Topic 2

• use micro studies of what actually happens within schools and classrooms
• use qualitative research methods.
• seek to discover how teachers or pupils experience education and interpret situations and develop meanings.
• interested in how pupil identities shape the progress they make.

• the ethos refers to the character, atmosphere or 'climate' of a school.
• the ethos of a school is normally reflected in and supported by the hidden curriculum, as well as the formal programme of subjects and lessons making up the overt curriculum. 
• in contemporary britain, many parents will assess a schools suitabilty for their children in terms of its ethos, put into practice through the hidden curriculum, and whether these combine to produce high educational standards

• teacher student interaction through the process of schooling and everyday classroom life can influence the construction and development of positive and negative pupil self concepts.
• teachers are actively judging and classifying pupils, interpretting their behaviour and forming impressions of them. 
• this process of labelling can contribute to the moulding of pupil identities and has been shown to affect the educational performance and classroom behaviour of students.
• this stereotype can produce  a halo effect, meaning a teacherwho has formed a good impression of a student in some way, such as seeing them as cooperative or polite may see that student favourably in other ways too- such as seeing them as bright and hardworking- even if theyre not.
• Waterhouse, in case studies of four primary and secondary schools, suggests that teacher labelling of pupils as either normal or deviant types has implications for the way teachers react with them. these labels can form a 'pivotal identity' for students whih provide a pivot teachers use to interpret classroom events.
• this may lead to the self fulfilling prophecy on which people react in response to predictions which have been made regarding their behaviour, and thereby the predictions come true.

• these are ways of grouping students due to their actual or predicted ability.
• banding is sometimes used to desbribe the way comprehensive schools try to ensure their intakes have a spread of pupils drawn from  all bands of ability. it is also commonly used as an alternative word for streaming
• streaming is where pupils are divided into groups of similar ability in which they stay for all subjects
• setting is where students are divided into groups of the same ability for particular subjects
• being placed into a low set or stream may undermine a students confidence and discourage them from trying.
• Balls research in beachside comprehensive fpimd that top stream students were 'warmed up' by encouragement to achieve highly and follow academic courses of study, while lower stream students were 'cooled out' and encoraged to folow lower stress vocational and practical courses. smyth found students in lower sets had a more negative attitude to school, and were more likely than other students to disengage from school life. 
• the sutton trust found that while setting was a good way of stretching pupils from poor backgrounds, not many of them were reaching the top sets and streaming favoured pupils from the middle class. 
• streaming contributes to the underachievement of working class pupils.

• one of the consequences of streaming and setting is that not all children are given access to the same knowledge. keddie found that teachers taught high streams differently than lower ones.
• lower stream working class pupils might therefore underachieve in education partly because they have not been given access to the knowledge required for educational success
• Gillborn and Youdell (2000) found that schools were undertaking a process of educational triage; dividing students into three groups, those who they thought were most likely with little help to achieve an A*-C grade, those on the C/D borderline who could get a c with help, and those who were seen as hopeless cases unlikely to get a C or above.
• focus on the first two groups will help improve league table positions. 
• in 2011 a culture of low expectations in some schools, every secondary school in england would be expected to increase the proportion of all pupils achieving five A*-C grades at GCSE,to at least 40%. this is likely to intensify the process of educational triage.
• the school processes and teacher stereotypes mean that those in the third group are more likely to be lower working class students, predominantly boys, and those with special educational needs.

• Students experience, react and adapt in a wide variety of ways to schools attempt to label them.
• These adaptations frequently take the form of pupil subcultures, who share some values norms and behaviours which give them a sense of group identity and belonging and provide them, with support and peer group status.
• Lacey's study of a middle-class grammar school found there were two related processes at work in schools, differentiation and polarisation. 
  • differentiation is when teachers judge students and rank and categorise them into different groups - streams or sets - according to the school's values. 
  • polarisation is a consequence of differentiation in which students become divided into two opposing groups, those in the top groups that achieve highly and those in the bottom streams who are labelled as failures. 
• hargreaves (1967, 1976)  in a secondary modern, ball  (1981) in a streamed comprehensive and Abraham (1989) in a comprehensive using setting found teachers perception of students academic ability and the processes of differentiation influenced how students behaved and led to the formation of pro and anti-school subcultures.

Becker first identified that teachers initially evaluate pupils in relation to their stereotypes of the 'ideal pupil' which influence teachers judgements of the quality of young people as pupils.

the idea of an ideal pupil includes things like hard work, concentrating, listening to teachers and performing well academically.

this has become a significant reference point for teachers and influences teachers dealings with pupils. 

social class, as well as ethnic background and sex, can also have an important influence on this evaluation. 

harvey and Slatin showed photographs of children from different ethnic and social class backgrounds to 96 teachers and found they saw white middle-class children as more likely to be successful students. 

this can lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy.

• A pro-school subculture consists of a group of pupils who generally conform to the academic aims, ethos and rules of a school, and tend to be linked to students in upper streams who are valued and rewarded and given status as they fulfil the schools' ambitions.
• Mac an Ghaill (1994) found a conformist pro-school subculture emerged in two male groups, the 'academic achievers'and 'new enterprisers' who were skilled manual working class white and Asian students who were aspiring to middle-class careers through either academic success (academic achievers) or success in vocational subjects (new entiprisers)
• sewell found a pro-school subculture among some black pupils, 'the conformists' who sought to achieve academic success and avoid racist stereotyping and labelling by teachers by conforming to school values
• students are more likely to be middle class or skilled working class.

• groups of pupils who rebel against the school. 
• truancy, playing up teachers, messing about, breaking school rules, copying work and generally disrupting the smooth running of a school become a way of getting back at the system that denied them status by labelling them as failures by placing them in lower streams and sets. 
• it is a subculture of resistance and an anti-learning subculture,
• it provides a means for pupils to improve their self-esteem, by giving them status in the eyes of their peer group. 
• these subcultures can contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy of underachievement
• Paul Willis' study of lad culture in Wolverhampton is an example of this
• Jackson suggests that some girls adopt 'ladette' behaviour and a similar confrontational approach to school as the boys do. however, Jackson's research showed that many girls still strived for academic success, hiding their work and effort at the same time as adopting ladette behaviour.

• Woods suggested that dividing pupils experience into pro- and anti- subcultures is too simple. while the research is now old, the framework is still relevant. 
• there are a wide variety of responses to school which influence what people achieve, and students may change their responses over time. 
• woods identified eight responses:

• recognise the importance of what happens inside schools
  • explanations for achievement focus on school organisation, processes and the teaching and learning context, and interactionist approaches which examine how labelling affects pupils identities and learning 
  • this avoids putting the whole blame for educational failure on deficiencies in the pupil, their families, their cultural values or material circumstances arising from their social class backgrounds.
• They are too deterministic
  • suggest that once a negative label is applied, it will always have a negative effect. 
  • it might actually have the opposite effect, and encourage those labelled to prove the label wrong. 
• they do not pay enough attention to the distribution of power in society.
  • do not explain why so many teachers seem to hold similar views on what counts as an ideal pupil and why these seem to be related to social class, gender or ethnicity.
  • they, therefore, do not pay attention to the distribution of power in society.
• they do not pay enough attention to factors outside the school
  • don't take the account structural, material and cultural factors outside the school.
  • teachers  cannot be held solely responsible for roots outside the school in the structure of inequality in wider society