Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

BBC NEWS | Education | Schools alone ‘cannot help poor’

The report mentioned in this article by Hirsch (2007) is actually a summary of a series of reports on research in progress published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and more details can be found here: Young children see poverty holding them back at school and even more detail here: Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage. In summary, the round up report suggests that in-school factors when taken together are far less influential in affecting children’s educational achievement than out-of school factors such as socio-economic background, parental education, parental attitudes and housing. There seems to be a strong suggestion that attitudes to education are very important, forming part of social class cultures which affect children’s and parents aspirations and expectations.

This report effectively updates Douglas’ (1964) research which found that out of school factors were more important than in-school factors and that parental attitudes towards education were the most important of all.

Research findings released on Monday are nicely summarised in this BBC News article

BBC NEWS | Education | Wealth gap in learning, by age 3

Although sociologists have known for some time that socio-economic group has a significant effect on educational achievement, this is some useful up to date evidence on this fact which here seems to be linked both to poverty and to parental education, as well as other factors such as family types.  The study is still ongoing, following a cohort of 15,000 children born between 2000 and 2002, so these findings are what has been found ’so far’.

If you want more detail you can follow the link below to the Institute of Education website where there are very readable ‘briefing sheets’ on the study’s findings.  The material on educational progress is under “cognitive development”.

http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/briefings.asp?section=0001000100060005 

This is another example of government policy picking up on the idea that parental involvement in their children’s education is one of the main factors affecting educational achievement.

BBC NEWS | Education | Parents urged to read to children

(Remember that it is good to show awareness of government policies when answering exam questions)

I’ve just read this article and it made me think about how we read the news and how it is written!

BBC NEWS | Education | Adults ‘wish for qualifications’

The article is about the findings of a survey of adults done by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) (ie a governmental body with the purpose of funding and promoting further education) looking at their views on their education.

Have a read of the article - it all sounds quite positive, doesn’t it?

The findings have evidently been presented by the LSC (and by the BBC) in a way designed to promote the importance of formal education and qualifications.  While there is obviously a serious point to be made about education and the fact that adult education schemes do have a positive impact, I did have some thoughts on some of the figures stated:
“The survey of more than 2,000 adults also found 27% regretted not making the most of the opportunities at school.” - which does raise the question about the other 73% (or 7 out of every 10 people) -

• did they make the most of their opportunities?  Or do they still think that a lot of what they were taught in school was irrelevant? - Tooley (2000) argues that a lot of what is taught in school is irrelevant to students’ later lives.
  
• Or do they feel that they weren’t given opportunities at school?  Neo-Marxist sociologists such as Althusser and Apple argue that school exists to reproduce existing social inequalities and that therefore schools often restrict the opportunities available to working class children, preventing them from achieving educational success.
  

“more than one in four (30%) of those who had completed retraining said it had made them more employable and 17% had got a pay rise.” - so 70% had found that retraining had had no effect on their employability. Oh dear! that’s not quite the picture the LSC would want to present when the government is encouraging more people to take up work-related training and to stay in education for longer.  Also, while there are statistics to show that getting a degree does significantly raise your earnings, less than 1 in 5 people who had undergone retraining found that they ended up earning more money.

The article then goes on to talk about the government wanting to promote more work-related training and how important it is.  All in all another interesting example of the use of official statistics to show what officials want them to show.

Reading | Catching up | Economist.com

Another Economist article from the Christmas 2006 edition, this provides a brief outline of current policy surrounding the government’s literacy strategy. It looks at the ways in which policy has succeeded - in that literacy levels have increased - but also the ways in which it has encountered problems in that a significant proportion (6% - about 1 in every 17) of children still fail to learn to read before they leave primary school.

The question of the purpose of reading is also raised, with data showing that children are more likely to see reading primarily as a skill needed for employment than as something to do for pleasure, with fewer children enjoying reading now than in 1997. The article points out that this is not necessarily a good development as enjoying reading is associated with educational success. Critics of New Labour’s policies can argue that the government’s emphasis on raising standards and also on the economic role of education may actually have served to undermine itself by decreasing children’s interest in reading and therefore in learning.

Freedom’s Orphans: Raising youth in a changing world by Julia Margo and Mike Dixon  is a research report from the IPPR due to be published next Monday (6 November, 2006).
It is this report that was discussed extensively in yesterday’s news, with its findings that young people in the UK are more likely than those elsewhere in Europe to commit anti-social behaviour, to try drugs and to have sex at a young age.  The report links this to a dislocation of relationships between adults and young people, saying that adolescents are essentially left alone to make the transition into adulthood, relying on their peer groups rather than being helped by strong relationships with adult role-models at home and in wider society.
This raises a host of interesting issues about youth culture, crime and deviance, the family and education in the contemporary UK:

1. Is the report (and/or the media response to it) an indication of an existing moral panic in the UK surrounding youth cultures? - ie when we look for problems we tend to find evidence of them.
2. It raises once again the question of what is anti-social behaviour? and the fact that the definition and therefore the proscription of such behaviour is relative and subject to shifting norms and values in society.
3. This report could be taken as supporting evidence for the New Right view which supports traditional family structures and close family relationships, arguing that these lead to greater social order.  The report seems to suggest that the continuance of traditional family forms and significant leisure time spent within the family, as found in countries such as Italy and Spain is associated with lower levels of anti-social behaviour by young people.  Although at the same time the implication seems to be that it is the amount of time shared by adults with young people that is important and that traditional family structures tend to facilitate this.
4. The report’s evidence may well be read with interest by those involved in education, particularly the home-education movement.  Numerous advocates of home education have argued that home educated children benefit from greater interactions with adults than their conventionally educated peers, and that home education removes children from an artificial environment at school in which their socialisation is restricted to their age-mates (Dowty, 2000).  Up until now, one of the key arguments against home education is that it could negatively affect a child’s socialisation by removing that child from its peers (see for example the case of Leuffen v. Germany discussed by Monk (2003)).  The suggestion of Margo and Dixon’s report would seem to be, however, that young people benefit from interaction with adults and that assuming that a child’s main socialisation will be carried out by their peer group has negative effects on their tendency to anti-social behaviour.  (All this of course rests on the assumption that home education does give children more interaction and close relationship with adults than they would receive in school)

BBC NEWS | UK | UK youths ‘among worst in Europe’

I’m sure there are many other possible analyses of this report and the discussions surrounding it - please let me know if you have other relevant points to add (or just add a comment to the post!).

Compared to countries like the United States there are relatively few private universities in the UK.  Probably the two most famous are the Open University and Buckingham University, and until 1998 students at British universities did not have to pay fees.

With the introduction of “top-up fees” this year it is often argued that the UK is moving closer to privatisation of its universities.  Universities already compete to attract students, with rankings in league tables an annual topic of conversation and many people arguing that which university you attend matters as much as what subject you study and more than what class of degree you get.

Some UK universities are already expanding their “brands” by opening branches overseas.  Warwick University for example, has been involved in discussions about the possibility of establishing a campus in Singapore.

James Tooley, in his book Reclaiming Education (2000) argues that private provision of university education allows for greater flexibility of provision and can actually increase access for socially and economically disadvantaged social groups through the provision of shortened, modular or distance learning options (The Open University is a good example of this kind of flexibility).  Essentially the argument is that when education runs in the form of businesses there is a response to the demands of the market and that those demands will be met creatively.

Others such as Walford (1990) and Brighouse (2004), although not writing specifically about higher education, argue that private education is elitist in that it provides the highest standard of education only to those who can afford to pay the premium price, therefore maintaining and exacerbating social divisions.

It is the second viewpoint that tends to predominate in discussions of education, and this has probably influenced the guarded response reported in this BBC article:

BBC NEWS | Education | Private schools ‘as universities’

It is also interesting to note the comment that the job of private schools (or schools in general) “is to prepare undergraduates”.  This brings out interesting assumptions about  the destinations of  independent school pupils and the purpose of education.    It seems to be assumed that university is the only progression from school, and that the main purpose of education is to achieve that progression.  This cultural assumption has been noted by numerous researchers into independent education, including Roker (1993), Kenway (1990) and Allatt (1996).

New statistics on truancy were released today, and there has been much outcry in the press that despite government attempts to “crack down” on truancy there has actually been a rise in truancy from schools over the past year, and the greatest rise has been in truancy from primary schools.

See for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5365416.stm

This raises several questions in my mind:

1. How big is the problem? For primary schools the truancy rate is less than 0.5% of half days - ie for every 200 pupils in school about one will be truanting. For secondary schools the figure is about 1.2% - ie for every 1000 pupils about 12 will be truanting. This suggests that the problem is still significantly greater at secondary schools than primary despite today’s hype. A large number of these truancies are from a small number of children who persistently miss school, suggesting that the number of children to be seriously worried about is small (not that this means that they should not be considered)
2. Why does the government see this as a problem? What are the motives behind the concern? Is it because league tables and exam results are being harmed; is it because there is a fear that some children’s education is being impoverished (which is undoubtedly true); is it because this might harm the economy and the unemployment figures in the long run; is it because we have a set of in-built assumptions that say that children should be in school, without really questioning why; or is it a mixture of all of the above? While there may be no easy answer to this question it is one worth posing - why is truancy a problem?
3. Why do children truant? This is a question that is rarely raised - are the children the problem, or the schools that they truant from? Illich (1976), Freire (1996) and Tooley (2003) all argue from different perspectives that schools as we know them do little to educate children, instead teaching them to conform and not to question; instead they argue that true education is something much more individual, flexible and stimulating, with real purpose for the student. Even Woods (1984) and many others who have no problems with school as a notion, found that the relationships between teachers and students were all important in determining how children behaved in the classroom (and whether they turned up at all). Undoubtedly some parents have an influence on their children’s truancy, but there are probably also significant numbers of children who do not want to go to school because of negative experiences and relationships - soemthing which also needs consideration.
4. How much has truancy been affected by increased government focus on targets and results and resulting changes in teacher practice? I am not sure if there has been any research on this but it is a question worth asking in the light of criticisms of teachers “teaching to the test”.

The answers to these questions are not clear cut - certainly not as clear cut as either the media or the government often portray them to be, so I leave them with you for contemplation.

This article looking at the way in which foreign languages other than the traditional French, German and Spanish are typically ignored or offered low status in education picks up on two key issues in education - the presence of an ethnocentric curriculum and a hegemony of knowledge.

As regards the ethnocentric curriculum, it picks up the fact that “traditional” Western European languages are seen as more important to be learnt in school than languages such as Mandarin Chinese or Urdu or Arabic.  This sidelines the linguistic abilities of many minority ethnic pupils in the UK who may be fluent in two or more languages but whose skills are often dismissed.  This suggests that our curriculum and education system are still very much centred around white Western-European culture.

The fact that some kinds of linguistic knowledge are more important than others suggests that “traditional” language knowledge such as French and German remains hegemonic  in the education system.  Michael Apple (who writes from a neo-Marxist perspective) would argue that this hegemony reflects the interests of the powerful groups in society and that they play a significant role in deciding what knowledge is transmitted in schools and the importance attributed to that knowledge.  In this case those in power in British society are typically white British, and the maintenance of the low status of minority group languages in the UK could be said to help maintain that power.

BBC NEWS | Education | School ’snobbery’ over languages

I’ve just read an interesting piece of research into students’ perceptions of Curriculum 2000 comissioned and published by the ATL (teachers’ union). It interviewed 77 students partway through the Upper Sixth about their experiences. It found that students felt under pressure from the workload of the AS year and also from the concentrated period of assessment at the end of the AS year. What I found very interesting and which runs counter to traditional stereotypes about hard-working sciences students and lazy arts students, was that the arts and humanities students had a greater workload outside school hours than the science students.

Thus far there has been very little research published into the impact of Curriculum 2000 with the new A-level and Vocational qualifications and there is also relatively little research into sixth-form students. My anecdotal experiences would tend to back up the findings of the research regarding the pressures on students, especially around the May-June exams - rushing into them and then attempting to return students to lessons for the final part of the summer term.

The report is by Elseta Elsheikh and Tom Liney and was published in 2002. It is available as a PDF download from the ATL website or can be ordered in hard-copy (free to members or about £7 to non-members). The ATL has a wealth of material on all sorts of aspects of education and much of it, especially in the research section, is easy to read and pitched at a level that most 6th formers would be able to cope with. I’ve included the link below to their publications page.

Publications