Notes

6 marker comprehensive
To begin with, the comprehensive system's implementation of streaming reinforced class inequality, with middle-class students in high streams and working-class students in low streams. Second, middle-class parents have the financial means to relocate to more wealthy places, or to areas where schooling is considered to be superior; working-class parents cannot do so and have little option, sustaining the meritocracy myth. Finally, due to the schools being mixed ability, an educational triage will occur. Teachers will overlook the lower band, believing they are unfit to teach, ignore the higher band, believing they do not require assistance, and only focus on the middle band. As a result, the bottom and upper bands are neglected.

6 marker why do girls perform better than boys/subjects
Subject::
Girls are more likely to be socialised to discuss things, therefore they are more likely to pick topics like history and English, which need more discussion, over sciences, which require less discussion and have a "one right answer." Science is frequently taught with masculine examples; for example, physics textbooks feature cars to demonstrate motion principles. This may discourage girls from studying physics since the masculine examples used to teach these subjects are unappealing to them. Teachers may have stereotypes about how females struggle in male-dominated disciplines like physics, and they may try to discourage them by directing them to more traditionally feminine topics like English, resulting in fewer girls taking scientific courses.

Why they perform better:
Girls may perform better in school because they have more positive role models - most primary school teachers are female, so girls understand that they may reach high goals and ambitions from an early age, motivating them to do well in school. Scientific research discovered once GCSEs with coursework were implemented, the gender difference in success expanded dramatically. Girls naturally prefer coursework because they pay more attention to detail, care about how their work is presented, and are better at meeting deadlines. Teachers favour females because they are more cooperative and often work quietly with little disturbance; these positive labels given to girls may develop self-fulfilling prophesies; similarly, when teachers label boys as a hassle, it can form a negative self-fulfilling prophesy for them.

Why education capitlaist 10 mark

One way that education promotes capitalism is through repeating inequalities in society and thereby developing the next generation's bourgeoisie and proletariat. Meritocracy is a myth for Marxists. Yes, the educational system sorts people into their social roles, but for the most part, this is a simple process of ensuring that the children of working-class parents leave school and work in working-class jobs, and the children of the owners of the means of production leave school and eventually own the means of production. The myth of meritocracy succeeds in creating an illusion of justice in this society, keeping people content and productive. An example of a school doing this is admissions regulations ensuring that children from higher-income families attend higher-performing schools (whether because they pay for tutoring to pass a test to go to grammar schools, live in a higher income area, pay for private schools, or even a mix of these factors). Therefore, most children from higher income families obtain higher results than lower income family children.
Finally, even if both children have high grades, a bourgeoisie child is far more likely to attend a renowned university and advance to the highest-paying occupations. Some debate if this is still true today, given the pressure on universities to widen participation and be more class and culturally diverse, and the availability of 'contextual offers,' in which students with grades below those required may be admitted according to personal circumstances.

The education system also promotes capitalism by maintaining a link between school and the capitalist workplace, training youngsters to be exploited.  While functionalists may see this as positively teaching children social norms and values and preparing them for life, Marxists see it as generating a submissive and compliant workforce. This correlation may be seen in numerous aspects of school and workplaces, such as the hierarchy, strict schedules, job dispersion, and reward and disciplinary systems. Many claim that kids nowadays are part of the anti school subculture, and that Bowles and Gintis is outdated since workplaces have changed dramatically since 1976, with various laws modifying it over time. However, modern adjustments to schools may be driven by changes in the workplace and so continue to serve the goals of capitalism.

30 marker:

Interactionism, which focuses on processes such as teacher labelling, institutional racism, and student subcultures, is related with the assumption that in-school procedures are the primary cause of these differences. I will be discussing how these in-school processes effect students differently.

Sociologists have discovered numerous factors that may indicate that school factors have a significant role in racial disparities in educational achievement. Schools are being criticised for coming off as 'racist' as a result of the ethnocentric curriculum that emerges in the secondary school curriculum. Miriam David investigated the Ethnocentric Curriculum and discovered that the history curriculum centred around the history of white British people and their "glorious history," with little acknowledgment given to any other ethnic groups or their histories. Coard also discusses how the ethnocentric curriculum might lead to underachievement. In history, for example, the British are portrayed as delivering civilisation to the 'primitive' peoples they colonised. This inferiority complex damages black children's self-esteem and leads to failure. However, it is unclear how effective the ethnocentric curriculum is. While it may disregard Asian culture, Indian and Chinese students outperform the national average. Similarly, Maureen Stone (1981) argues that black kid do not suffer from low self-esteem.

Institutional racism is another element that sociologists believe influences educational achievement among different ethnic groups in schools. This is when a school is organised in such an ethnocentric fashion that every day school life discriminates against ethnic minorities, such as with dress requirements, the school food, and holidays. School holidays are viewed as institutional racism because the British secondary school calendar is based on Christian (a traditionally white religion) holidays such as Easter and Christmas, with religious celebrations from other ethnic groups being ignored and not fitting into the secondary school calendar. This is a severe case of institutional racism, indicating that the school discriminates against ethnic minorities. Institutional racism is another element that sociologists believe influences educational achievement among different ethnic groups in schools. This is when a school is organised in such an ethnocentric fashion that every day school life discriminates against ethnic minorities, such as with dress requirements, the school food, and holidays. School holidays are viewed as institutional racism because the British secondary school calendar is based on Christian (a traditionally white religion) holidays such as Easter and Christmas, with religious celebrations from other ethnic groups being ignored and not fitting into the secondary school calendar. However, many argue that this view is outdated because many schools in the UK with a substantial minority population have met their needs. For example, public colleges and schools that serve Halal meat. Furthermore, some may argue that labelling Christianity as a "white religion" ignores the fact that almost half of ethnic minorities in the UK are Christian, and that the title is a type of whitewashing because Christianity began and continues to exist in the Middle East.

There is some evidence that school marketisation and selection have a role in the differences in educational success between ethnic minorities. For example, Ball and Whitty argue marketisation policies such as exam league tables reproduce class inequalities by creating inequalities between schools. This would imply that the 'better' secondary (often private) schools will be able to choose which students they accept, as opposed to the average secondary state institutions, which are picked by the students. This would provide the school the option of selecting students, and hence the ethnic majority in the school. And because private schools outperform public schools, ethnic gaps in educational success persist. The Commission on Racial Equality looked into this issue and discovered that schools favoured white students over ethnic minority students, with primary school reports criticising ethnic minority students over white students. However David 1993 describes marketized education as a parentocracy. They argue that in an education market, power shifts away from the producers (schools/teachers) to consumers (parents) - and therefore instead of ethnic differences through marketization being a school process, it becomes an internal, at home factor. They also claim this encourages diversity among schools, gives parents more choice and raises standards.

However, there is some evidence that ethnic differences in educational success are caused by factors other than schools. For exams, the majority of study on in-school factors focuses on African-Caribbean underachievement, which is a restricted perspective; there are other variations as well, such as Gypsy Roma underachievement, which is mostly due to low attendance, therefore school is not a key influence here. Also, in research Tony Sewell conducted, he focuses on the greater proportions of single parent families and the effect of gangster culture on young black males, both of which are considerably more important than what happens in school. Sewell has been criticised for lack of representativeness due to the small sample size relative to the larger picture, for example, accusing black culture for black underachievement, when actually it's only black males who adopt hyper-black masculinity, which are a very small percentage compared to the overall black community.

On the other hand, internal factors may play a significant role in clarifying today's most serious problem with underachievement: white working-class kids who feel disconnected from school culture because they believe it does not reflect their own. And though this is a mix of socioethnic factors, it is still relevant.

Overall, I believe that school processes account for a small percentage of the differences in achievement by ethnicity; most of the differences are caused by home factors, and schools can only do so much, since students spend more time at home than at school. Furthermore, I believe that putting all the focus on issues linked with ethnciity within education is a distracting us from the more relevant issue of class and differential achievement, which affects the differential achievement gap more, regardless of ethnic background.

10 marker: unstructured interviews

Unstructured interviews have the advantage of being relatively flexible. The interviewer can only ask preset questions in structured interviews. Informal interviews, on the other hand, aren't bound by any rules, allowing the interview to be tailored to each person.  It enables for a far more in-depth examination of the complexity of the person's viewpoint. For example, William Labov used a formal interview approach to investigate the language of black American youngsters and discovered that they seemed linguistically impaired. However, upon taking a more casual, informal style - Labov seated on the floor, with a friend allowed to be with him, response changed alot. He spoke more freely and more detailed and demonstrated his ability to communicate.This boosts the interview's validity and helps the interviewer to collect a broader and more detailed set of data. However, one drawback is that each interview will be quite different, making them unreliable and difficult to put into quantitative data.

A disadvantage of unstructured interviews is that some ethnic issues can arise. In an interview it may be hard to not answer questions that may be sensitive or that the person being interviewed doesnt want to talk about . There is also issues with confidentiality or sensitive topics, since there is more in depth information, there is more potential to harm the respondent if confidentiality is not mantained. However, some may argue this is too deterministic as they are assuming there cannot be basic guidelines both parties agree to, with it still being unstructured. For example, they can be protected by laws when signing a simple contract or signing an agreement that the information will stay confidential and will be non traceable, whilst still mantianing an informal conversation during the interview.