a job is very hard to measure, and that inequality actually stops a society discovering its talent. Inequality is passed on, because, as he put it, “access to education depends upon the wealth of one’s parents.” Children of wealthy parents get the training whatever their ability; able children of poor parents may never get the chance. Davis replied that he and Moore were explaining inequality, not justifying it.

Tumin’s point is worth using in an essay on meritocracy because it attacks functionalism on its own terms. If the aim is to put the most able people in the most important jobs, an unequal society is a bad way of doing it.

The Marxist critique: the myth of meritocracy

Marxists argue that education is not meritocratic, and that the belief that it is serves the interests of the ruling class. The broader Marxist view is in my post on the Marxist perspective on education; this section concentrates on meritocracy.

Bowles and Gintis: IQ, class background and success

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), argued against the functionalist claim that the most able rise to the top. They looked at the relationship between intelligence (measured by IQ), educational attainment and income, drawing on existing statistical evidence.

Their argument ran like this:

• IQ explains only a small part of educational attainment. People with similar IQs end up with very different levels of education.
• Class background explains much more. The higher a person’s class background, the higher their educational attainment tends to be, even comparing people of similar IQ.
• The same goes for income. Among people of similar IQ, incomes vary widely. Family background is a much better predictor of income than IQ.
• The link between IQ and success is mostly a by-product. People with higher IQs do tend to have more qualifications and higher incomes, but Bowles and Gintis argued this is largely because both IQ scores and success reflect family background and length of schooling, not because intelligence is being rewarded.

Textbook accounts of their argument add that qualifications are worth more to some groups than others: the same qualifications pay off better for a white, middle-class man than for a Black, working-class woman.

Bowles and Gintis returned to the question in 2002, in “Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited”. Using later research, they estimated that genetically inherited IQ explains only a very small part of why incomes run in families. Cognitive skills matter for earnings, but they are not the main route by which advantage is passed from parents to children.

The myth of meritocracy: legitimation and self-blame

If class background matters more than ability, why do so many people believe the system is fair? Bowles and Gintis’s answer is the myth of meritocracy: the belief that qualifications and jobs depend only on individual ability and effort.

The myth does two jobs. It legitimates privilege, because the middle-class child who gets good results and a good job appears to have earned them. And it makes poverty look like personal failure, because the working-class child who leaves with few qualifications appears to have had their chance and not taken it. People end up blaming themselves rather than the inequality of opportunity built into the system. For Marxists, this is how education reproduces class inequality while making it look fair.

The myth works alongside the correspondence principle, Bowles and Gintis’s argument that the hidden curriculum prepares working-class pupils to accept their place in the workforce.

Evaluating Bowles and Gintis

• Their argument fits the evidence that class background still predicts achievement (see the next section), and their 2002 follow-up supports the claim that inherited IQ is not the main explanation.
• HOWEVER, it’s deterministic. Paul Willis showed working-class pupils actively resisting school rather than passively absorbing its messages, even though that resistance still led them into working-class jobs.
• It is based on American data from the 1960s and 1970s, before the expansion of higher education and before the policy changes covered later in this post.
• It may underestimate how far people see through the myth. Many students know perfectly well the system isn’t a level playing field.

Evidence on meritocracy today

Most of the evidence that follows has its own detailed post. Each item is a short summary you can use in an essay, with a link to the full version.

The class gap in achievement

The gap between disadvantaged pupils and everyone else appears at every stage of education in England:

Stage	Disadvantaged pupils	Other pupils
GCSE: grade 5 or above in English and maths, 2025/26	27.5%	54.3%
Progression to higher education by age 19, 2024/25 (free school meals v others)	28.6%	48.4%
Progression to high-tariff universities by age 19, 2024/25	4.6%	13.9%

Sources: DfE Key Stage 4 performance 2025/26; DfE Widening participation in higher education 2024/25.

The figures, and the problems with using free school meals as a measure of class, are in my post on social class and educational achievement statistics.

Private schooling and elite jobs

About 6% of pupils in England (6.3% in 2025/26) attend independent schools. Yet the Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain 2025 found that 62% of senior judges, around half of newspaper columnists and 36% of people across the elite roles it studied were privately educated. If schooling were a fair race, it is hard to see why one school sector would supply such a large share of the people at the top.

Cultural capital and parental choice

Bourdieu argued that schools reward middle-class culture, so middle-class children start with an advantage that looks like ability. Gewirtz, Ball and Bowe (1995) found that middle-class “privileged/skilled choosers” were far better placed to get their children into the best schools. See cultural capital and educational achievement.

Teacher labelling and in-school processes

Becker (1952) found teachers judging pupils against a middle-class “ideal pupil”, and Ball (1981) found pupils of similar ability placed in higher bands if their fathers had middle-class jobs. If teachers’ judgements are shaped by class, schools are not rewarding ability alone. See class differences in education: the role of in-school factors.

Luck and the structure of opportunity

The economist Robert H. Frank, in Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (2016), argues that almost everyone who succeeds is talented and hard-working, but they are also lucky, and chance plays a much bigger part in life outcomes than most people imagine. Frank gives an example from his own life: he survived a heart attack on a tennis court only because an ambulance happened to be close by.

Frank’s wider argument is about what he calls winner-take-all markets, in which the best performer in a field can sell to a national or global market. In these markets, chance opportunities and small early advantages turn into very large differences in income. People who believe they succeeded on merit alone, Frank argues, tend to resist the idea that luck had anything to do with it.

In the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed discussion of the book, the conversation turned to the idea of a structure of luck. Some luck is random, but a lot of it is patterned. The generation that reached 18 when universities expanded had chances their parents’ generation never had, whatever their ability. A child at a well-resourced school with parents who have plenty of cultural and social capital has their path smoothed in ways a working-class child at an under-resourced school does not.

This is a useful way to link luck to class in an essay. Being born to middle-class parents is luck from the child’s point of view, but it isn’t random: it is exactly the advantage that material deprivation and cultural theories describe.

Meritocracy on television

Marxists see the media as one of the places the myth of meritocracy is spread. A good example is Channel 5’s Rich House, Poor House (first shown in 2017), in which a family from the wealthiest 10% swaps lives for a week with a family from the poorest 10%. A Marxist reading is that programmes like this tend to present the gap between the two families as a matter of individual effort, and say little about how likely it is for anyone to move from one house to the other. That is the myth of meritocracy at work outside school.

Evaluating the view that education is meritocratic

Arguments that education is (becoming) more meritocratic

• Participation has risen. Far more young people stay in education to 18 and go on to university than a generation ago, including more from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Policy targets the gap. The Pupil Premium, introduced by the Coalition government in 2011, gives schools extra money for each disadvantaged pupil, and free school meal eligibility is being widened from September 2026.
• Exams are marked anonymously against the same mark scheme, which is Parsons’s universalistic standard in its purest form.
• Some schools do far better than others with disadvantaged pupils, which suggests disadvantage is not destiny.

Arguments that it isn’t

• The gap persists. The GCSE gap in the table above is a gap of more than 26 percentage points, and it is wider than it was before the pandemic.
• Money buys advantage through private schooling, tutoring and houses in the catchment areas of the best state schools (“selection by mortgage”). The 1988 Education Reform Act created a market in which middle-class parents are best placed to compete.
• In-school processes favour the middle class, through labelling, setting and the hidden curriculum.
• IQ is a disputed measure anyway: if the tests themselves favour middle-class culture, “ability” is partly class background measured another way. See why IQ tests may not measure intelligence.

Analysis: an ideal or a description?

One way to lift an essay is to separate meritocracy as an ideal from meritocracy as a description. Very few sociologists would argue that British education is fully meritocratic as a description of how it works. The live argument is whether it is moving towards the ideal, and whether the ideal is even achievable when children start school with such different resources.

There’s a further twist. The word “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), and he meant it as a warning, not a goal. Even a perfect meritocracy would still produce winners and losers, and the winners would feel they deserved everything they got. That’s a reason to question the ideal itself, not just how well we live up to it.

How meritocracy comes up in the exam

Meritocracy has been the focus of a full 30-mark essay on Paper 1. The June 2021 paper (sat in November 2021) asked:

Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate the view that the education system is meritocratic. [30 marks]

A strong answer would set the functionalist case (Parsons, Davis and Moore) against Tumin and the Marxist critique (Bowles and Gintis), use the evidence on the class gap and elite jobs, and reach a conclusion about how far the system falls short of the ideal and why.

Meritocracy also turns up as evaluation in other questions: in essays on functionalism, on the Marxist perspective on education, and on marketisation and policy. Whenever a question touches on whether education is fair, it’s relevant.

Signposting and Related Posts

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

Meritocracy sits between the two big perspectives on the role of education: see the functionalist perspective and the Marxist perspective. For the evidence on class, see social class and educational achievement statistics and cultural capital.

You can find the full set of notes on the sociology of education page.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (2002) Schooling in Capitalist America revisited. Sociology of Education.

Davis, K. and Moore, W. E. (1945) Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242–249.

Department for Education (2026) Key Stage 4 performance, 2025/26; Schools, pupils and their characteristics, 2025/26; Widening participation in higher education, 2024/25. Explore Education Statistics.

Frank, R. H. (2016) Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gewirtz, S., Ball, S. and Bowe, R. (1995) Markets, Choice and Equity in Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Sutton Trust (2025) Elitist Britain 2025.

Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4: Success and luck.

Tumin, M. (1953) Some principles of stratification: a critical analysis. American Sociological Review, 18(4), 387–394.

Young, M. (1958) The Rise of the Meritocracy. London: Thames and Hudson.