What Factors Help To Explain Differences In Educational Achievement And Experience?

If home background were the whole story, two equally disadvantaged pupils sent to different schools would do equally well. They often do not. What happens inside the school gates, the labels teachers attach, the sets pupils are placed in, the friendship groups they join, and the curriculum they are taught, shapes achievement in its own right. Sometimes the school reduces home disadvantage; sometimes it makes it worse.

This lesson examines those in-school factors and how they affect achievement by ethnicity and by gender. You will meet labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy, setting and streaming, pro-school and anti-school subcultures (including Willis’s famous lads), the ethnocentric curriculum and institutional racism, gendered socialisation and teacher expectations. Finally you will look at why achievement differs so much between countries. By the end you can argue that school and home together explain who succeeds.