Education - School Factors

As promised yesterday, today a few points on the other side of the explanation for differences in educational attainment. Yesterday I briefly viewed the explanations which put the cause of differential attainment firmly on the side of the pupil - in terms of factors like IQ and class. But suppose it’s nothing to do with pupils social background - how would such explanations work?

The other angle taken is to pin the causes of differential attainment on schools and what goes on in them. Here are a few of the key factors:

Type and Quality of the School

This was famously studied by Michael Rutter who argued that good schools could make a big difference, regardless of the quality of the intake of students. This, you may well note, is a view which has been very fashionable amongst politicians and policy makers in recent years. Yet education Professor Peter Mortimer of the Institute of Education, University of London, has argued that the quality of a school can account for around 10% of the differences in attainment between different schools. This is not a negligible difference, but does it suggest that we can ignore input factors and just concentrate on improving the quality of schools? You decide.

Teacher-Pupil Relations
The key point, according to a whole tradition of studies in the sociology of education, is that, however hard they try not to, teachers label students and that has a huge role in shaping how they do in the education system.

Streaming and Banding

Another element of labelling in a way, is streaming and banding - the separating of students, supposedly on ability, but as many sociologists have argued, factors like class, race, and gender loom large in the way students are allocated to certain subjects and streams.

The Hidden Curriculum / Curriculum Organisation

The concept of the hidden curriculum follows on neatly with these other ideas. It suggests that subtle influences push students towards what is seen to be appropriate for them - the clearest example here being the argument that the curriculum is sexist, so the hidden curriculum promotes the idea that e.g. metalwork and football are ‘unfeminine’, so girls drift towards other activities and lessons.

In terms of the formal, overt curriculum, organisational factors can have a big influence on student outcomes. Students have limited options and it is for example, still hard to mix academic and vocational courses. And subtle selection mechanisms can be at work -e.g. not being entered for the higher tier exams, or being put in for ‘Science’ rather than two or three separate science subjects.

There are weaknesses with these explanations, no matter how convincing some believe them to be. But the key point here is that neither input nor school factors, on their own, can explain differences in attainment.

In fact, what seems more convincing is the idea that the two sets of factors interact.

That should be a useful orienting idea if you get a question on differences in educational attainment. And don’t forget, the concepts we’ve reviewed over the past two days are equally applicable, whether the particular difference is class, ethnicity or gender.

That’s all for today.