Does Class Have an Impact on Educational Achievement?

Working and middle class students may seem to have the same chances of educational achievement but what about social lessons those working class children miss out on. Does that give middle class students an advantage in school.

One of the main ways that results in educational achievement differing across classes is through material deprivation. This is for example when families are unable to afford school uniforms, school trips and textbooks. It causes the child to feel isolated and in some cases they are bullied and stigmatized because of it. Smith and Noble (1995) referred to these as the “barriers of learning” which can occur from low income. These barriers also refer to the school itself, as there will be better resourced and oversubscribed schools in more affluent areas and unpopular and low achieving schools in the disadvantaged areas. This leads to disadvantaged children who have a lot of potential being sent to the underachieving schools because their parents either cannot afford to or do not have the time to take them to better schools. Lisa Harker (2006) also documented similar findings when she found links between overcrowding houses and educational achievement. A number of distinct negative effects were noted, such as; less space to play leading to higher rates of depression, higher rates of stress among both children and the parents and greater hazards to health leading to more school days lost to illness. This leads onto Oscar Lewis’ findings (1966) although these were recorded many years earlier. He proposed the idea of a culture of poverty that would help individuals to cope in society. This included how children acted when faced with problems that occurred because of their poverty. For example when a child cannot afford school equipment they may make up excuses because they do not want everybody else in the class to know the truth. Furthermore, older working class students are more likely to be working part time or looking after siblings instead of concentrating on their studies. Once at university, students from poorer backgrounds were still working long hours to support their studies but were also at the nearest university to them to save money on accommodation and travel.

Cultural disadvantages can also disadvantage working class children from higher educational achievement. This included the way that they talk and the language in which they use. Bernstein (1971) completed interviews with children of different backgrounds and classes and found two patterns in use; restricted code which is used casually with limited vocabulary and simple grammar and elaborated code which is used in more formal situations with sophisticated grammar and vocabulary. Bernstein argued that while middle class children can switch between the two codes, working class children are often limited to the restricted code. This then makes them disadvantaged at school where the language is formal and so it is harder for them to learn. Labov (1973) interviewed black working class children with different interviewers. Its results showed that while the students may understand the elaborated code they cannot answer in such ways. Also, the students were much more inclined to answer back and to partake in the conversation if it was in the type of language that they understood and then they could put across sophisticated ideas. When Bernstein was interviewing his students it is likely that some of them were black and working class as it is also likely that he found that they also were limited to the restricted code. By using the restricted code, students find it harder to receive educational achievement as they cannot swap to the elaborated code when necessary for example in English exams students may not be able to write in “standard” English and this will lower their mark.