Gillborn and Youdell: Rationing Education

Last Updated on October 22, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Gillborn and Youdell’s study Rationing Education (2000) shows how the pressure on schools to climb the league tables led them to ration their time and resources – and how that rationing disadvantaged Black pupils. (The names are sometimes misspelt ‘Gilborn and Youdell’.)

The key points are:

1. Schools had become organised around an ‘A-to-C economy’: everything was geared to raising the percentage of pupils getting five GCSEs at grade C or above, the league table benchmark of the time.
2. This led to educational triage – sorting pupils into those who would pass anyway, those on the borderline who were worth extra help, and those judged to have no hope, who were in effect written off.
3. Teachers’ judgements of ‘ability’ were shaped by racialised expectations, so Black pupils were more likely to be placed in lower groups and lower GCSE tiers.
4. The study links macro-level policy (marketisation and league tables) to micro-level processes in the classroom (labelling and setting).

This study is part of the ‘relationships and processes within schools’ section of the AQA specification, examined on Paper 1 (7192/1), and it is one of the most useful pieces of evidence for in-school explanations of ethnic differences in achievement.

The research: two secondary schools

Gillborn and Youdell carried out an ethnographic study of two secondary schools, following two cohorts of pupils through Key Stage 4 (ages 14–16) over two years. One of the schools, which they called Taylor Comprehensive, was a large mixed comprehensive in an outer London borough; the largest minority ethnic group there was African Caribbean. They drew on observation, interviews with teachers and the schools’ own documents.

The study was carried out in the late 1990s, when the main league table measure for secondary schools was the percentage of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C.

The A-to-C economy

Gillborn and Youdell argued that the schools had become organised around what they called the A-to-C economy. Because schools were judged by the proportion of pupils gaining five higher-grade passes, that figure came to drive decisions about who was taught what, in which groups, and with how much support. At Taylor, the headteacher described GCSE preparation as the school’s “supreme and unavoidable constraint”.

This is a clear example of how marketisation policies – league tables and parental choice – changed what happens inside schools.

Educational triage

Gillborn and Youdell borrowed the idea of triage from battlefield medicine, where it describes how treatment is rationed when there isn’t enough to go round:

1. Those who need urgent treatment to survive are prioritised.
2. Those with less urgent needs are dealt with later.
3. Those who are judged beyond help are left.

In their words, educational triage is “acting systematically to neglect certain students, while directing additional resources to those deemed most likely to benefit”. In the A-to-C economy it worked along similar lines, with schools rationing their effort according to each pupil’s perceived chance of getting five good GCSEs:

• Pupils expected to pass anyway – left largely to get on with it.
• Borderline pupils – those who might reach five C grades with extra help – were prioritised for extra teaching and attention, because they were the ones who could move the school’s league table figure.
• Pupils judged to have no hope of reaching the benchmark were in effect written off.

The key point for the exam is that triage is not about what pupils need. It is about what the school needs to improve its results.

GCSE tiers and setting

Gillborn and Youdell identified GCSE tiering as a key part of the rationing process. In many subjects pupils were entered for either a higher or a foundation tier paper. At the time, the foundation tier capped the grade a pupil could get at C, so a pupil entered for it had no chance of the top grades however well they did on the day.

Entry decisions were tied to the way the schools grouped pupils by ability in Years 10 and 11. Pupils placed in lower sets were usually entered for the foundation tier. So the teachers’ early judgements about ‘ability’ fixed the maximum grade a pupil could achieve.

Racialised expectations

Gillborn and Youdell did not argue that teachers were deliberately racist; most were committed to equal opportunities. Their argument was that the A-to-C economy and teachers’ taken-for-granted ideas about ‘ability’ combined to produce racist outcomes – in other words, a form of institutional racism.

Teachers tended to have lower expectations of Black pupils. At Taylor, when a head of year was asked about under-achievers, he spoke about Black boys in terms of effort and of a ‘challenge’ to the school. Black pupils’ lower scores on the school’s ability tests were read as confirming lower ‘ability’, so they received less support rather than more.

The result showed up in the way pupils were grouped. In the Taylor cohorts, only two Black pupils (5.6%) were placed in the top ability band, compared with 99 white pupils (33.2%).

This links directly to labelling theory and the self-fulfilling prophecy: a label of low ability became a placement in a low group and a lower-tier exam, which then limited what the pupil could achieve.

Educational triage today

Two things have changed since Gillborn and Youdell’s research, and both are useful for evaluation.

The league table measure changed

From 2016, the headline measures for secondary schools in England became Progress 8 and Attainment 8, which give credit for every pupil’s grades across eight subjects, rather than the old measure of five passes at grade C or above including English and maths. One reason for the change was that the old measure gave schools what AQA has described as “the perverse incentive of focusing on those pupils on the grade C/D borderline”.

In principle, this should reduce triage, because moving any pupil up a grade now improves the school’s figures. HOWEVER, the percentage of pupils getting grade 5 or above in English and maths is still published and still watched, so a version of the borderline focus may simply have moved to the 4/5 boundary.

Tiering still exists

Under the 9–1 grading system, foundation tier papers in subjects such as maths offer grades 5 to 1, while the higher tier offers grades 9 to 4. So tier entry still sets a ceiling on what a pupil can achieve – the same mechanism Gillborn and Youdell criticised.

Black Caribbean pupils still underachieve

The most recent ethnicity breakdown published by the government (for 2022/23) shows that Black Caribbean pupils had an average Attainment 8 score of 40.0, compared with 44.9 for White British pupils and a national average of 46.3. Black African pupils (48.7) scored above the national average. So the gap Gillborn and Youdell were trying to explain has not closed for Black Caribbean pupils – which strengthens the case that in-school processes still matter.

More recent DfE figures (2025/26) do show results for Black pupils as a whole improving faster than for White pupils since 2018/19, so the picture is moving – but it is too early to say the gap has gone.

Evaluation of Gillborn and Youdell

Strengths:

• It is a useful study to show how the macro (marketisation policy) and the micro (teacher labelling) work together to disadvantage Black pupils.
• The ethnographic approach gives detailed insight into how decisions about pupils were actually made inside schools.
• Tiering and setting are still part of schooling, so the mechanism it describes has not gone away.

Limitations:

• It is based on only two schools, so we cannot be sure how representative they were.
• The research is now over 25 years old, and the A*–C benchmark it focused on has been replaced.
• It concentrates on processes within school. Critics such as Sewell argue that factors outside school, such as peer-group culture, also matter (see ethnicity and in-school processes).
• Black African pupils now score above the national average, which suggests that teacher expectations alone cannot explain ethnic differences in achievement.

How Gillborn and Youdell come up in the exam

Gillborn and Youdell are most useful as evidence in essays on ethnic differences in achievement, and on in-school processes more generally. Recent AQA questions they are relevant to include:

• June 2019, 30 marks: Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate sociological explanations of differences in educational achievement between ethnic groups.
• June 2019, 4 marks: Outline two criticisms of schools selecting pupils by ability.

Educational triage also works well in essays on class differences, and on marketisation as an unintended consequence of league tables.

Revision bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision 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.

Related posts:

• Setting and streaming – the wider research on ability grouping.
• Labelling theory and the self-fulfilling prophecy – the interactionist theory behind racialised expectations.
• Ethnicity and in-school processes – other in-school explanations of ethnic differences in achievement.
• Social class and in-school factors – how triage and setting affect working-class pupils.

For more posts on this module, see the sociology of education page.

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

Sources

• Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing Education: Policy, Practice, Reform and Equity.
• Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (1998) ‘”Raising standards” and deepening inequality: selection, league tables and reform in multiethnic secondary schools’, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, San Diego (ERIC ED424332).
• Gillborn, D. (2001) ‘”Raising standards” or rationing education? Racism and social justice in policy and practice’, Support for Learning, 16(3), 105–111.
• Race Disparity Unit, Ethnicity facts and figures: GCSE results (Attainment 8), 2022/23 data (updated 7 November 2024).
• Department for Education (2026) Key stage 4 performance, 2025/26 (15 October 2026).
• AQA, ‘Progress 8 – schools’ flexible friend?’ (AQi).
• Pearson Edexcel, 9–1 awarding FAQs (tiered grades).