A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!
Category: education
Sociological perspectives on the role and functions of education in society; the significance of in-school processes such as teacher labelling and subcultures for pupil identities; explanations for differences in educational achievement by social class, gender and ethnicity; the impact of education policies of marketization, selection and privatisation, and the globalization of education
28.2% of schools are faith schools, most of them Christian.
Faith Schools are schools which have either have formal links to particular faith based organisations or just have a ‘religious character’.
There are three main types of state funded Faith School in England and Wales: Voluntary Aided (VA), Voluntary Controlled (VC) and Faith Academies. Some Faith schools are also independent, or fee-paying schools.
Faith schools have to teach the National Curriculum (although not Faith Academies because all academies are exempt from this requirement) but they can teach what they like for Religious Education, limiting the content to their own faith if they wish.
Faith schools are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of faith in relation to applications if they only have a limited number of applications. For example if a Faith school has 1000 places and they only have 1000 applications, they MUST allow all of those students into the school no matter what the faith of the applicant.
However Faith schools discriminate on the basis of Faith of applicants if the school is oversubscribed, using Faith as a preference for admitting students of the school’s faith before students who do not share the faith of the school. (3)
How Many Faith Schools?
In 2019 there were 1342 Faith schools in England and Wales, meaning that 28.2% of all schools were Faith schools and the remainder, over 70% were non-faith schools (3)
What faith are Faith schools?
68% are Church of England
29% are Catholic
1% are other Christian faiths
2% are non-Christian.
The statistics vary a lot depending on whether the schools are primary or secondary.
Primary
Secondary
Church of England
72%
34%
Catholic
26%
52%
other Christian
7%
1%
non-Christian
1%
6%
Looking at the figures in terms of raw numbers you really get an impression for how dominant Christian schools are, and especially Church of England schools…
4370 Church of England
1649 Roman Catholic
25 Methodist
72 Other Christian
36 Jewish
14 Muslim
6 Sikh
5 Hindu
2 Multifaith.
There are very few non-Christian faith schools in England and Wales today.
Arguments against Faith Schools
Faith schools are selective: they take a disproportionate amount of students from wealthier, middle class backgrounds which explains their better results compared to non-faith schools.
However the fact that faith schools are selecting more middle class students results in a polarising effect with non-faith based schools having to take on a higher proportion of children from lower income backgrounds.
Parents really just want decent community focussed schools that encourage social cohesion, whereas Faith schools may have the opposite effect: by teaching pupils a particular faith they may well be isolating them from the wider community leading to increased social fragmentation.
The most female dominated subjects are performing arts, health and social care and sociology, the most male dominated subjects are computer science and I.T., construction and engineering.
Subject choice in post-16 education remains heavily influenced by gender in 2022.
If we look at the total numbers of students taking A-level and BTEC subjects we find that girls and young women are still more likely to choose subjects which conform to the norms and roles associated with females, such as performing arts and health and social care.Boys and young men on the other hand are more likely to choose subjects which align with traditionally male gender norms and roles such as physics and computing.
However these trends are just generalisations and there are of course exceptions, and the ‘traditional gender-divide’ in subject choice has been reducing over time.
This post explores some of the differences in subject choice by gender in 2021-2022, focusing on A-levels, BTECs, higher education and apprenticeships. (I don’t look at GCSE level or below because students do not have freedom of subject choice until they pass their GCSEs and pursue post-16 education.
Computer Science: 80% of pupils are male
Physics: 75% male
Further Mathematics: 65% male
Design and Technology: 64% male
Economics: 63% male.
The most female dominated subjects at A-level are:
Performing arts: 90% of students are female
English Literature: 78% female
Sociology: 77% female
Art and Design subjections: 75% female
Psychology: 74% female
Spanish and French: 74% female.
Most other subjects have a much more equal gender balance, so are best characterised as gender neutral.
Gender and Subject Choice at BTEC
Subject choices at BTEC also remain heavily gendered in some subjects. For example:
90% of students choosing health and social care are female.
85% of students choosing Information Technology are male.
75% of students choosing Sport BTEC are male.
Business BTEC is more gender neutral with nearer a 60-40 split in favour of males and Applied Science is the most gender neutral subject with almost equal numbers of male and female students in 2022.
The gender divide continues into Higher Education, once again with subjects broadly divided along stereotypical gender lines:
The top five degree subjects for females are:
Subjects allied to medicine
Social Sciences and psychology
Veterinary sciences
Education and Teaching
Design and Creative and Performing Arts.
Five subjects where there are more males studying them than females are:
Engineering and Technology
Computing
Architecture
Physical Sciences
Mathematical Sciences.
Gender and Apprenticeships
The traditional gender divide is somewhat apparent when it comes to the types of apprenticeship men and women choose, but it less dramatic than with subject choices at A-Level, BTEC and University.
Females dominate in health and social care and education apprenticeships. Males dominate in construction, manufacturing and transportation. But many apprenticeships are gender neutral such as retail and public administration.
Signposting
This material is relevant to the gender and subject choice topic within the Education topic of A-level Sociology
You might also like to read this post on why males and females choose different subjects in education.
PREVENT requires schools to monitor pupils for their potential to become radicalised into extremist views and become terrorist.
While PREVENT doesn’t specify that schools should focus mainly on preventing Muslims from becoming extremist, an increasing body of research suggests this is what happens and as a result PREVENT as a policy is discriminatory.
What is Prevent?
PREVENT was introduced in 2015 and today forms part of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy. Schools are among those institutions which are required to prevent young people from being drawn into terrorism.
The government notes that terrorism is often driven by extremist beliefs and for the sake of prevent defines extremism as:
“vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.” (1)
PREVENT requires Local Education Authorities to use terrorist risk profiles to assess the risk of certain students being drawn into terrorism, and where necessary take appropriate action, which might mean sharing information with other agencies such as the police themselves.
However for the most part PREVENT requires that schools teach British Values and the importance of community cohesion.
Problems with PREVENT
In 2015 the Muslim Council of Great Britain raised a number of concerns (2) that the way PREVENT was being deployed in schools was both discriminatory against Muslims and having a harmful effect on mainly Muslim children.
They noted that 60% of referrals under PREVENT had been against Muslim children, even though they only made up 5% of the population, while only 10% of referrals were for white extremists, despite the growth in far right views in Britain.
They cite a number of case studies such as:
A two year old with learning difficulties being referred to social services after singing an Islamic song and then saying “Allahu Akbar” spontaneously afterwards.
Two students were referred to Senior Leadership Team at one school for making way for a female student and lowering their gaze as she went past.
In one school a physics teacher referred a Muslim student to the PREVENT team because he asked how to make a bomb, he hadn’t made a similar referral for a white student who had asked the same previously.
Human Rights Watch (3) argues that the implementation of PREVENT has violated students’ right to education and freedom of expression, making many Muslim students feel as if they cannot freely discuss religious and political issues for fear of being referred to the police.
The report cites the case of one eight year old who was subjected to an interrogation by authorities because a teacher mis-identified a name in Arabic on his T-shirt.
The main problem has been relying on teachers who are not well trained enough to identify the signs of radicalisation in children. Because of lack of training and mis-interpretation, some teachers end up alienating mainly Muslim students.
PREVENT and Islamophobia
Even though the 2021 update of PREVENT guidance doesn’t specify that school policy should be specifically focused on preventing Islamic extremism (NB the 2015 original version of PREVENT did), in practice PREVENT is usually interpreted through an Islamophobic lens.
In other words, schools mainly target Muslim students with PREVENT policies.
Jerome et al (4) cite survey research which found that over half of Black and Ethnic Minority students feel stigmatised by the PREVENT policy and feel as if the policy has made the creation of an ethnically inclusive school environment more difficult.
Signposting and Related Posts
This material is mainly relevant to the education topic within the sociology of education.
There is little specific formal guidance for schools and more than half trans pupils feel like they can’t be themselves in school.
85% of schools report (1) they have seen an increase in the number of pupils identifying as either trans or non-binary, that is pupils identifying as a different gender to that which they were assigned at birth.
Schools have a long, historical tradition of being organised along a simple male-female divide which does not recognise trans identities, the most obvious examples of which include:
gendered school uniforms
gendered sports teams
male-female toilets.
Some schools are even boys and girls only schools!
Such simplistic traditional gender-divisions are potentially discriminatory against the increasing number of pupils with transgender identities, and this post explores the extent to which policies in schools are adapting to this increasing diversity of gender identities.
Government Policy Guidance on Transgender Children in Schools
The House of Commons Library last published guidance on how schools should support transgender children (2).
The briefing follows the Equality Act of 2010 stating that schools must not discriminate against pupils who are undergoing gender transformation, which doesn’t have to involve physical surgery, so any student transitioning to another gender is protected by law.
However besides this there is little central laying down of rules about what schools should do to support transgender pupils.
For example schools don’t have to provide gender neutral toilets or changing rooms, and they are free to continue with a traditional male-gender divide in P.E lessons.
The uniform restrictions are the most stringent as schools need to provide flexibility to accomodate cultural diversity, so transgender pupils are already covered against discrimination here in most cases.
The Home Secretary Seems to be Transphobic
Yet another generational disconnect that doesn’t help trans pupils is the fact that the current Home Secretary, Suela Braveman (*) comes across as Transphobic.
As far as she is concerned people under 18 cannot obtain a gender recognition certificate and so schools are under no obligation to recognise or support trans children in any way at all (4)
She has explicitly stated that schools don’t have to recognise students by any name other than that assigned at birth, and that they MUST provided single sex toilets, she has also suggested that schools are obliged to out transitioning pupils to their parents if they are not aware of this going on.
(*) I deliberately misspelled her name as she clearly thinks names don’t matter.
Support for Trans Pupils in schools is lacking
The latest survey data on how supported trans pupils feel in school to feel comfortable with their own (rather than birth-assigned) gender identity is from Stonewall in 2017 (3) which found that between one third and two thirds of trans pupils don’t feel supported.
While 75% of trans pupils reported that they were allowed to wear a uniform which fitted in with their identity, this is almost irrelevant as an indicator of discrimination as most schools today have gender-neutral uniform options – that is girls can choose to wear trousers if they want to .
Most shockingly of all one third of transgender pupils reported not being to use their own name in school, which is just about the most basic aspect of one’s individual identity I can think of, which is pretty hard evidence that one third of trans pupils feel like they are being directly discriminated against.
Finally, the majority of trans pupils report not being able to use toilets or changing rooms or feeling comfortable with sports suited to their gender.
I can understand that schools might find it difficult to find sports options that trans pupils feel comfortable with, given that most traditional school sports are spilt along traditional gender lines, and there might be resource restrictions on offering a wider variety of gender neutral options, providing discrete changing rooms and gender neutral toilets are relatively minor changes which could be made quite easily, and clearly by 2017 most schools hadn’t made these changes.
In terms of pupils feeling they can’t use their own name, that strikes me as just an unwillingness on the part of schools to make a very easy adaptation.
However, many schools are very supportive
It’s five years on since Stonewall’s last research on this issue, and even though we have a disconnected ageist and transphobic home secretary many schools do have policies in place which do support trans pupils.
A google search for ‘trans policies in schools’ yields several policy documents from schools which show a clear willingness to put in place mechanisms to make sure trans students feel comfortable, so thankfully many schools are more inclusive than central government!
Signposting and relevance to A-level Sociology
This material is designed to update the ‘gender identity’ topic within the sociology of education.
Clearly when it comes to trans identities schools were lacking in their support for trans pupils in 2017, and central government is not at all supportive, but it will be interesting to see what future research shows on this issue in the coming years – I’m sure there will be more support in place, but we’ll have to wait for more data to know for certain!
how many children are home educated, what are their characteristics and what are the challenges of increasing home education?
The number of children being homeschooled has more than doubled since 2015, with most of these children being between key stages 2 and 4. While the trend towards homeschooling is part of a broader process of postmodernisation in education, we still have only 1% of children being home educated in England and Wales, meaning this isn’t a significant trend.
How many children are home educated?
There has been a rapid increase in the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children in recent years in the United Kingdom.
Between 2013 to 2018 there was a 130% increase to bring the number of homeschooled children to just over 57 000 by 2018. (1)
In 2019 another survey found that there were 60,544 registered home educated children in England. This is an increase of around 15% compared to 2018 (2)
However, with a total of 9 million children in school this is less than 1% of children who are being home-educated.
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) produced a more recent estimate of around 81,200 registered home educated children in England as of October 2021. This was based on survey responses from 124 out of 152 LAs and so may not be representative.
The ADCS further estimated that around 115,500 pupils in England were known to be home educated at some point during the academic year 2020/21.
Taken together the above data suggest that the number of homeschooled children in England and Wales is increasing, but we need to be cautious with recent numbers as the pandemic may have skewed recent data upwards. Also, Homeschooling maybe a temporary status for some of these children, rather than them being homeschooled for their entire school career.
The Department for Education does not routinely collect data on all the characteristics of home educated children but we do know that 0.9% of home educated children have EHC plans, meaning they have a formal statement of special educational needs.
We also have data by age in 2020 which shows us that most home educated children are between key stages 2-4.
1.3% of home educated pupils are early years
10% are key stage 1
28% are key stage 2
30% are key stage 3
27% are key stage 4
Only 3% are key stage 5.
So this suggests there is a pattern of parents pulling children out of education at key stage two and then home educated kids going back in to formal education by key stage 5.
There are no available data on gender, ethnicity or sexuality, or social class, but for later I think it’s reasonably safe to guess that we are talking about mainly middle class parents doing the home education given that they are the ones who are going to have the material and cultural capital to home educate.
Why do parents choose to home-educate?
According to a 2021 House of Commons Research briefing (2) in which parents were asked to state the top three reasons for home schooling, the main reasons parents in England and Wales opt for home schooling are:
Covid related concerns
Philosophical or lifestyle choice
Physical and mental health
No reason provided
Disatisfaction with the school
Did not get school preference
Other reasons such as bullying, avoiding exclusion, but both of these are less than 1% of choices.
So if we discount the recent Pandemic, the two stand-out reasons are philosophical or lifestyle choices and the mental and physical health of the the child.
I’m not sure if ‘religious or cultural belief’s comes under the philosophical statement above, but that’s also a commonly stated reason on most home-education web sites.
What’s interesting about this is that these are pro-active choices, rather than re-active choices – in general parents are home educating because of their deeply held values or for the health benefit of their children rather than reacting to what they perceive as sub-standard schools.
What are the challenges of home education?
While it is every parents right to educate their children as they see fit, there is a risk that children who are home educated are going to receive a lower standard of education than their school educated peers and achieve lower exam results, but of course that all depends on the quality of schools available in the local areas.
An increase in home education could mean a more fragmented society as there will be more diversity of education, but as long as parents are encouraging their children to be reasonable and responsible human beings this shouldn’t be a problem.
Home educated children may also miss out on broader socialisation into friendship groups, but if the kind of children being home educated aren’t interested in this then I guess this is a net gain.
To my mind one of the biggest problems is inequality of opportunity – home education is really only available with the middle classes who have the resources to do this – if you’re a lower income family where both partners have to work full time home-ed just wouldn’t be an option!
This recent blog post by Schools Week suggests there has been a move towards parents pulling children out of school to avoid fines for poor attendance, and a move away from religious or cultural/ ideological motivations.
This could mean more low quality home education with schools left to fill in the gaps of anything the children miss out on.
Home Education – Relevance to A-Level Sociology
This material is mainly relevant to the education aspect of the A-level sociology course.
Home-ed is part of the postmodernisation of education, but TBH it is such a minor trend it is socially insignificant at time of writing, but interesting to observe nonetheless!
What are the advantages and disadvantages of making all students study maths until they are 18?
Rishi Sunak wants every student in the U.K. to study maths up until the age of 18 (1)
In his first speech of 2023 Sunak stated that he wants people to better equipped with numeracy skills so that they are better equipped to deal with an increasingly data-driven society and to manage their personal finances.
A further argument for making some kind of maths or numeracy lessons compulsory until 18 is that doing so should make British students more competitive internationally: many other countries which are higher up the PISA league tables do so, such as Finland and Canada.
Approximately half of 16-18 year olds currently do maths or science subjects at A-level, but most of these are those who achieved lower than a C grade at GCSE and are forced to resit their GCSE.
Only a minority of students who get C and above in maths go on to do a maths related subject at A-level, there are currently at least 400 000 16-18 year olds in Further Education institutions who are qualified to maths or science subjects but aren’t doing them, having opted for humanities subjects instead (20)
The speech was thin on details but the government has ruled out making A-level maths compulsory at 16-18 and has suggested that developing some innovate approaches to teaching numeracy post-16 will probably be required.
Increasing Maths Teaching: Supply and Demand Challenges…
On the supply side, the government is currently 5000 maths teachers short of its recruitment target.
A brief look at the statistics illustrates this: there were only 35 771 Maths teachers in state secondary schools in 2021, compared to 39 000 English teachers, with one in eight maths lessons being taught routinely by a non-specialist.
It seems unlikely that the government is going to be able to recruit more maths teachers given the 24% real terms pay cut teachers have been subjected to since 2010 and the current below inflation 5% pay increase being offered by the government for 2023.
And jobs in teaching are going to be especially unattractive for maths and science graduates, given that maths and science degrees tend to be gateways to higher paying careers.
A related supply problem is that sixth form colleges have seen drastic real terms funding cuts compared to other sixth form providers in recent years, being 20% underfunded in comparison, so these probably don’t have the funds to boost 16-18 math provision effectively.
On the demand side there is the problem that most students simply do not want to do maths related subjects beyond the age 16, and forcing all students to spend an hour or two a week studying a subject they don’t want to is a waste of resources, and so increasing maths provision could come at the expense of teaching students a broader range of subjects that they think will actually be of use to them.
There are a whole load of other subjects students could be usefully taught besides maths, such as critical thinking, political issues and debating contemporary news items civilly, for example.
And besides this A-level maths is actually the most popular subject already, with entries having increased from 83 000 in 2018-19 to almost 89 000 in 2020/ 2021. (3)
Finally, forcing 16-18 year olds to do maths won’t help the 8 million adults in the UK who only have primary levels of numeracy.
Signposting
This post is most relevant to the sociology of education, especially education policies.
students from independent schools did 7.4 hours more schoolwork per week during lockdown compared to students from state comprehensive schools.
Students from higher socio-economic backgrounds had significantly more support from their schools during lockdowns compared to students from lower economic backgrounds.
This is according to the latest findings from a contemporary longitudinal study (1) being carried by the Sutton Trust which is analysing the short and longterm consequences of the disruption suffered by students during the Covid lockdowns.
Social class differences in learning during lockdowns
Better of schools (in terms of FSM provision) were able to adapt much more quickly during Lockdown one to minimise disruption to student learning compared the most deprived schools.
Students attending independent schools (compared to state grammar and state comprehensive) and students attending the least deprived schools by FSM provision were more likely to receive online lessons during lockdowns; more likely to get more frequent online lessons; had more access to teachers outside of lessons; and suffered fewer barriers to learning such as lack of access to laptops at home.
By lockdown three the support offered to students by the more deprived schools had caught up with that of the least deprived schools, but significant differences remained.
For example, by lockdown three:
Students from the least deprived schools were doing 2.9 hours more schoolwork per week than students from the most deprived schools.
71% of students from the least deprived schools reported having 3 or more online lessons per week compared to only 53% of students from the most deprived schools.
Only 6% of pupils from higher managerial backgrounds reported only having a mobile device (rather than a computer) to access learning compared to 14% of pupils from routine/ manual/ non-working backgrounds.
Teacher contact during lockdowns
73% of students from independent schools reported having contact with teachers outside of lessons at least once a week during the first lockdown compared to only 43% of students from comprehensive schools. This gap had narrowed by the third lockdown with 77% of students from Independent schools and 52% of students from comprehensive schools reporting teacher contact.
Students from the most deprived quintile reported more teacher contact than those from the least deprived during the first lockdown and there was almost no reported variation during the third lockdown.
Hours of schoolwork during Lockdowns
Students from independent schools did almost twice as many hours schoolwork per week during the first lockdown compared to students from state comprehensive schools. The gap was narrower during the third lockdown with independent school students reporting 23.7 hours per week compared to 16.3 hours per week for comprehensive school children.
Pupils from the least deprived quintile did 3.2 hours more schoolwork per week during the first lockdown than pupils from the most deprived quintile and 2.9 hours more during the third lockdown.
Provision of online lessons during lockdowns
During the first lockdown 94% of independent schools provided online lessons compared to only 64% of state comprehensive schools. By the third lockdown state comprehensives had caught of a lot but there was still a large difference with 96% of independent schools providing online lessons compared to 87% of comprehensive schools.
By the third lockdown 95% of the least deprived schools (by FSM provision) were providing online learning compared to only 80% of the most deprived schools.
The above differences are significant but if we look at the amount of online learning which took place (immediately below) we find that independent schools and the least deprived schools were much more likely to provide MORE online classes…
How many online classes during lockdowns?
84% of pupils at Independent schools reported having more than three online lessons per day during the first lockdown, compared to only 33% of students from state comprehensive schools. The figures were 93% compared to 59% respectively during the third lockdown.
71% of students from the least deprived quintile reported having access to three or more online lessons a day during lockdown three compared to only 53% of students from the most deprived quintile.
NB this basically means that students attending the more deprived schools were more likely to get very little in the way of online learning, just one or two lessons a day, while students attending the better off schools were more likely to get three or more lessons, closer to a regular school day.
Barriers to learning during lockdowns by social class
Students faced several barriers to learning during lockdowns including:
Minimal provision of online lessons or, in some cases, no online lessons.
Internet connectivity problems.
Inability to access teachers during the lockdown periods.
Lack of access to desktop or laptop computers and having to rely on mobile devices.
Having to share a device with siblings.
A small percentage of students didn’t have any devices to access online learning
Lack of a quiet study space.
Parents who lacked the confidence to help students with learning during lockdowns
Students from lower social class backgrounds were more likely to suffer barriers to learning during lockdowns compared to students from higher social backgrounds.
For example 34% of students from higher and professional managerial backgrounds reported infrequent teacher contact during lockdowns compared to 39% of students from routine/ manual/ never worked backgrounds. The figures for having to share a device were 9% and 15% respectively for these two social classes.
Pupils without a device during lockdowns
Only 2% of pupils from independent schools reported not having access to a suitable device by lockdown three compared to 11% of pupils from state comprehensives.
5% of pupils from the least deprived backgrounds reported no access to a suitable device during lockdown three compared to 19% from the least deprived quintile.
Conclusions and policy implications…
15-18 year olds doing GCSEs and A-levels suffered just as much learning loss as younger students, and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds suffered proportionately more learning loss. Thus the pupil premium should be extended and paid out for 16-19 year olds for a couple of years. ATM Pupil Premium ends with year 11 students.
By lockdown three 30% of all year 11s who needed a laptop had received one, which was significant. However, HALF of all students who lacked a laptop or didn’t have access to one during the pandemic still haven’t received one.
Sources
Cullinane, C., Anders, J., De Gennaro, A., Early, E., Holt-White, E., Montacute, R., Shao, X., & Yarde, J. (2022). Wave 1 Initial Findings – Lockdown Learning. COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities (COSMO) study Briefing No. 1. London: UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities & Sutton Trust. Available at: https://cosmostudy.uk/publications/lockdown-learning
comparative education studies are useful to policy makers because they allow the ‘adaptation’ of best educational practice, but there are problems because what works in one culture may not be so successful in another!
Comparative education studies involve comparing aspects of one nation’s education system with another and analysing the reasons for similarities and differences within those systems.
Typical motives for doing a cross national comparative studies of education systems would be to find out why some countries get better overall outcomes (in terms of qualifications) for their pupils, or why some countries have better outcomes for disadvantaged students, and thus better equality of educational opportunity.
Comparative education studies have become increasingly popular in recent years and are one response to the increasing interest in education globally, as evidenced by the PISA testing regime which publishes comparisons of student performance in standardised international tests.
Why compare education systems…?
Comparative education studies are themselves part of the globalisation of education and there are different reasons why actors may wish to compare education systems.
Probably the most obvious is the pragmatic aim to improve education policy – this is where policy makers in one country will employ researchers to study aspects of education systems in another country to see what works well with the intention of adapting or even just copying those aspects for use in their home country.
Such studies may be done by policy makers in post-industrial countries hoping to maintain their competitiveness in a fast changing global economy, or by developing countries hoping to use education to modernise quickly.
One specific phenomena which has led to recent increase in this kind of practical study is ‘PISA shock’ – where countries have found their positions in the PISA league tables to be lower than expected, which can spur them on to conduct research into the education systems of countries higher up the league tables looking for ways to improve their own systems.
Besides pragmatic reasons for comparative education studies some researchers also do purely academic studies, just to develop a deeper understanding of how education systems interact with other institutions within a society – purely focused on theory building and with no intention of applying findings at a policy level.
Bartram (2018) notes that international comparisons of education are increasingly motivated by economic and political reasons rather than purely theoretical motives.
Problems with comparing national education systems
Educational practices need to be considered in the context of the local culture.
It may not be possible to simply lift aspects of one education system and apply it to another and get improved results, because educational practices which ‘fit’ the culture in one country might not fit the national or local cultures of another.
For example, in Western countries educators have introduced more collaborative learning in recent decades (such as more group work) and this has led to improved performance for most students, but this may not work as well in some Asian cultures which are more sensitive to ‘public image’, and in such cultures more individualised ‘sit down and be quiet learning may get better outcomes for students.
You also have to think about WHO is doing the comparisons and applying the (potential) policy changes. Often such research studies are dominated by western experts who may well regard western models of education as superior to traditional indigenous, community based models which may be regarded as inferior.
There is actually a long history of this, stretching back to colonial times when Western powers used their education systems a means of subjugating indigenous people in their colonies, but even after independence new states were coerced into accepting Western education systems as a condition to receive international development aid (Nguyen-Phuong Mai, 2019).
It is simply not the case that Western practices can be transplanted and fitted into local indigenous cultures with easy success, and in many cases countries and local cultures simply don’t want this kind of education, as is the case in many Islamic countries for example.
There is also a problem with comparing results obtained from international tests such as the PISA tests: for those countries appearing near the bottom of the international league tables it is easy to blame their education systems for their poor performance, but this simply may not be the case – it could be a range of other factors such as the prevailing wider economic problems in those countries.
In fact, there is some research (Pasl Sahlberg, 2015) that shows that neoliberal marketised education systems which preference parental choice do not yield better educational performance, even though this has been the dominant educational ideology of the last 40 years.
Signposting and Relevance to A-Level Sociology
The material above is most relevant to the sociology of education module, developing the theme of the relationship between globalisation and education.
Sources
Barlett and Burton (2021): Introduction to Education Studies, fifth edition
Personalised learning means listening to student’s needs and tailoring teaching and learning to meet those needs.
Personalised learning involves putting individual students at the centre of the learning experience, listening to their voices, understanding their individual strengths and limitations and tailoring teaching and learning strategies to their individual needs. It also involves working with them to help them realise their full potential and allowing students an element of choice in what they study through flexible learning pathways, which may entail schools working in partnership with institutions outsides of the school.
A useful analogy to help understand the concept of personalised learning is to contrast it to the world of production.
Personalised learning is the equivalent of making bespoke products according to what the individual consumer wants, in contrast to ‘standard education’ which is like mass production – taking a one sized fits all approach by teaching all students the same thing in the same way (like Chalk and Talk).
Personalised Learning in education policy
Personalised Education became a formal part of education policy in 2004 under the the New Labour Government.
At that time the DfES defined personalisation of learning as “a highly structured and responsive approach to each child’s and young person’s learning, in order that all are able to progress, achieve and participate. It means strengthening the link between learning and teaching by engaging pupils – and their parents – as partners in learning (1)
While the above definition is a fairly typical example of government speak – in that it doesn’t really say anything the DfES did at least further identify five key components of personalised learning which give some more specific details of what the policy might look like in practice:
Assessment for Learning – teachers knowing the strengths and limitations of individual students.
Teaching and learning strategies that build on the individual needs of students – for example learning being appropriately paced and stretching those students who need it.
Curriculum choice – flexible learning pathways which encourage students to take responsibility of their own learning.
The whole school taking a student centred approach, taking student voices seriously.
Strong partnership beyond the school – involving local communities and institutions.
Personalised learning is a reaction against the kind of standardised education that many associated with the ‘bog standard’ comprehensives of the 1960s – in which students were required to largely sit there and listen to the teacher, taking notes, with very little in the way of creativity or interactivity occurring.
NB this kind of ‘bog standard education’ didn’t necessarily happen in every Comprehensive school, and it may be something of a stereotype, but at least this image serves the function of showing what personalised learning isn’t!
What does personalised learning look like…?
Ideally it will start with teachers finding out as much as they can about the individual and working alongside them to find a suitable learning pathway.
Another aspect is helping students figure out what their end-goals are (usually cast in terms of career aspirations) and helping them study the right subjects to set them up for their future goals.
It also involves finding out how students learn the most effectively and designing tasks for them to work on that are gong to suit their learning style, part of this will involve encouraging them to work in groups or individually, and most likely a mixture of both depending on the subjects.
In reality the capacity for schools to personalise learning is limited (see below) by available staff and the curriculum demands (schools are still required to be exam factories) so the personalisation of learning may well be reduced to:
occasional guided independent study lessons, days or maybe weeks during the year.
students working with teachers to draw up personalised learning plans for independent study which are reviewed only once or twice a term.
Some lessons maybe more ‘personalised’ with the the teacher acting as a ‘facilitator’ most of the time and students largely getting on with their own project work. You are most likely to see this in post-16 education and in creative subjects such as art and music technology.
Limitations to personalised learning
Firstly there is the fact of the national curriculum and the demand on schools to get students GCSE grades – obviously personalisation isn’t to go as far as to allowing students to simply learn guitar or pain for 6 hours a day 5 days a week, so ‘personalisation’ is limited by the requirement that students have to study English, Maths and the other core subjects.
Secondly there is the limitation of teachers’ time – the higher the ratio of students to teachers the less personalised learning is going to be. Teachers have to get through a certain amount of content and most of the time PowerPoints and group work where all students are focused on the same topic are quicker than allowing students to spend time exploring their own ‘learning pathways’.
Thirdly, schools are required to encourage students to work together, and so while a students might personally prefer to just work entirely on their own, if they are in school, this probably won’t be allowed to happen most of the time – they are going to be in a classroom working with other students.
A 2016 article from Education Week points out that the available research on personalised learning initiatives isn’t robust enough to prove that personalised learning is effective.
The Digital Counter-Revolution blog criticises the concept of personalised learning as being focused on individual academic achievement. In practice a lot of personalised learning has turned into a helping students how to maximise their grades.
in this sense all personalised learning is doing is making individual students compete more with each other, it isn’t about helping them think more critically or about being more creative or just about being better people – it is just a response to the pressures of marketisation and a competitive Higher Education and labour market.
Has Learning in the U.K. become more personalised?
Mainstream education as a whole has become more ‘postmodern’, but the tend has been very slight and mainly on the fringes of the mainstream education.
For the most part our education system remains very ‘modern’ with it being 95% focused on teaching the national curriculum and getting students through standardised exams.
I think the same thing is true for personalisation which is part of the very gradual and slight/ fringe move towards postmodernity, given that individualism, diversity and relativism are a key ideas within postmodernism.
So YES mainstream education in the U.K. has become more personalised, but personally I’d say most schools pay lip-service to this personalisation, with students having little real choice over what they study until post-GCSEs (they are not allowed to ditch English and Maths for example and have to resit it post-16 if they fail it at GCSE level).
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the education topic within A-level Sociology.
Education policy to combat racism has gone from ignorance, through assimilation, integration, multiculturalism to aggressive majoritarianism in 2022.
Gilborn (2008) divided policy approaches to combatting racism into eight phases:
Ignorance and neglect (1945 to late 1950s)
Assimilation (late 1950s to mid 1960s)
Integration (mid 1960s to late 1970s)
Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism (late 1970s to late 1980s)
Thatcherism: the new racism and colour-blind policy (mid 1980s to 1997)
New Labour: Naive multiculturalism (1997 to 2001)
Cynical multiculturalism: from 9/11 to 7/7 (2001 to 2005)
Aggressive majoritarianism (2005 to present day).
Ignorance, assimilation and integration
The government’s response to immigration from 1945 to the late 1950s was that of ignorance and neglect. The government largely ignored the issue of immigration from mainly the Caribbean, India and Pakistan and put no educational policies in place to do anything about the children of immigrants.
This was in line with the racist colonial mentality that people from Africa and the Indian subcontinent would do primarily menial, unskilled manual jobs which required little in the way of educational input to prepare them for.
Assimilation
From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s the government’s official response to immigration was to expect immigrants to assimilate to the British way of life, meaning that they were expected to adapt and become just like the majority white British population.
This was very much a one-way expectation, with ‘them’ being expected to become ‘like us’. Any racial tensions in schools during this period were interpreted as a migrant problem – some immigrants were just not trying hard enough to assimilate.
Integration and education policy
By the late 1960s policy makers had begun to realise that the assimilationist approach was impractical – Indian and Black-Caribbean cultures were not simply going to disappear after a period of time and there was a move towards policies being more accepting of cultural diversity.
This period saw the introduction of the Race Relations Act in 1976 which made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of ‘race’.
Multicultural education
Education became more multicultural from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.
The late 1970s were a period of large spread social unrest due to the failures of Capitalism leading to mass unemployment and poverty, which were disproportionately felt by black and asian minorities.
This was a period in which ethnic minorities were protesting more about the high levels of marginalisation, poverty, unemployment and racial discrimination they were experiencing which resulted in a number of widely publicised riots such as the Brixton Riots of 1981.
Part of this resistance by young ethnic minorities manifested itself in more disruption in school and higher truancy rates.
The Swann Report was published in 1985 as a response to such unrest and this represented something of a landmark change in thinking about how policy should combat racism:
It recognised that cultural diversity was a positive force for social change and that a society with a plurality of cultures was richer than a more homogenous white culture.
It recognised that ethnic minorities in the U.K. faced higher levels of unemployment, poverty and racial discrimination.
It explicitly identified institutional racism as a problem which it defined as ‘where the official institutions in society, such as the education system… operate in a way that automatically discriminates against and disadvantages certain groups.
It also recognised that racism was not just a problem that ethnic minorities had to deal with but that it was also a white problem, and that white people needed to be educated about racism, especially in white-majority areas.
The Swann report caused division in central government and was largely ignored there, but many Local Education Authorities acted on its findings and introduced changes to make education more multicultural.
Multicultural education involved understanding and celebrating difference in education
Two examples of multicultural education included:
having classes which specifically educated students about the languages, religions and diets of different minority ethnic groups.
Changing text books so that they had broader representation of ethnic minorities.
However early multicultural education has been criticised for being condescending and ignoring institutional racism, seen by many as tokenistic and doing little to really foster a mutual understanding and respect between cultures.
Anti-Racist Education
Anti-Racist education believed that racist attitudes needed to be explicitly opposed within schools and that active measures needed to be taken to ensure equality of opportunity for all ethnic groups. Anti racist policies were primarily adopted by some of the more left-wing Local Education Authorities, to whom the New Right Tory government was opposed in the early 1980s.
Colour Blind Education Policy
The New Right Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher and John Major adopted what David Gilborn (2001) has described as a ‘colour blind’ education policy because it ignored ethnic diversity altogether.
This was convenient for the Tories in the early 1980s against the backdrop of the Falklands’ war and increasing popular concern about the amount of immigration to the U.K. and a rising fervour over (white) national identity.
Two ways in which the New Right’s education policies were colour blind include:
Leaving everything to market forces and individual choice which took no account of ethnic diversity.
The National Curriculum which was introduced in 1988 was also highly ethnocentric if we examine some of the core subjects such as languages, literature and history. The only languages which were options for students were white European languages and there was almost no recognition of black and Asian minority cultures in history or english during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Naive multiculturalism
Gliborn (2001) characterises New Labour’s education policies as being a form of naive multiculturalism. He suggests that while New Labour acknowledged that significant ethnic inequalities existed and that something had to be done about this, they in fact introduced no significant policies to actually to do so.
Rather, in education, they assumed that issues such as racial discrimination would be tackled adequately through the introduction of Citizenship into the curriculum.
Cynical multiculturalism
The September 11 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York ushered in what Gilborn (2008) refers to as an era of cynical multiculturalism in social policy. This means that while New Labour maintained a rhetoric of commitment to promoting ethnic diversity and equality of opportunity the policies they introduced were more similar to the assimilation/ integration phases of the 1950s and 1960s.
For example New Labour made it harder for the spouses of recently arrived immigrants to join them in the U.K., they sped up the deportation of illegal immigrants and they put more emphasis on the importance for migrants to learn English.
Aggressive majoritarianism
Gilborn (2008) suggests that since the London Bombings of 2005 the New Labour government adopted a stance of aggressive majoritarianism.
The media discourse at this time was one of Islamophobia and of how integration policies have failed, and there was something of a return to assimilationism.
There was also more open criticism of veiling as a problem rather than an aspect of diversity and acceptance of diversity was more likely to be seen as destabilising rather than something to be celebrated.
The Coalition government carried on the majoritarian agenda, with the then Prime Minister David Cameron saying in 2011 that multiculturalism had failed and that we needed a stronger identity in the UK to prevent extremism.
The Coalition government’s introduction of British Values into the curriculum is another example of a more assimilationist majoritarianism.
British Values are today taught as something passive and peaceful and the policy discourse suggests that greater social harmony can be achieved if everyone accepts ‘Britishness’ as a core identity rather than us celebrating multiculturalism in schools.
British Values – A form of cynical multiculturalism?
We might also interpret the ‘PREVENT’ agenda, introduced in 2011 as an example of this – which highlights the fact that some elements of Islamic culture have failed to integrate and it is the job of schools to identify these failures and intervene to prevent these aspects of Islamic culture from harming the majority.
It also seems to be the case that the government thinks that we are now in a post-racial Britain – that there is no real problem with racial discrimination anymore so education policy need not address this.
Signposting
Education policy and its relationship to ethnicity and racism is a topic within the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.
