Education Essay
Throughout the 20th century, there have been many changes made to the structure of the education system. These include the 1944 Education act which made secondary education compulsory the tri-partite system of school, though the move to a comprehensive system of schools in the 1960?s, to the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988. While statistics have shown that all these measures have served to increase the overall levels of educational attainment (as defined by attainment of qualifications), both official and sociological evidence indicated that class-based inequalities in educational attainment have shown no tendency to decline.
It has been suggested that class differences in educational success are due to home and familial factors: that children from lower social backgrounds are more likely to fail because of what they experience inside the home environment. This is based on the belief that those from different social classes have significantly differing home lives. It is possible to split home and family based factors into two categories: material factors and cultural factors.
As educational success rises with family income, many researches see material deprivation as the major cause of inequality in educational success. Hasley, Heath and Ridge examined the education careers of males, and found that those from higher social backgrounds were much more likely to stay in education past the minimum leaving age than those from working class backgrounds. They pointed out that a major reason for this was the cost of staying in education, and this denied many working class people from gaining higher-level educational qualifications. Douglas also believed that poor living conditions in the home were major factors in educational failure. In a survey, he divided his sample into two groups: those who had sole use of household facilities, such as bathrooms, and those who did not. He found that the children living in ‘unsatisfactory condition scored much more poorly on tests that those in ’satisfactory? conditions. Reason suggested for this include poor housing conditions and diet leading to ill health, leading to absence from school, and underperformance while there. Read more…