Education and social control

Last Updated on September 4, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Schools are one of the most effective agents of social control in Britain, and they have become more controlling over the last forty years, not less. This post covers:

1. What social control means and why education is central to it
2. Fourteen ways schools control pupils and parents
3. The evidence: attendance fines, isolation units, British Values, Prevent, and academic surveillance
4. Three counter-trends — exclusions, home education and post-16 choice
5. How effective schools actually are as agents of social control

This material is part of the sociology of education module on Paper 1 of the AQA’s A-level sociology specification. Much of it also applies to the surveillance material in crime and deviance on Paper 3, and it works as evaluation against the Functionalist perspective on education.

[IMAGE: Empty school corridor with CCTV camera illustrating education as an agent of social control for A-level sociology]

What is social control?

Social control refers to the formal and informal techniques used to make individuals conform to social norms and values. In sociology the focus is usually on how those with power and authority use institutions to control ordinary people. There is a fuller treatment of the concept, including formal and informal control and the full range of agents, in my post on what social control is.

Many institutions perform social control — the law and the courts, the police, religion, the media and education.

Education is the interesting case because it reaches more people than any of the others. Nearly all of us attend school from a young age and spend thousands of hours there as children. Most of us will have no direct contact with the police in our entire lives.

How might school act as an agent of social control?

Fourteen ways, grouped by the kind of control involved.

Formal control — legal requirement and official sanction

1. Parents are legally required to send their children to a state or independently run school. Pupils are expected to attend, and parents can be fined if their children have unauthorised absences.
2. From 2013, young people are required to remain in some form of education or training until 18, raised from the previous education leaving age of 16.
3. Schools have clear codes of conduct and use isolation units, detentions, suspensions and permanent exclusions to regulate deviant behaviour.
4. Schools increasingly involve parents in monitoring pupils through parenting contracts in more serious cases.
5. Students in 16–19 education are required to resit GCSE maths and English if they did not achieve a grade 4, which narrows their choices.

Time and curriculum — control over what pupils do and learn

6. The 90%-plus of pupils who attend state schools spend at least six hours a day in formal education, and often more: the school day has lengthened through breakfast clubs and after-school provision.
7. Pupils in state schools are taught the National Curriculum, with limited choice over what they study until GCSE options at 14.

Surveillance — watching pupils

8. Schools engage in physical surveillance, most obviously through cameras, but also through staff on gates, in playgrounds and walking corridors during lessons.
9. Schools keep databases of academic progress and report to parents regularly. Pupils know they are being watched, and most self-regulate as a result.
10. Some pupils are required to work with learning support staff or attend additional supported sessions, which places them under higher levels of surveillance than their peers.
11. Schools may keep confidential records of discussions about mental health and wellbeing, and work with medical professionals where further support is judged necessary.

Ideological control — shaping what pupils think

12. Schools and colleges are required to teach pupils about British Values. This might be regarded as indoctrination by the State.
13. Schools carry responsibility for Prevent. They must report anyone they believe to be at risk of involvement in terrorism, and work to stop pupils being drawn towards extremism.
14. Schools constantly remind pupils of the importance of qualifications for a good career, which leads many of them to self-regulate without being told to.

Are schools effective agents of social control? Exploring the evidence

It is hard to argue against the view that schools use more control measures today than they did in the 1970s and 80s. But trying to control pupils and succeeding are different things, and the evidence below points in more than one direction.

There are also possible counter-trends — the growth of home education and the increase in post-16 choice — which suggest formal education may be less constraining than it once was for a growing minority.

Fines for parents taking their children out of school during term time

Local councils can impose fines on parents if their children have an unauthorised absence during term time, even for a single day. The fine is currently £80 if paid within 21 days, rising to £160 after that. If it is not paid, parents can be prosecuted and face up to three months in prison.

These fines were tested in 2015 when John Platt refused to pay a fine issued by the Isle of Wight local authority after taking his daughter on holiday to Florida during term time. He argued that her attendance had otherwise been excellent, and took the case to the Supreme Court.

Platt lost. The court sided with the local authority, ruling that he had breached school rules and failed to secure his child’s regular attendance.

The numbers since have gone one way only. In 2017-18 local authorities issued 260,000 penalty notices. In 2024/25 they issued 492,800, according to the Department for Education’s Parental responsibility measures release. That is close to a doubling in seven years. Of those, 459,300 — 93% — were for unauthorised family holidays.

Something else changed in the meantime. A National Framework for Penalty Notices came into force on 19 August 2024, replacing individual local authority policies with a national threshold: ten sessions of unauthorised absence in a ten-week period. Formal social control here has not just expanded, it has been standardised and centralised.

[IMAGE: Chart — penalty notices for unauthorised absence in England, 2017/18 to 2024/25]

HOWEVER, enforcement is far from even. Education Policy Institute analysis published in 2026 found that 33 of 153 local authorities issued half of all penalty notices, and that high rates of fines overlap with disadvantaged areas. If you wanted evidence that formal social control falls hardest on the poorest families, this is it — and it is a straightforwardly Marxist point that can be made with current official data.

Extended school days

Though not compulsory, some academies run extended school days. The NET Academies Trust starts at 8.45 rather than 9.00, runs extra lessons after 15.00 for underachieving pupils, and offers an enrichment programme later in the afternoon.

The raising of the education leaving age in 2013

In 2013 the government raised the education leaving age in England from 16 to 18.

Pupils can still leave school at 16, but only if they have a place at a further education college, or are going into work with accredited training attached.

This means that rather than transitioning to full adulthood and relative freedom at 16, young people are now subject to the control and surveillance associated with education or training for at least two more years.

If someone is on a work-based training course, that regime may be no more restrictive than an ordinary job. But since 2013 this layer of educational control has been formalised, and it means MORE PEOPLE are subject to observation and assessment than ever before.

Physical surveillance

In 2012 Big Brother Watch published a report based on Freedom of Information requests estimating there were over 100,000 CCTV cameras in schools in England and Wales. That figure is now well over a decade old and I have not found a current equivalent — treat it as a 2012 estimate rather than a present-day one.

Camera footage is also used to show parents how their children have behaved, and to get pupils to reflect on and take responsibility for their own behaviour.

It is worth noting that if you search for research on CCTV in schools there is remarkably little of it. The use of cameras in schools seems to have become normalised as a form of social control without anyone particularly examining it — which is itself sociologically interesting. Some schools have cameras in toilets, which has raised concern among parents.

A more recent development is the use of body cams by teachers, trialled in some schools from 2020.

The increasing use of isolation units

Isolation units are staffed rooms, often with partitioned booths, where disruptive pupils are sent to cool off — sometimes for an hour, sometimes for an entire day.

According to a 2018 BBC investigation, at least 200 out of 1,000 schools surveyed used isolation units or booths. Some had permanent units with their own toilet facilities so pupils could remain in them all day.

According to a 2020 Guardian article, schools were using isolation to punish pupils for increasingly trivial breaches of the rules — the article describes one girl placed in isolation for forgetting her planner for the first time. It also describes a pupil, Brendan, who spent much of his final term in isolation and left school with no GCSEs.

Isolation grew in popularity partly because it lets schools deal with disruptive pupils in-house rather than excluding them. Given that permanent exclusions have since risen sharply and then begun to fall — see the counter-trends section below — the relationship between the two is worth thinking about rather than assuming.

British Values

According to Ofsted, fundamental British values are:

• democracy
• the rule of law
• individual liberty
• mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and those without faith

The government has required schools to promote British Values since 2014, when it published its guidance on how schools should do this. Some of the guidance reads like something from the 1950s: schools are required to prepare pupils for modern life by ensuring their moral, spiritual and cultural development.

This article in The Conversation makes the point that what counts as a British Value was never widely debated in Parliament, let alone with the public, before schools were required to teach it. The article also argues that the requirement is unlikely to promote value consensus in any meaningful way — partly because untrained teachers may misread ordinary behaviour as suspicious, and partly because the values themselves are general enough to be interpreted in contradictory ways.

The Prevent duty

The Prevent duty, in force since 2015, requires schools to have due regard to preventing pupils being drawn into terrorism.

The guidance recommends teaching British Values, raises the possibility of monitoring pupils’ online activity, and provides contacts where schools have concerns — among them the local police force.

This is the strongest single piece of evidence that schools act as formal agents of social control, and the referral figures make it stronger than the post originally suggested. In the year ending 31 March 2025 there were 8,778 referrals to Prevent, the highest number since the series began in 2015 and a 27% increase on the previous year. The education sector made more referrals than anyone else — 3,129, or 36% of the total — ahead of the police on 30%.

Read that again. Teachers refer more people to a counter-terrorism programme than the police do.

[IMAGE: Chart — Prevent referrals by source, year ending March 2025]

HOWEVER, the pattern of referrals has changed substantially since this post was first written, and the change cuts against a criticism that was widely made at the time.

When the Prevent duty was introduced, a common objection was that it would fall disproportionately on Muslim pupils and increase their marginalisation in school. That was a reasonable concern given the policy’s origins in a response to Islamist extremism. On current data it no longer describes what is happening. Of referrals in the year to March 2025, 21% concerned extreme right-wing radicalisation — roughly twice the 10% relating to Islamist extremism. The largest single category, 34%, involved no identifiable ideology at all.

There is a sharper criticism available now, and the data supports it. The Independent Prevent Commissioner reported in 2026 that of 4,715 referrals involving children in 2024/25, 79% were closed without progressing through the programme. Roughly four in five children referred — mostly by schools — were judged not to need it.

Whether that shows schools over-referring, or appropriately erring on the side of caution, is exactly the kind of question you can be asked to evaluate. Note also that children aged 11 to 15 were the single largest age group among all referrals, at 36%.

Source for the Prevent figures: Home Office, Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme, April 2024 to March 2025, published November 2025. [LINK NEEDED — search gov.uk for the release title]

The increasing use of technology to monitor pupils

In the United States some schools moved to 24-hour monitoring of pupils’ online activity, at least within the school’s own systems. This article describes a pupil who mentioned self-harm on a school messaging system outside school hours; the monitoring software triggered an alert and a member of staff contacted the parent immediately.

That is the United States, but Britain tends to follow a few years behind. This article in Wired argues that UK pupils are already under a historically unprecedented level of electronic surveillance, and that this is likely the beginning rather than the end of it.

[IMAGE: School laptops illustrating digital monitoring and surveillance of pupils]

Other forms of surveillance in schools

The forms of control above are the visible ones. In some ways they are not the important ones.

Schools have steadily increased their level of academic surveillance since the 1988 Education Act. Pupils are now exposed to regular testing, reports and progress reviews as an entirely normal part of school life. This kind of surveillance has been so thoroughly normalised that most pupils expect it and never think to challenge it.

It is possibly this, rather than any camera, that is the most profound social control measure in education. Millions of pupils knowing their progress will be reviewed at least once every six weeks — probably more often — keeps them working, keeps them doing homework, and keeps them attached to the system.

The same goes for getting pupils to think about their futures. With UCAS, students have to start choosing universities and writing personal statements a year in advance, which takes up considerable time in their final year of formal education and, if they get a conditional offer, keeps them working right through it.

So it may be the competitive nature of the system, the fear of failure and the constant monitoring of progress — rather than the cameras and the isolation booths — that do most of the controlling.

This connects directly to Foucault’s work on surveillance: control that operates by making people watch themselves is more efficient than control that requires someone else to watch them.

Counter trends

The system does not control all pupils equally, and there are three trends worth examining as evidence that schools are NOT effective agents of social control.

Exclusions rose sharply, then began to fall

Suspensions and permanent exclusions rose steadily from 2012/13, then rose sharply again after the pandemic. The most recent DfE figures show that trend has now turned:

• 913,000 suspensions in 2024/25, down 4% from 955,000 in 2023/24
• 9,900 permanent exclusions, down 9% from 10,900
• Persistent disruptive behaviour accounted for 52% of reasons for suspension and 40% for permanent exclusion

The fall is real but should not be overstated. Autumn term 2019/20 saw 178,400 suspensions; autumn term 2024/25 saw 335,700. Even after the decline, suspensions run at close to double their pre-pandemic level.

[IMAGE: Chart — suspension rate by free school meal eligibility, 2024/25]

The much more revealing figures are in the breakdown, and they are not in the original version of this post. In 2024/25:

• Pupils eligible for free school meals were suspended at a rate of 26.66 per 100 pupils, against 5.41 for those not eligible — more than four times the rate
• For permanent exclusion the gap is wider still: 0.32 against 0.05, more than six times
• Pupils on SEN support were suspended at 28.86 per 100, more than four times the rate for pupils with no identified SEN
• Boys were suspended at more than 1.5 times the rate of girls, and permanently excluded at more than twice the rate

So whether exclusions count as evidence against effective social control depends on which pupils you are asking about. I think they do suggest schools are failing to control some pupils within school boundaries — those pupils are offloaded, possibly to less surveillance than before.

HOWEVER, you could read the same figures as evidence of MORE control, not less: it all depends what happens to those pupils afterwards. What the class and SEN breakdown shows unambiguously is that formal control in schools falls overwhelmingly on poor pupils and pupils with additional needs.

The increase in home education

This is the section that has changed most since this post was first written, and the original argument no longer holds.

The post used to say that 48,000 children were home educated in 2016-17, up from 34,000 in 2014-15, and concluded that we were talking about relatively small numbers.

The current DfE figures are:

• 126,000 children in elective home education on census day in autumn 2025, up from 111,700 the previous autumn
• 175,900 children home educated at some point during the 2024/25 academic year, against 153,300 the year before
• Around 1.5% of children of school age

[IMAGE: Chart — elective home education in England, 2016/17 to autumn 2025]

That is more than two and a half times the 2016-17 figure on the census-day measure, and nearly four times on the at-any-point measure. It is no longer a marginal trend.

Two methodological points, both directly examinable in the research methods topic:

These are official statistics in development, not accredited official statistics. The collection only became mandatory for local authorities in autumn 2024, and the DfE says data quality is still improving and that trends over time are consequently hard to estimate.

They also undercount, by construction. Local authorities only know about children they have been told about — typically those previously enrolled at a school. Children who have never attended school at all are not counted at any point.

The reasons have changed too, and this matters more than the numbers. The original version of this post assumed home education was largely a middle-class choice. The DfE’s own breakdown gives mental health as the single largest reason parents provide, and SEND prevalence among home-educated children runs well above the school population. The pattern local authorities describe is parents withdrawing children after school SEND provision has failed them.

That is a different phenomenon from parents rejecting school control on principle — and it is sociologically far more interesting. It is what happens when schools cannot accommodate a pupil, not when a family opts out of being accommodated.

I should say plainly that a reader made exactly this point in the comments on this post in 2020, and she was right on both counts — on the numbers being unknown and undercounted, and on the class composition having shifted away from the middle-class picture. This update is a correction.

And there is a twist that fits the argument of this post rather neatly. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, requires local authorities to keep “Children Not in School” registers. The relevant measures are not yet in force — a consultation on how the register will work is still expected, and implementation is unlikely before 2027 — but the direction is clear. Home education has been the one route out of the formal control described in this post. It is now being brought inside it.

For the current legal position and the state of the reforms, the House of Commons Library briefing on home education is the best single source.

Increasing post-16 choice

Young people have to stay in some form of education or training until 18, but it is debatable how many of those are really still under educational surveillance.

At 16 a young person can enter work-based training, which can be much like an ordinary job except with lower pay because it is designated as training. For those pupils this may not be much of a change from the pre-2013 position, when they could simply have left formal education altogether.

Conclusions: are schools effective agents of social control?

Schools are certainly being used by the State to control pupils more than they were, and they are making increasing use of technology to do it. On the question of effectiveness, I would say yes — but primarily through the subtle forms of academic surveillance that operate day to day and go largely unquestioned, rather than through the cameras and isolation booths that attract the attention.

There remains a significant minority of pupils who are not controlled in this way: those who are excluded, and those who are educated at home.

When I first wrote this post I speculated that the excluded would turn out to be the poorest pupils and the home educated the middle classes. Half of that has since been confirmed and half refuted. The exclusions data supports it comprehensively — free school meal pupils are suspended at four times the rate of their peers and permanently excluded at six times. The home education data does not. The fastest-growing group of home educators are families withdrawing children whose needs the school system failed to meet, which is closer to being excluded by other means than to opting out from a position of advantage.

Which points at something more interesting than the original claim. Both groups outside the system are there substantially because the system could not accommodate them. That is a failure of social control in one sense — and in another it is social control working exactly as a conflict theorist would predict, by pushing out those it cannot absorb.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is examinable in several places.

On Paper 1, it works as evaluation against the Functionalist perspective on education. Functionalists see the control functions of school as socialisation into shared values; the evidence above supports a more critical reading, particularly the class and SEN breakdown of exclusions.

On Paper 3, the surveillance material applies directly to crime and deviance, especially Foucault on surveillance and crime control and to the concept of social control more generally.

In research methods, the home education statistics are a live example of official statistics that are incomplete by construction, and of the distinction between accredited official statistics and statistics in development.

A likely exam use is a 10-mark question — for example, outline and explain two ways in which schools act as agents of social control. Two developed points, one formal and one informal, is the shape that earns the marks. For more on exam technique see my page on exams, short answer questions and essays.

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:

[IMAGE: Education Revision Bundle Cover — linked to Sellfy product]

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 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.

For the concept itself — formal and informal control, internal and external control, and the full range of agents — see what is social control.

For the perspective this material most directly criticises, see the Functionalist perspective on education.

For the surveillance theory underpinning the academic surveillance argument, see Foucault, surveillance and crime control.

More material on this topic is available on the sociology of education page.

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