Year 12 have been examining how educational achievement can be influenced by social class.
Use the articles from The Indepenent and The Guardian (and your class notes) to evaluate the extent to which selection policies can affect the educational attainments of students from different social classes.
3 comments:
with more schools focusing on exam league tables they seem to be concentrating on an "A-C economy" ad Gillborn and Youdell put it. Schools are seeing their grades as a form of currency almost for better funding, better reputation and in turn better pupils.
It is with wanting better pupils where the class divide comes into play, the "ideal pupil" will be wanted for recruitment however this "ideal pupil" is normally seen to be middle class.
Better schools are able to attract and "cream skim" more of the middle class children, perhaps by using boundries as in the guardian article, in hope of good grades while lower classes have to go to other schools.
-Helen- 13SEV
Those pupils who have the ability to boost league tables are labelled as 'ideal pupils' meaning they are more likely to be accepted into high acheveing schools creating class difference as the pupils are likely to be of a middle class background; creating social class difference. Those pupils who are not seen as 'ideal pupils' - middle class pupils are then left to go to the schools in which are not high performers limiting their educational achievement; from the article in the guardian we can see that selection policies within schools can cause conflict as they enable the 'cream skimming' of areas to gain the best pupils to boost the league table as well as desire for parents to send their child to that particular school.
Anoushka 12KK
Marketisation and selection policies have produced social class differences in educational achievement due to "competition and selection," those schools which are higher in the league tables have a tendency to attract middle-class pupils, which then further improves the position of the school in the league table. This results in more government funding for the school. This means that working-class students do not attend these schools which then creates ssegregation as Will Bartlett (1993) argues that marketisation leads to "cream-skimming" and "silt-shifting" where schools select higher ability students and off load those students with less ability.
Haroon Ul-Haq 12 RAS
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