AQA A-Level Sociology: Paper 1 - Education with Theory and Methods

Durkheim (1903): education serves two main functions for society.

Parsons (1961): education is a "focal socialising agency" that bridges the family and wider society.

• Secondary socialisation: the family is particularistic (judged by who you are) and ascriptive (status by birth); wider society is universalistic (same rules for all) and achievement-based.
• Meritocracy: education applies universalistic standards - everyone is judged on the same criteria (exams), allowing talent to be identified and rewarded regardless of background.
• Role allocation: education selects pupils for the roles they are best suited to, matching individuals to occupational positions suited to their abilities.

Davis and Moore (1945): education performs role allocation in a stratified society.

• Some roles are more functionally important and require scarce talent; they must be rewarded more highly to attract the most able.
• Education sifts and sorts individuals according to ability; the most talented rise to the top (meritocracy).
• Inequality is therefore functional and inevitable.

Althusser (1971): education is part of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA).

• ISA (schools, church, media, family): reproduce class relations through ideology - making inequality appear natural and justified.
• RSA (Repressive State Apparatus: police, army, courts): maintain ruling class power through force.
• Education is now the dominant ISA in capitalist societies, replacing the church. It transmits ruling class ideology and produces a labour force that accepts its own exploitation.

Bowles and Gintis (1976) "Schooling in Capitalist America" - the correspondence principle.

Feminist perspectives: education reproduces patriarchy (male dominance).

• Liberal feminism: the problem is unequal opportunity. Solution: legislation (Sex Discrimination Act 1975); campaigns like GIST (Girls Into Science and Technology) and WISE (Women Into Science and Engineering); curriculum reform to remove gender stereotyping from textbooks. Goal: equality within the existing system.
• Radical feminism: schools as institutions reproduce male dominance - through subject hierarchies (science prestigious, humanities feminine), male-dominated senior leadership, and a curriculum that marginalises women's contributions. More fundamental change is required.
• Marxist feminism: girls are socialised to accept domestic roles that serve capitalism (cheap/unpaid domestic labour).

New Right perspective: Chubb and Moe (1990) "A Lesson in School Reform from Great Britain".

• State monopoly of education is inefficient: schools have no incentive to improve because they receive funding regardless of performance.
• Private schools outperform state schools because they are accountable to parents as consumers.
• Solution: marketisation - introduce market mechanisms (competition between schools, parental choice, per-pupil funding, league tables); this forces schools to improve to attract pupils.
• Evaluation: Gewirtz (1995) - marketisation increases inequality through cream-skimming (selecting the most able pupils) and silt-shifting (excluding difficult or costly pupils); not a level playing field for all parents.

Material deprivation: poverty directly limits educational outcomes.

• Smith and Noble (1995): identified several "barriers to learning" linked to poverty: lack of books and computers at home; inadequate diet affecting concentration; overcrowded housing (no quiet study space); stress and ill health reducing attendance; inability to afford school trips, uniforms, or equipment.
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2007): persistent links between low income and poor educational outcomes across all stages of schooling.

Cultural deprivation: working class subculture is seen as not valuing education.

Sugarman (1970): working class subculture has four features that are at odds with educational achievement:

Douglas (1964) "The Home and the School": found that working class parents showed less interest in their children's education - less likely to attend parents' evenings or discuss progress with teachers. Lower parental expectations and involvement correlated with lower achievement. (Note: criticism - blames the family rather than structural inequality.)

Bernstein (1971): language codes as a barrier.

Schools operate in the elaborated code: textbooks, exam questions, and teachers all use it. Working class pupils are at a systematic disadvantage because their home language is not the language of school.

Bourdieu (1984): cultural capital, habitus, and field.

Middle class cultural capital is converted into educational credentials, which are then converted into economic advantage - perpetuating class inequality across generations.

Teacher labelling: Becker (1971) interviewed 60 Chicago teachers and found they judged pupils against an "ideal pupil" standard. Middle class pupils most closely matched this ideal (in appearance, behaviour, and ability); working class and ethnic minority pupils were seen as further from the ideal and labelled accordingly. These labels affect how teachers interact with pupils and the opportunities they offer them.

Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) "Pygmalion in the Classroom" - the self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Tested 650 pupils at an American elementary school (the "Oak School experiment"); told teachers that a random 20% had been identified as "intellectual spurters" likely to show rapid IQ gains.
• Retested 8 months later: the labelled pupils showed significantly greater IQ gains than the control group.
• Mechanism: teachers treated "spurters" differently (warmer interactions, more demanding work, more feedback), and pupils internalised higher expectations, fulfilling the prophecy.

Lacey (1970) "Hightown Grammar": streaming produces differentiation and polarisation.

• Differentiation: teachers rank pupils by ability and behaviour, placing them in streams. Those in lower streams receive less encouragement and fewer resources.
• Polarisation: pupils in high streams adopt a pro-school subculture; pupils in low streams adopt an anti-school subculture, gaining status by rejecting school values.

Willis (1977) "Learning to Labour": an ethnographic study of 12 working class boys ("the lads") in a Midlands secondary school, followed through their last years at school and into the workplace.

• The lads formed a counter-school culture: they valued "having a laff", skiving, and sexism; they saw school as irrelevant and those who worked hard ("ear'oles") as foolish.
• They willingly chose unskilled factory work on leaving school - reproducing their class position.
• Paradox: by exercising what they saw as agency and freedom, the lads were freely reproducing their class position. Willis challenges simple Marxist determinism: working class culture has partial insights (they see through the myth of meritocracy) but ultimately leads to self-defeat.

Since the early 1990s, girls have consistently outperformed boys at GCSE and A-level in the UK. Girls are more likely to go to university and to achieve higher degree classifications.

Reasons for girls' improved achievement:

• Sharpe (1976 vs 1994): in 1976, working class girls prioritised "love, marriage, husbands, children"; by 1994, the same type of girls prioritised "job, career, and being able to support themselves" - a dramatic shift in aspirations driven by feminism and changing female roles in the labour market.
• Legislation and policy: the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) outlawed discrimination in schools; the National Curriculum (1988) reduced subject choice and made science compulsory for girls; GIST and WISE campaigns raised girls' participation in traditionally male subjects.
• Female role models: more women in professional and managerial roles make ambition seem realistic.
• Coursework: girls tend to be more conscientious and organised (Mitsos & Browne, 1998), which advantages them in coursework-based assessment.

Boys' underachievement:

• Epstein (1998): boys who work hard are labelled as "swots" and accused of being feminine by their peers; dominant forms of masculinity define academic effort as incompatible with being male.
• Sewell: argues boys suffer a crisis of masculinity linked to deindustrialisation and the decline of the traditional male breadwinner role; peer culture fills the vacuum with anti-school attitudes; schools have become "feminised" (rewarding methodical, conscientious working). Mac an Ghaill (1996) is often cited alongside on crisis masculinity.
• Francis (2000): laddish subcultures among boys - valuing sport, humour, and risk-taking over academic work; being seen to try is socially costly.

Subject choice: despite overall parity in achievement, girls and boys continue to make gendered subject choices.

• Kelly (1987): science is presented as a masculine subject (male scientists in textbooks, male examples, often taught by male teachers) - discouraging girls from choosing it.
• Gender identity and peer pressure reinforce "appropriate" subject choices: girls towards arts and humanities, boys towards science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM).

Patterns: Chinese and Indian heritage pupils consistently outperform the national average at GCSE; Black Caribbean and White working class boys underachieve most significantly.

Wright (1992): classroom interaction study in four multiracial primary schools.

• Asian pupils received less teacher attention; teachers mispronounced names and assumed limited English, giving simpler tasks.
• Afro-Caribbean boys were more likely to be singled out for discipline even when their behaviour was no worse than white peers.
• Covert, unintentional discrimination in everyday classroom interaction.

Gillborn and Youdell (2000) "Rationing Education": the A-to-C economy.

• Teachers directed resources and attention toward pupils on the C/D borderline (educational triage): those expected to pass were helped; "hopeless cases" were written off.
• Black pupils were disproportionately seen as disruptive and placed in lower sets; teacher stereotyping was racialised.
• The A-to-C economy reproduces racial inequalities within apparently rational school management strategies.

Macpherson Report (1999): following the inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder, defined institutional racism as "the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes, and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping."

Sewell (1997) "Black Masculinities and Schooling": four responses of Black males to teacher racism and peer group pressure:

The hidden curriculum: the implicit lessons that schools teach alongside the formal curriculum: how to accept authority, how to queue, how to compete, how to present oneself. Marxists argue it reproduces obedience to capitalism; feminists argue it reproduces patriarchy.

Illich (1971) "Deschooling Society":

• Schools are damaging institutions that suppress natural curiosity and creativity; they create passive, credential-dependent individuals who cannot learn without institutional validation.
• Solution: replace schools with "learning webs" (informal networks of learners, skills exchanges, peer matching) - radical de-institutionalisation of education.
• Evaluation: unrealistic; ignores the social benefits of universal schooling; romanticises self-directed learning.

Marketisation (from 1988 ERA onwards): the introduction of market mechanisms into the state education system.

• Key policies: league tables; formula funding (money follows pupils); parental choice; open enrolment; specialist schools; grant-maintained schools (opting out of LEA control).
• Gewirtz et al. (1995): studied 14 London secondary schools and identified three types of parents: "privileged-skilled choosers" (middle class with the cultural and economic capital to work the system), "semi-skilled choosers" (ambitious but lacking confidence and capital, often frustrated by the system), and "disconnected-local choosers" (working class, restricted by lack of resources and information; choose the nearest school). Marketisation produces cream-skimming (schools select the most able pupils to boost league tables) and silt-shifting (off-loading less able or costly pupils to rival schools).

Vocational education: NVQs, GNVQs, BTECs, Apprenticeships. Functionalist view: provides economy with skilled workers. Marxist view: vocational routes reproduce class division - working class pupils are channelled into lower-status, lower-paid roles while middle class pupils access academic routes; the myth of meritocracy is maintained.

Globalisation and educational policy:

• International comparisons such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment, run by the OECD) rank countries by pupil performance, creating competitive pressure on governments to reform education.
• Sahlberg (2012) identifies the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM): a worldwide convergence of neoliberal policies including standardised testing, teacher accountability frameworks, marketisation, and private sector involvement. The UK, USA, Australia, and Sweden have all adopted similar reforms regardless of their different contexts.
• Transnational bodies (OECD, World Bank, IMF) export market-based educational models to developing countries, sometimes as conditions attached to loans or aid.

Privatisation is distinct from, though related to, marketisation: it involves private providers directly running or funding state education.

• Endogenous privatisation (Ball, 2007): importing private sector management values into state schools (performance-related pay, target-setting, branding, inter-school competition).
• Exogenous privatisation: private companies delivering publicly funded services or running schools directly (academy chains, private finance initiatives, outsourcing of school services).
• Ball and Youdell (2008) "Hidden Privatisation in Public Education": identify both visible and covert forms of privatisation across state education systems globally.
• Critics (Marxist, feminist): privatisation prioritises profit over educational values; increases inequality; removes democratic accountability from local communities; benefits middle class families who can navigate the market.

The Methods in Context question (a 20-mark item on Paper 1) asks you to apply a named research method to the study of a particular issue in education. You must link the general strengths and limitations of the method (from Theory and Methods) to the specific features of educational settings: pupils, teachers, classrooms, schools, and parents.

Characteristics of research populations and settings in education:

Applying each method to education: