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
The evidence suggests that if you’re white and middle class you’ll do OK out of A-levels being cancelled, not so if you’re BAME or poor.
The Coronavirus may not discriminate, but the social response to it probably will, and this could well be the case with the recent decision by the DFE to cancel A-level exams.
Universities will now rely on a combination of GCSE results and predicted grades from schools and colleges in order to determine which students qualify for which degree courses, and this will benefit some more than others.
The winners
If you’ve been working hard all year and had a decent mock exam grade (which would have been sat very recently in most centers) then you’re predicted grade should at least match the grade you would have got.
If you suffer from exam stress, dyslexia or any other ‘condition’ that may mean you under perform in exams compared to your ability, then your predicted grade may even be higher than what you would have got.
If you’ve got an unconditional offer from a university for the course you want, and you’re happy enough with your predicted grades then you’ve just been gifted two free months of your life, although you may not be able to do what you want with those two months, like going outside for example!
In general I’d say that the next two months of A-level teaching are actually the most pointless thing in terms of useful skills and knowledge – you would have literally spent two months cramming knowledge into your head and learning exam technique, both skills being utterly useless in any real life content, work or otherwise.
You’ve been spared that, however….
The losers
This article in The Guardian suggests that predicted grades tend to be lower for black and minority ethnic students and for those from poorer backgrounds, compared to those students from white middle class backgrounds.
The argument is that teacher stereotypes, or labelling if you like, mean that BAME student’s grades are under-predicted, and so these students tend to do better than expected in exams, an opportunity now lost to them. (Yes they may get a chance to sit some kind of exam in the Autumn, but that might be too late).
The article further suggests that those who are privately educated are more likely to have an unconditional offer and that those with ‘pushy parents’ are more likely to negotiate their children higher predicted grades from the schools, drawing on cultural capital theory.
And I do feel for home educated or self-studying students, who probably have no record of past achievement and no mock exams to fall back on, especially if they messed up their GCSEs and are returning to A-levels maybe after taking a year or a few months out.
Conclusions
The DFE, exam boards and UCAS are all aware of how a university entrance system based on predicted grades discriminates against certain students, I just hope they put measures in place to combat this.
We won’t know how effective any anti-discriminatory measures have been until we can compare the ‘results’ and UCAS entrance stats for this year with last year, assuming that data will even be published?
How do schools try to control pupils? Some of the ways include academic surveillance, CCTV, teaching British Values. Prevent and the use of isolation units. It also explores how effective schools are as agents of social control.
One possible social function that schools perform is that of social control. This post explores some of the ways school might perform this function and asks how effectively schools control pupils and parents today?
You can use the material below to evaluate some of the perspectives on education, and much of it is also relevant to the crime and deviance module, especially the material on surveillance.
What is social control?
Social control refers to the formal and informal techniques that
may be used to make the individual 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 in society.
There are many institutions which can be said to perform social
control, such as the law and the courts, the police, religion, the media and
education.
The education system is of interest as an institution of
social control because it reaches more people than most other institutions. Nearly
all of us will attend school from a young age, and spend thousands of hours in
school as children, while most of us will have no direct contact with the
police, for example.
How might school act as an agent of social control?
Parents are legally required to either send
their children to a state or independently run school. Put another way, pupils
are expected to attend school, and truant officers are employed to catch those
who are not attending. Parents can be fined if their students have unauthorised
absences.
The > 90% of pupils who attend state schools
will spend at least six hours a day in formal education. Many will spend more time
in school because the school day has been getting longer in recent years, through
the addition of both morning classes or breakfast clubs and after school clubs.
Students who attend state schools will be taught
the National Curriculum, having limited choice over what they study until they
make their GCSE choices at 14.
From 2013 young people are required to remain in
some form of education or training until the age 18, raised from the previous ‘education
leaving age’ of 16.
Schools and colleges are required to teach pupils
about ‘British Values’. This might be regarded as indoctrination by the State.
Schools are responsible for Prevent – they have
to report to the police anyone they believe to be involved with terrorist activities,
and they have to work to prevent students being attracted to terrorist
organisations.
Schools engage in physical surveillance of pupils,
most obviously through the increasing use of cameras, but also by using staff
at school gates, in playgrounds and walking the corridors during lessons.
Schools have clear codes of conduct and use isolation
units and detentions to regulate deviant behaviour.
Schools increasingly involve parents in
monitoring students and keeping them on track, using ‘parenting contracts’ with
deviant cases.
Schools keep databases of student’s academic
progress and report back to parents regularly. This means students know they
are being watched, and most of them ‘self-regulate’ because of this.
Schools may require certain students to work
with learning support staff or attend further supported learning, which means
such students will be under higher levels of surveillance.
Schools may keep (confidential) records of
student discussions about mental health and well-being and work with medical
professionals to require students to attend further ‘support’ as necessary.
Schools constantly remind students of the
importance of qualifications for getting a good career, which may lead to some
students self-regulating.
Students are required to resit GCSE maths and
English when in 16-19 education if they achieve less than a C first time round,
meaning less choice in later life for those students.
Are schools effective agents of social control: exploring the evidence
It’s hard to argue against the view that schools use more control measures today than they did in the 1970s and 80s. However, just because schools try to control pupils more than they used to, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are effective in doing so.
Furthermore, there are some possible counter trends, such as the growth of home education and the increase in post-16 educational choices, that suggest that ‘formal education’ might actually be less constraining and controlling than it once was for increasing numbers of pupils.
Below I explore some of the different types of evidence to examine whether schools are effective agents of social control
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 from school during term time, even if just for one day. The fines start at £60 and if not paid parents can be prosecuted and face up to three months in jail.
These fines were tested in 2015 when John Platt refused to pay a fine handed out by the Isle of Wight LEA after he took his daughter on holiday to Disney World, Florida during term time. He argued that his daughter’s attendance had otherwise been excellent, and took his case the Supreme Court.
John Platt: guilty of taking his daughter on holiday for one week during term time.
Platt lost the case, with the court siding with the Local Education Authority, declaring that he was guilty of breaching school rules and failing to secure his child’s regular attendance at school.
This court ruling seems to have made LEAs more likely to impose fines, and in 2017 -18 Local Authorities issued 260 000 penalty notices for unauthorized absences to parents, which was an increase of 110 000 on the previous year.
Extended School Days
Though not compulsory, there are some academies, such as the NET Academies Trust which run extended school days – starting school at 8.45 rather than at 9.00, running extra lessons after 15.00 for underachieving students, and offering a further enrichment programme later in the afternoon.
The rising of the ‘education’ leaving age in 2013
In 2013 the government raised the ‘formal education’ leaving age of pupils in England from 16 to 18 years.
Pupils can still leave school at 16, but only if they have a place at a further education college, or are going into work which has some kind of accredited training attached to it.
This means that rather than being able to transition to full adulthood and relative freedom at the age of 16, students are now subjected the control and surveillance associated with training for at least another two years.
If an individual is on a work-based training course, this regime of control may not be as severe as being in school, and in many ways this is probably going to be quite similar to just starting out on a new job anyway. But since 2013 this layer of ‘educational control’ has been formalised, and it means that MORE PEOPLE are now definitely going to be subjected to work based observations and assessments than ever before.
There are more recent reports that camera footage taken in schools to show parents how their children have misbehaved, and to get students to reflect on and take responsibility for their ‘bad’ behaviour.
It’s interesting to note that if you do a google search for ‘schools’ and ‘cctv’ or ‘surveillance’ there isn’t much research being done, so the use of CCTV in schools seems to have become normalised as a form of social control.
The most recent evolution of physical surveillance is the use of body cams by teachers, which some schools are currently trialing. (Link from 2020).
The increasing use of isolation units
Isolation units are staffed rooms, often with partitioned booths, where disruptive students are sent to ‘cool off’, possibly for an hour or so, but sometimes for an entire day.
They are especially popular, according to at least one of the reports below, among multi-academy trusts.
Isolation booths in one primary school – may as well start ’em young!
According to a 2018 BBC report, at least 200 out of 1000 schools use isolation units, or booths. Some even have permanent units with their own toilet facilities so pupils can remain in them for an entire day if necessary.
According to this Guardian article (2020), schools are using isolation units to punish pupils for more and more trivial breaches of the rules. For example the article refers to one girl who was put in isolation for forgetting her planner, for the first time ever.
Some schools seem to be using isolation on a more regular basis to freeze some pupils out of the mainstream school environment. The article refers to one individual, Brendan, who spent much of his last term in isolation, and left schools with no GCSEs.
It’s likely that these units are growing in popularity since the government has cracked down on the use of exclusions, which means schools are more likely to try and deal with deviant students in-house, which explains the rise of isolation units.
Certain extracts from the guidance read like something out of the 1950s: schools are required to prepare pupils for modern life by ensuring their moral, spiritual and cultural development.
The primary aim of the British Values agenda seems to be about promoting democracy, and it is suggested that schools look for opportunities within the National Curriculum as well as extra-curricular activities to promote them.
This article in The Conversation presents one of the problems with teaching British Values is that the idea of what British Values should be taught in schools wasn’t discussed particularly widely by parliament, let alone the general public before schools were required to teach them to pupils.
The Prevent Duty
The Prevent Duty (in effect since 2015) requires that schools take due regard to ensure that pupils are not drawn into terrorism.
Specifically, the guidance recommends teaching British Values, as well as the possibility of monitoring students’ online activities, and it provides contacts if schools have a concern about particular students, among which it lists the local police force.
This seems to be some extremely strong evidence that schools are directly being used as agents of formal social control, working directly with the police to combat terrorism.
However, although the intention is to prevent extremism, the legislation may have had the opposite effect. This 2016 report by Rights Watch UK suggests that Prevent may have increased divisions in British society.
The report argues that divisions may have increased as a result of untrained teachers unnecessarily referring students on to anti-terrorism authorities because they have misinterpreted certain patterns of behaviour or actions as being suspicious, when in fact the students has no terrorist intentions at all.
The increasing use of technology to monitor students
In the United States some schools have moved to 24 hour monitoring of students’ online activities, at least those made within the school’s own system.
This article cites the example of one student talking about self-harm on a school messaging system, after school hours, this triggered an alert from the monitoring system, and a member of staff contacted the student’s parent immediately.
I know this is the United States, but the UK so often follows what the U.S. does, just a few years afterwards. This article from Wired Magazine highlights the fact that students are already under a historically unprecedented level of electronic surveillance here in the UK, and maybe this is just the start, with surveillance of personal communications set to get ever more intrusive.
Other forms of Surveillance in schools
I’ve only examined a limited range of some of the more obvious forms of evidence which suggests schools are increasingly acting as agents of social control for the British State.
In addition to all the above, schools have increased their level of ‘academic surveillance’ since the introduction of the 1988 Education Act, and students are now exposed to regular testings, reports, and reviews of their progress as just a normal part of school life.
This kind of academic-surveillance has just become normalised: most students expect it, and don’t even think about challenging it.
It is possibly this that is the most profound social control measure – millions of students knowing that their progress is going to be reviewed at least once every six weeks, probably more often, keeps them working, keeps them doing homework, keeps them chained to the system.
The same may be said of getting students to think about their future careers – where UCAS is concerned, students have to start thinking about what universities to go to and writing their personal statements a year in advance, taking up considerable time in their final year of formal education, AND (if they get a conditional offer) keeping them working.
So it is possibly the competitive nature of the system, the concern about failure and the constant surveillance of progress which are the main mechanisms whereby schools control pupils?
Counter Trends?
The system doesn’t control all students equally, and there are at least three recent counter-trends which suggest schools are NOT effective agents of social control: the increase in home education, the increase in exclusions and the increase in choice in 16-18 education.
The Number of Exclusions is Increasing
According to DFES data, both fixed term and permanent exclusions have been increasing since 2012/13
However, whether this counts as evidence against schools being effective agents of social control is debatable.
Personally I think it does suggest schools are not being effective, because exclusions suggest schools cannot control students within school boundaries, so students are offloaded, possibly to be under less surveillance once they have been excluded.
HOWEVER, you might interpret this increase as evidence of MORE control: it all depends what happens to the students afterwards!
The increase in Home Education
48,000 children were being home-educated in 2016-17, up from about 34,000 in 2014-15, according to this BBC article.
Students educated at home are more likely to get a choice in how they are educated, and are less likely to be subjected to many of the control measures suggested above.
However, we are talking about relatively small numbers of students here – 48, 000 children, compared to a few million in the education system as a whole!
Increasing post 16 education choices
Students may have to stay on in some form of education or training until they are 18, but it’s debatable whether many of those are really still under educational surveillance.
Once students hit 16 years of age, they can enter work based training, which can be just like an ordinary job, except with lower pay because they are ‘training’, so this may not be that much of a change from pre-2013 when they could have just left formal education altogether!
Conclusions: Are schools effective agents of social control?
Based on the evidence above, I’d say that they are certainly being used by the State to control certain pupils more, and that schools themselves are making increasing use of technology to control students through surveillance.
When it comes to the question of effectiveness – I’d say yes, they have become more effective – but this is primarily due to the more subtle forms of academic surveillance, which works day to day, and goes largely unquestioned.
However, there are a significant minority or students who are NOT controlled – both those who get excluded, and those who are home educated, and I’m sure if I dug further I’d find that we’re talking about the underclass being excluded and the educated middle classes who are being home educated.
Links to some contemporary sociology which students can use in their A-level sociology exams!
Links to some of the contemporary news items, documentaries and research studies which I’ve blogged about in 2019-2020, which are relevant to the sociology of education.
According to the AQA sociology specification, students are expected to be able to use contemporary examples to illustrate the points they make in their sociology exams.
Links to relevant blog posts….
Class,
gender ethnicity and your chances of getting into university – Free School
Meals students are still about twice less likely to make it university compared
to those not in receipt of free school meals. Meanwhile the gender gap
continues to increase, and white students lack behind nearly every other ethnic
group when it comes to university entrance.
How
to break into the elite – a documentary looking at numerous case studies of
how employers want cultural capital in their employees, and so how lack of
cultural capital prevents working class kids from getting the top jobs.
Inside
the school cuts crisis – a documentary looking at how funding cuts to
education are leading to schools cutting SEN provision, Useful to evaluate New
Right education policies.
Student
debt and future careers natural experiment – In 2019, a Tech Billionaire
wrote off the debts of an entire cohort who graduated from his university – now
we just need to wait half a decade or so to see what the effects are!
How does your social class background, your gender and your ethnicity influence your chances of getting into university?
There are still huge variations in the types of student who make it to university, if we analyse the Department for Education’s Higher Education data by ‘Free School Meals’ (a proxy for social class), gender and ethnicity. This update should be of clear relevant to the education module within A-level sociology.
We can see from the table above that there are stark differences by pupil characteristics.
82% of non Free School Meal Chinese girls make it to university, compared to only 2% of girls of Free-School Meal Traveler of Irish Heritage background.
The above chart is very effective in showing the ethnic differences in university students, and with some interesting variations by FSM status – Black African FSM girls seem to do particular well, for example.
It’s also interesting to note that ‘White British’ students come very near the bottom of the table, with figures of around 40% HE participation for non FSM students, but only around 20 average for FSM White British pupils. The reason for singling out White students here is that the majority of pupils are white, so these figures are going to have most impact on the national average statistics.
The University FSM gap
There is still an 18.6% gap in Higher Education participation by Free School Meal status, this has decline by almost 1.5% points in the last decade, but this is slow progress!
The University Gender Gap
TBH I’m somewhat surprised to see the gender gap continuing apace, and it seems to be a steady increase year on year!
Other Higher Education inequalities
The latest report (see link below) also highlights inequalities by region (the biggest gap is in the South East, the smallest in London) and by Special Educational Need. See below for more details!
It also looks at the differences for ‘high tariff’ universities (the ones which ask for higher grades) which show starker differences.
Widening Participation Targets
The Office for Students has been campaigning to get universities to widen participation by reducing the above gaps. Most universities have in fact pledged to try and half some of these gaps by 2025 for example – if they succeed this would mean only a 10% gap between FSM and non FSM pupils.
However, this would mean fewer middle class students getting into university, assuming that more places are not created.
An exploration of the key facts on private or independent schools and some of the arguments and evidence for or against their existence.
Private, or Independent schools are a key feature of the British education system, attended by around 6% of children, the vast majority from the wealthiest families. In this post I explore some of the arguments and evidence for and against independent schools.
This information should be useful to help you evaluate perspectives on education, especially the Marxist perspective and New Right view of education.
What are private schools?
Private (aka independent) schools are privately funded through fees or donations from parents or other donors, rather than being funded by the state through taxation. Independent schools do not have to follow the national curriculum like state schools.
Private schools are also known as Independent schools, and the two terms are usually used interchangeably, and I will use the two terms interchangeably in this post
Different types of Independent school
Independent schools exist for all ages of pupil – from prep-schools (infant schools) to secondary schools and 16-19 colleges. Some will specialize in one age group, others will have provision from 3 years to 19 years of age.
Somewhat confusingly ‘Public Schools’ such as Eton and Harrow are actually ‘private’ or ‘independent’ schools. Public schools are the ‘elite’ independent schools – they are the oldest and most well established independent schools and typically have annual fees of over £30 000 year per pupil.
The term ‘public’ school comes from 1868 when a group of seven elite boys boarding schools were granted independence from the state and the church and allowed to be run by groups of local governors, so they are really elite private schools.
Most independent schools are day schools, but some are boarding schools.
Independent Schools and State Schools: similarities and differences
Statistics on Private schools in the UK
The number of private schools is steadily increasing
The main source for the states below is the 2019 Independent Schools Council 2019 survey of independent schools.
1,364 schools are members of the Independent Schools Council.
In 2019 there were 536,109 pupils at ISC member schools, a record number of pupils.
6,169 pupils in ISC schools paid no fees at all, a figure which is increasing as a proportion of Independent school pupils but still only represents just over 1% of all pupils in independent schools.
33.8% are minority ethnic pupils, reflecting general population
84,293 pupils identified as having SEND, equating to 15.7% of all pupils, marginally higher than last year.
The most common SEND is Specific Learning Difficulty (SPLD), which includes conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia and represents 57.5% of all SEND pupils in ISC schools.
5.4% of all pupils are foreign students, whose parents reside permanently abroad, the highest number of students being from China.
There were 69,155 boarding pupils on Census day – 17th January 2019.
An increasing number of ISC schools operate campuses overseas, educating 39,616 pupils.
The most common age is 16-18, or A-level ages students
Arguments for private schools
One argument for independent schools is that they are like Beacon schools, showcasing the very best of education. Independent schools provide a very positive learning environment for their pupils, with some of the best teacher-pupil ratios in the country, excellent learner support facilities and other resources deployed in IT, sports and the arts, to give students a well-rounded, broad education. They also tend to instill good discipline in students, so truancy and exclusion rates should be lower than for state schools.
Then there’s the results, which are far better than for state schools. In 2018 48% of private-school students achieved A*s and As at A-level was 48%, nearly double the national average of 26%.
There is also an economic arguemnt for independent schools, in the context of an increasingly global education market – increasing numbers of parents from abroad (especially China) pay fees to have their students attend British independent schools – meaning these schools are an econmic asset, they bring money into the country.
Finally, from a Liberal (or broadly postmodern) perspective, surely parents have the right to send their children to private schools rather than state schools?
Arguments against private schools
I’ve taken many (but not all) of the arguments below from Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston.
Green and Kynaston argue that the existence of private schools limits the life chances of those who attend state schools and damages wider society.
One in every 16 pupils attends an independent school, and yet one in every seven teachers works at an independent school, meaning that as a nation we spend twice as much on the 6-7% of privately educated pupils as we do on pupils attending state schools. Green and Kynasaton argues that the primary effect of this intense focus of resources on the top 6-7% is to give them an increased chance (read unfair advantage) of getting into a top university and then into one of the elite professions.
Between 2010 and 2015 an average of 40% from Oxford and Cambridge were made to the 6-7% of students who had been privately educated, which effectively blocks offers going to those who attended state schools. 54% of ISC pupils continue to a Russell Group university.
The private school advantage carries on throughout the life cycle – Politics, the media, and public service all show high proportions of privately educated in their number, including 65% of senior judges, 59% of civil service permanent secretaries and 57% of the House of Lords.
Essentially what Private schools do is reproduce class inequality!
The Sutton Trust’s 2019 data explorer allows you to find out the percentage of people from different professions who were privately educated.
But there’s also a deeper problem, one of resource inefficiency – extra resources given to students who are doing well or OK produce diminishing returns compared to extra resources being spent on those students who are less able. For example in a classroom where there is already one teaching assistant, adding another won’t do as much good as adding one classroom assistant to a classroom where there are no teaching assistants.
The whole of the indepdent school system does just that for the children of the wealthy…. we spend twice as much to give them a little boost so they can get into the best jobs, meaning fewer resources being spent on average or the worse off students, where these resources would probably do much more social good.
Finally, James Blunt attended a private school. Maybe if he’d have gone to a regular secondary modern he would have produced some better music?
Conclusion: are private schools good or bad for Britain?
On balance it would seem that Independent schools give a significant advantages to the children of the parents of those who can afford to pay their tuition fees. As a result of attending an independent school students benefit from smaller class sizes and more support, which translates into a much improved chance of getting into a Russel Group University and then into an elite job.
For those who attend one of the elite public schools these advantages are especially significant, multiplied it seems by cultural and social capital which provide advantage through the life course.
However, whether having a concentration of the upper middle classes going into the best jobs and effectively running the country benefits Britain as a whole is much more open to debate.
If you believe that having diversity in the elite professions and government is of benefit to society, then private schools prevent this by effectively keeping out people from poorer backgrounds.
It is also possible that the huge resource expenditure on each privately educated child would be more effectively spent educating the more disadvantaged kids rather than the most disadvantaged.
Personally, I’d rather see less spending on private education and the rich kids fending for themselves, competing on a level playing field with the other 90% of kids, and more money spent on compensatory education for those at the very bottom!
If you relate this to some of the evidence from Left Realism (especially the Perry School Project) – a few thousand pounds extra spent on disadvantaged kids at a young age pays back several times over as those children are kept in school educated effectively and prevented from pursuing a life of crime.
However, abolishing private schools is unlikely to happen given that so many people in government attended a private school.
In 1950 there were 19700 young people graduated with a degree, in 2019 that figure will be around 1.4 million.
However, is this increasing number of graduates actually a good thing?
There have certainly been a lot of winners with the expansion of Higher Education, which is now big business in the UK.
More graduates has meant more money flowing into Universities (albeit from private rather than public sources, more of that later), and many of these have expanded, which has resulted in an increase in teaching jobs and various support jobs in the HE sector.
And there is a whole industry surrounding meeting students’ needs – most obviously the need for student accommodation, but also a whole host of local businesses in university towns will be partially or wholly dependent on student expenditure. The student subsistence economy is estimated to be worth £95 billion annually.
However, in 2018 only 57% of young graduates went onto ‘higher skilled employment’, while 43% ended up unemployed or in jobs which previously would not have required a degree, such as nursing.
This means that almost half of today’s graduates could be victims of what we might call ‘qualification inflation’, and rather than going straight into work at 18 and training/ qualifying on the job while earning, they are now effectively forced into having three years of no or low earnings while they study for unnecessary qualifications while being saddled with student loan debts of tens of thousands of pounds.
A final little known fact is that around 1/2 of student loans are never repaid, which means that the taxpayer is effectively subsidising these unnecessary degrees, and there does seem to be a disturbing correlation between the half of students doing unnecessary degrees and the half of loans not repaid.
This means that the taxpayer is subsidising around half a million students a year to do degrees that are in no way related to their jobs, while a good chunk of this money gets sucked upwards, to universities and landlords.
Seems like a hidden case of the state subbing the elite by stealth, while conning almost half of university students?!?
A timeline of documentaries about education in England and Wales from 2010 to 2019.
There are several useful documentaries available for teaching and learning the education module as part of A-level sociology and this post simply provides a few links to some of them. The easiest way to access the links to them is to go via my Google Spread Sheet – which contains a lot more than just video resources btw…
Education Documentaries 2010- 2019
Where possible the links take you through to the actual videos, but in some cases they aren’t available anymore, mainly thanks to the BBC being an anachronism which can’t seem to store documentaries even though we have no real choice but to pay our licence fee, in which case the link goes to the programme homepage, or Wiki in the case of the ‘Educating series.
How useful are education documentaries for teaching A-level sociology?
Well, it depends on the documentary! Personally I’ve used most of the above docs in my teaching over the last few years. I tend to find ‘single issue’ documentaries more useful, such as ‘How to Break into the Elite’, whereas the ‘fly on the wall documentaries’ are maybe less useful as valid texts but more useful for getting students to think about research methods.
A timeline of education documentaries
NB I know it probably looks hideous if you’re viewing this on a tablet or a phone, but if you actually click through to the Tableau site, it looks a lot better. Just an experiment, not sure it worked TBH!
Changing Education Paradigms
An excellent video criticising modernist perspectives on education.
Signposting and related posts
This material is mainly relevant to the sociology of education module, part of the A-level sociology specification.
Why don’t working class graduates with good degrees get the best jobs?
This documentary focuses on social mobility, and the myth of meritocracy, focusing on why working class graduates with good degrees struggle to get into the top jobs.
Statistics mentioned in the documentary
About 1/3rd of the population come from working class backgrounds, but only 10% make it into Britain’s top professions, and they earn 15% less than their colleagues from more privileged backgrounds.
Put another way you are 6 times more likely to land an elite job if you’re upper middle class.
Russel Group University students with 2nd class degrees are more likely to go into a top profession than those from working class backgrounds and got a first.
Oxbridge candidates from privileged backgrounds end up earning more than those from less privileged backgrounds.
Banking and finance – 34% educated privately
Private equity – nearer 70%
Top employers want cultural capital as well as qualifications
The stats suggest that top employers are not rewarding what the universities are rewarding, and this is preventing working class kids from getting the top jobs.
City recruiters are looking for ‘polish’ in the way they present – if we break this down this means accent, mannerism, behavior, dress.
One of the areas most affected by this is sales in finance: it is felt that if employees don’t look and feel ‘reassuringly expensive’, this will undermine the firm/ sector.
To illustrate this we have an interview with one independent recruitment agent who has a woman with an Essex accent on her books who she ‘can’t get a job for love for money’
This also applies to the The Media Sector – 60K of last years grads aspired to a career in media, but working class students are at a disadvantage because they don’t have the cultural capital to ‘fit in’. With the media, there’s a kind of ‘studied informality’ and way of being ‘knowingly hip, and those from WC backgrounds are just confused by it… lack of being at ease.
It seems that having cultural capital is crucial to breaking into a job in Media: If you have a parent who works in film and television you’re 12 times more likely to work in the Media, and 60-70% of those who work in The Media come from professional and managerial backgrounds. Tacit knowledge, no explicit rules about how you get in.
The problem with all of this is that this set of rules are ‘tacit’ – they unwritten, a set of social codes which are quite ‘knowing’ (to with dress/ speak) and without being brought up with them, working class people struggle to make the leap of selfhood required to get into the top jobs.
Why the working classes lack confidence….
People from disadvantaged backgrounds have more unstable lives, those from more advantaged have more stable lives and are more likely to have been brought up being listened to and having their opinions valued as a peer, that breeds familiarity and confidence – knowing that everything’s going to ‘be OK’ tomorrow.
Three contrasting case studies
The documentary uses case of students who have just graduated, some working class and struggling to get good jobs despite their top degrees from good universities, and one middle class student:
Amaan – has a degree in Economics from Nottingham and has wanted a i equity sales in an investment bank (since he was 13), also world kickboxing champion at 17, but he struggles with a lack of confidence in interviews.
Elvis from East London – has a degree in political economy at Birmingham, wants a city job in finance, he ends up getting onto a graduate training programme with bank (if I remember correctly).
Finally, Ben from Dulwich, screamingly middle class who charmed his way into London Live and the local press – he was just pushy, winged it, and looks set to get a career in the media despite his degree in Classics.
Ian Wright and the Internal Class Ceiling
Unexpectedly the documentary has a section featuring Ian Write, from a working class background who talks about the prejudice he has faced in his media career.
He even says we should abolish private schools and ‘give the working class guns’ to get over the middle class advantage, and that interview training and soft skills are bullshit – you shouldn’t have to be someone you’re not.
results have improved since marketisation, but at the expense of teaching the test and widening class inequalities.
In this post I provide four pieces of evidence students can use to evaluate the New Right’s perspective on education, particularly their claim that Marketisation policies since 1988 have raised standards for all pupils.
Item A: GCSE Pass Rates
Probably the strongest piece of supporting evidence for the New Right’s policies on education is that they have worked to improve GCSE results nearly every year for the last 30 years:
The latest reports focusing on the long term trend are a bit dated, such as this one from The Guardian, but it clearly shows a long term improvement in grades at GCSE:
Despite recent dips in top grades, this 2013 report from Full Fact, which also focuses on the long term trend in results since 1988 points out that:
The pass rate for grades A*-C has increased by almost two-thirds from 42.5% in 1988 to 68.1% in 2013.
A*/A grades have almost trebled from 8.6% in 1988 to 21.3% in 2013.
However, the report also recognizes that some of this is due to grade inflation as this increase in performance is not mirrored by English and Welsh students in international tests, such as PISA BELOW.
The PISA league tables demonstrate how the neoliberal/ New Right idea of ranking educational achievement has gone global – Since the year 2000 we now have International Education League Tables.
Since the year 2000, every three years, fifteen-year-old students from randomly selected schools worldwide take tests in the key subjects: reading, mathematics and science, with a focus on one subject in each year of assessment. In 2012, some economies also participated in the optional assessments of Problem Solving and Financial Literacy.
Students take a test that lasts 2 hours. The tests are a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that are organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items are covered. Students take different combinations of different tests.
PISA is unique because it develops tests which are not directly linked to the school curriculum. The tests are designed to assess to what extent students at the end of compulsory education, can apply their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society.
The students and their school principals also answer questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.
The UK currently ranks 23rd for English and Maths.
Item C: Stephen Ball (2003)
argues that government policies of choice and competition place the middle class at an advantage. They have the knowledge and skills to make the most of the opportunities on offer. Compared to the working class they have more material capital, more social capital – access to social networks and contacts which can provide information and support.
Ball refers Middle class parents as ‘skilled choosers’. Compared to working class parents (disconnected choosers) they are more comfortable with dealing with public institutions like schools, they are more used to extracting and assessing information. For example, they use social networks to talk to parents whose children are attending the schools on offer. They collect and analyse information about GCSE results, and they are more used to dealing with and negotiating with administrators and teachers. As a result, if entry to a school is limited, they are more likely to gain a place for their child.
Ball also talked of the school/ parent alliance: Middle class parents want middle class schools and schools want middle class pupils. In general, the schools with more middle class students have better results. Schools see middle class students as easy to teach and likely to perform well. They will maintain the schools position in the league tables and its status in the education market.
Item D: Sue Palmer – The Problems of Tests, Targets And Education
Sue Palmer Is usually introduced in Families and Households module. She argues that technological and social changes have made modern childhood ‘toxic’, and testing in education (because of league tables and The New Right) is part of this problem. Sue Palmer writes…..
‘As long as league tables exist, in a risk averse society most people daren’t ignore them. Primary schools at the top of the league (which, by a strange coincidence, tend to be in the wealthiest areas) have a reputation to maintain; those at the bottom have to try to claw a little higher. The status of all interested adults (teachers, governors, parents) depends on how their Year Sixes perform in national tests.
So from four years of age, our children now live in the shadow of SATs. ‘No time for play in the reception class now,’ one teacher told me ruefully. ‘As soon as they arrive, it’s fast forward to the Key Stage One test.’ The curriculum is dominated by the core subjects of English, Maths and Science, broken down into a series of discrete‘learning objectives’ – closely matched to ‘assessment criteria’ – to be ticked off as children progress through the school.
There are ‘voluntary’ SATs for each year group, so children’s progress (and teachers’ competence in coaching their pupils) can be checked every summer. Then, in Year Six, come several months of concentrated exam practice, ‘booster classes’ during the Easter holidays for those who might not scrape the required mark, and sleepless nights for 11-year-olds terrified of ‘letting themselves down’ on the day.
Not surprisingly, this regime leaves far less time for creative but unquantifiable experiences, like art, drama and music, which through the millennia have nurtured children’s imaginations and contributed incalculably to their emotional and social development. Less time also for the active, hands-on learning children need if they’re genuinely to understand the concepts underpinning the tests.
Last year researchers found that the conceptual understanding of today’s 11-year-olds lags two to three years behind their counterparts in 1990. While performance on pencil-and-paper tests of has soared over this period, children are apparently less likely to understand the principles they’ve been trained to tick boxes about.
Research published recently by the independent Alexander Review of primary education shows that – on tests other than those for which children are coached – there have been only modest improvements in mathematics, and little change in literacy standards. And in last month’s PIRLS survey of international achievement in literacy, England had actually gone backwards, slumping from 3rd to 19th place.
Related Posts
This topic is part of the ‘perspectives on education’ topic and ‘education policies’, links to both can be found on the education home page.
A postmodern education should be diverse, individualised and allow choice. The British education system is not particularly postmodern!
A postmodern education might be individualised, more diverse and offer more choice of subjects and learning pathways to learners, one might also expect it to be more playful, more hyperreal and express a certain incredulity towards metanarratives.
This would mirror changes associated with the shift from modern to postmodern society (especially since the 1980s). Postmodern society is more diverse, consumerist, fragmented, media-saturated (hyperreal) and allows individuals much more freedom of choice than in the previous modern society.
This post considers the extent to which our mainstream education system (mainly schools and colleges) might be characterised as postmodern or responding to postmodernisation.
Postmodern education or education responding to postmodernisation?
OK so this might sound like a pedantic semantic issue, but I think there is a difference to be made between a postmodern education and an education system (which may remain predominately modern) responding to society having become more postmodern (a process known as postmodernisation).
A postmodern education
As I understand it a postmodern education would display a certain incredulity towards metanarratives (maybe manifested through a scepticism about religion, science and politics and the possibility of progress), and maintain a relativistic attitude towards what knowledges are taught as part of a curriculum, and probably even abandon the concept of a curriculum altogether.
A postmodern education might also be more diverse, playful, not take itself too seriously, and allow parents choice and children the freedom to explore their own individual learning paths.
An education system responding to postmodernisation
The postmodernisation of society has resulted in societies becoming more diverse, individualised, consumerist, globalised, uncertain and risky.
An education system could respond to the postmodernisation of society by becoming more consumerist (by creating a market in education for example), but also by simply becoming more global in outlook and teaching children strategies to cope with new global risks and uncertainties, and it can do all of this through a relatively modernistic, centralised curriculum.
Personally I’d characterise the latter as a late-modern education system rather than postmodern.
The above type of education system is very different to a ‘postmodern education’ and might not be effective if there was a radically relativistic and playful approach to knowledge, BUT these can also be part of a late modern as well a postmodern approach to education.
One further change which could be either or both the postmodernisation of education or a late modern response to postmodernisation is the move to more online learning within schools.
Is education in Britain becoming more Postmodern?
To determine if mainstream education is becoming more postmodern then we might expect to see evidence of all or any of the following:
More diversity of school types and more freedom of choice for parents
More home education of pupils
Less centralised control of schools and more autonomy for individual schools.
A move away from a prescriptive national curriculum.
More personalised and individual learning programmes for students within schools.
Schools making use of more online learning platforms.
A greater diversity of educational experience, more relativism.
Back in the early 1980s most parents had no choice but to send their children to the local education authority, and in some areas the actual specific school the child went to was determined by the local council.
Fast forward to 2022 and parents do have a choice of their preferred school AND there are a number of types of different school: LEA maintained or academies/ free schools, specialist schools and faith schools to name just a few.
And because most secondary schools are now academies which don’t have to follow the national curriculum there is potentially a greater diversity in the range of subjects that these schools offer.
However, while there is more choice and diversity today, it’s important to not overstate the increase in these trends. The vast majority of academies choose to follow the national curriculum, and they still focus mainly on getting students the best grades in their GCSEs or Ebacc subjects, and STEM subjects still have more status than the critical thinking subjects, all of which are very modernist.
Even free schools aren’t really innovative
The case of free schools also shows how little innovation is actually happening in the state education sector…
The promise of free schools when they first launched was that parents in local communities would be able to create their own schools which would increase school diversity, but 10 years on from the creation of the first free schools in 2010 only a third of now more than 500 free schools are ‘innovator schools’ having been set up by locals, the majority are either run by academy chains or faith groups, so are maybe better characterised as late modern rather than post-modern.
There is also some evidence that in some areas they have led to polarisation. Melanie Carvalho describes how here children were thriving at an ethnically diverse primary school in her local area until a Free School: Belham School was set up nearby.
This resulted in ‘middle class white flight’ as it was mostly white middle class children who left the old school to go to the new free school.
In the Free School, only 7% of children were eligible for Free School Meals, compare to 24% locally and 70% were from white British backgrounds compared to only 19% in other local schools.
So it’s more a case of white flight and ethnic segregation rather than more choice and diversity.
Homeschooling isn’t that significant
Homeschooling is possibly the postmodern form of education there is: taken to its extreme if every household chose to educate their children at home we’d have more than 20 million ‘learning centres’ at home with, presumably, children studying the most diverse array of subjects possible given the extreme level of decentralisation involved with homeschooling.
And 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) with a further survey in 2019 reporting that there were 60,544 registered home educated children in England, 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, so clearly we are not talking about sufficient numbers for us to say that there is a significant trend towards the postmodernisation of education in this respect.
One also might question the extent to which a hypothetical mass movement towards home education would actually involve ‘education’ – for some households ‘home ed’ may just mean children being taken out of school and hem receiving no education, so this might be regressive rather than progressive, not that this distinction would matter to postmodernists anyway as they don’t believe in the concept of ‘progress’ anyway!
Do schools today have more autonomy?
Academies and free schools are free from Local Education Authority Control and receive their funding directly from central government, which means in once sense the majority of secondary schools now have more control to manage their own budgets because of that freedom.
However, there are still conditions which determine how money can be spent – most of it has to go on wages and teachers have to be paid a legally binding minimum salary, buildings have to be maintained to safe standards and Pupil Premium Funding has to spent on disadvantaged students.
And on top of this schools are still monitored by OFSTED, which is, by proxy, inspecting how effectively they are spending their budgets.
So in reality ‘independent control over budgets’ maybe means the heads of academies get to pay certain teachers a bit extra, maybe spend a few thousand more on fringe-subjects they value, but really 95% of the budget is already determined.
Have we moved away from a centralised curriculum?
As with the issue of autonomy more broadly, independent schools, academies and free schools do not have to follow the national curriculum, so this means that we currently have an education system which has the potential for radical diversity.
HOWEVER, the vast majority of schools spend most of their time teaching the standard national curriculum and Ebacc subjects: English, maths, the sciences, geography and history, and focus on getting their students through their Key Stage 4 exams with the best grades possible.
It may be true that outside of the mainstream exam-focussed subjects academies and free schools offer a rich ‘extended curriculum’ offering a range of sporting, creative and career-development programmes but realistically these are fringe offerings – schools are still 90% focused on national curriculum subjects because that’s what parents want.
Has learning become more personalised?
While personalised learning became a formal part of government policy in 2004 under New Labour, in reality schools remain for the most part exam factories focused mainly on getting students the best grades possible in the mainstream GCSE subjects such as English and Maths.
Personalised learning happens but most schools pay lip service to it – working with students to produce ‘personalised learning plans’ which are in reality not that unique to each student (lots of cutting and pasting going on for similar students) and then only reviewing these infrequently a few times every academic year.
The shift to online learning?
Global companies such as Pearsons are now offering purely online private education to 14-16 year olds covering their own GCSES.
However, this is a very narrow offering to only older students and not available to all students.
At the level of state education schools in England and Wales were forced to shift to mostly online learning for the majority of students during the two government imposed lockdowns of 2020-21 during the Covid-19 pandemic. This provides us with a natural experiment to test out how successful online learning is for school aged children.
According to research from the Office for National Statistics teacher assessments students who were studying purely online only covered from between 50-75% of what the few in-school students covered during that period, suggesting that online learning is drastically less effective that in-person education:
Moreover this recent review of online learning during the pandemic by the government suggests that both the quantity and quality of education received by students fell with over half of parents saying they felt it challenging to support students and that quality of education students received at home varied greatly depending on the level of education of parents.
In short, the ‘natural experiment’ in online learning that took place during the lockdowns seems to have been judged as a resounding failure by the government.
So far the available evidence suggests that while schools are becoming ever so slightly postmodern, this is really only on the fringes, and they remain around 95% modernist institutions, but how successfully has our education system made rational adaptations to the postmodernisation of society?
Education Responding to postmodernisation
The changes below are (to my mind) more likely to be characteristic of a late modern education system rather than a post modern education system…
the rise of apprenticeships and more vocational options in post-16 education
Schools having a more global outlook and teaching more about global issues such as climate change
Schools teaching students strategies to cope with the risks of living in post/ late modern society.
the rise of apprenticeships
The last 40 years has seen a significant increase in the variety of vocational options on offer.
The increasing variety of apprenticeships especially suggests that the system is adapting to an increasingly diverse and competitive global economy.
There are currently over 600 types of apprenticeship available with around 750 million people studying towards them, but in reality the diversity is even greater because there are thousands of employers who will be educating their young employees (apprentices) according to the specific needs of their companies, adapting the ‘framework’ of the apprenticeship to suit their specific needs.
Teaching about global issues
At the beginning of 2023 climate change is still not on the national curriculum. There is a private members bill currently going through its second reading in the house of commons but even if it makes this through and becomes law (it’s difficult to see how it can’t pass!) it’s incredible to note just how late in the day this is coming to fruition.
Although maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised by this lack of pace in getting climate change on the education agenda. After all, it is totally in line to the lack of specific action being taken to reduce global emissions.
This fact also suggests that schools are fundamentally failing to prepare younger people to cope with what is probably going to be the major challenge of their generation.
Teaching strategies to cope with new risks in society
One example of this the government introducing the PREVENT strategy to deal with radicalisation and the threat of terrorism. HOWEVER, there is nothing at all postmodern about this because one aspect of PREVENT was to make schools teach British Values, which itself is a very modernist response, as is the potential for the policy to alienate Muslim students.
Most schools do offer lessons on staying safe online as part of their PSHE portfolio, but this is hardly front and centre of schools’ teaching agendas, rather many schools do their duty to teach this content but do so in a piecemeal and often cringeworthy and ineffective manner.
When it comes to issues of safety in general while schools do have safeguarding duties and the some of the more vulnerable students are protected, when it comes to the more subtle, everyday risks which ‘non-vulnerable’ students have to deal with, they are very much left to fend for themselves, left to figure out their own strategies for negotiating the risks of living in an uncertain world, and more often than not they have to first figure out what these risks actually are!
Postmodernism, Postmodernisation and Education: Conclusions
The education system has become more postmodern in some ways such as:
Education market, more consumerist, more choice of schools and subjects
Especially post-16.
More personalisation
Shift to online learning.
However, overall I would say this has NOT been a significant trend. There is very little within the education system to point to a shift towards postmodernism.
Rather, the education system as a whole for 5-16 year olds remains very modern in that most schools stick to the fairly narrow national curriculum, most try to instil a sense of shared values and solidarity, and the primary focus of mainstream schools is getting children through the national exams with the best grades.
And once we drill down into it there is little real choice for most parents, little real diversity, little in the way of innovation or experimentation.
Sort of a 10% postmodern fringe. 90% modern.
I think at best we might characterise our education system as ‘late modern’ – because it has adapted in some ways to reflect our society becoming more postmodern in response to the emergence of globalisation and digital technology. For example, history and english literature now have more options to look at global events and texts and the Pandemic saw a radical increase in the amount of online learning.
However in terms of equipping students with the skills they will need to cope with the risks associated with living in our global postmodern world schools lag way behind – there is little in they way of giving students the skills they will need to cope with the world of work (if that’s even possible to do in school), and very little effective education teaching about global issues such as climate change or how to stay safe online.
If education is becoming more post (or late) modern then this shift is happening outside of the mainstream education system (maybe even in spite of it), possible examples of which include…
the rise of online digital learning platforms such as Udemy
The increase in independent people offering education and training on YouTube and other channels
The increase in ordinary people sharing their stories, experiences and life-experiments, and the increased interest in people consuming these.
The increase in both children and adults using the above sources to educate themselves about what interests them (on top of what they have to learn for work or school).
Students increasingly using online sources to educate themselves rather than resources provided by the school they attend (such as text books).
If we were to explore the above we might well find that we might characterise informal child and adult-education outside of the mainstream education system as postmodern, but I can’t hand on heart characterise the formal educational institutions and practices as being postmodern in 2023.
