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The AQA specification treats "relationships and processes within schools" as a topic in its own right, and it is one of the most rewarding areas of the whole Education unit because it allows you to weave together class, ethnicity, and gender in a single analysis. Where Lessons 2 to 5 examined each social group separately, this lesson asks a synthesising question: how, in the everyday life of the classroom, do schools actively manufacture differences in achievement? The answer lies in a set of interlocking interactionist and structural processes — labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy, streaming and setting, differentiated knowledge, pupil subcultures and identities, the hidden curriculum, institutional racism, and the in-school effects of marketisation. The crucial examiner-rewarded move is to show that these are not separate causes but stages in a single chain, and that this chain converts the external disadvantages pupils bring through the gate (Lessons 2 and 4) into measured underachievement. A school is therefore not a neutral container that merely registers inequality; it is a maker of inequality in its own right.
Key Definition: In-school processes are the interactions, relationships, structures, and institutional practices within educational settings — labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy, streaming, subcultures, the hidden curriculum, and marketised selection — that shape pupils' experiences, identities, and ultimately their educational outcomes, often independently of the ability pupils actually possess.
Spec Mapping: This lesson maps to AQA A-Level Sociology (7192), Paper 1, Section A: Education — specifically the requirement to understand and evaluate relationships and processes within schools, with particular reference to teacher/pupil relationships, pupil identities and subcultures, the hidden curriculum, and the organisation of teaching and learning. It is the synoptic hinge of the unit, drawing together the internal-factor material from the class, ethnicity, and gender lessons, and it is assessed through 10-mark "applying material from the Item, analyse two…" questions and 30-mark "applying material from the Item and your knowledge, evaluate…" essays.
Synoptic Links: In-school processes are saturated with interactionism — Becker's labelling theory originated in the sociology of crime and deviance (the "master status" and the self-fulfilling logic behind Lemert's deviancy amplification), so the same conceptual toolkit serves both topics. The hidden curriculum links to Marxism (Bowles & Gintis; Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus in beliefs in society) and to stratification (the reproduction of class). Pupil identities connect to the family (primary socialisation and class habitus) and to debates about gender and masculinity. Methods in Context is everywhere: almost all the evidence here comes from observation and unstructured interviews (Becker, Rist, Lacey, Ball, Willis, Sewell, Mac an Ghaill), so the validity, reliability, representativeness, and ethics of small-scale qualitative research are ready-made evaluation points you can deploy in any answer.
Key Definition: Labelling is the process by which teachers attach a meaning or definition to a pupil on the basis of perceived characteristics — appearance, accent, behaviour, class, ethnicity, or gender — rather than measured ability. A label is not a neutral description but a social construction that reflects the labeller's assumptions and can then shape the labelled pupil's behaviour and identity.
Labelling theory, rooted in the interactionist (symbolic-interactionist) tradition, argues that teachers' perceptions and classifications of pupils have a powerful effect on their educational outcomes. Because teachers must process large numbers of pupils quickly, they rely on "typifications" — mental shortcuts that summarise what kind of pupil they think they are dealing with — and these shortcuts are heavily coded by class, ethnicity, and gender. The label is then communicated through countless small cues (tone of voice, amount of attention, the difficulty of the work set) that the pupil reads and, over time, may come to live up to.
Becker (1971), drawing on interviews with around sixty Chicago high-school teachers, showed that teachers construct an image of the "ideal pupil" and judge all pupils against this standard. The ideal pupil is typically middle class in appearance, manner, and attitude: well spoken, well dressed, attentive, eager, and compliant. Pupils who do not match this image — disproportionately working-class and minority-ethnic pupils — are more likely to receive negative labels. Becker's key point is that the same behaviour can be read in opposite ways: lively questioning is "able and engaged" in a child who matches the ideal and "disruptive and attention-seeking" in one who does not.
Dunne and Gazeley (2008), researching in English secondary schools, found that teachers routinely "normalised" working-class underachievement, attributing it to home background and a supposed lack of parental support and treating it as inevitable and beyond the school's power to change. By contrast, they attributed middle-class underachievement to temporary factors (illness, a difficult patch) that could be tackled. This differential attribution had concrete consequences: schools set extension work for middle-class underachievers but entered working-class pupils for easier examination tiers, so the school's own labelling practices constructed and widened the very class gap they claimed merely to observe.
Hempel-Jorgensen (2009) showed that the definition of the "ideal pupil" itself varies between schools in different social contexts. In schools serving disadvantaged communities, the ideal pupil was defined primarily in terms of behaviour — being quiet, passive, obedient, not causing trouble. In middle-class schools, the ideal pupil was defined in terms of academic engagement — asking questions, being curious, showing intellectual creativity. This means working-class pupils are judged against a narrower, conduct-focused criterion that does not reward the higher-order thinking examinations actually demand, while middle-class pupils are positively encouraged to develop precisely those examined skills.
| Study | Setting / Method | Key Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Becker (1971) | Interviews, ~60 Chicago teachers | Teachers rank pupils against a middle-class "ideal pupil" image |
| Rist (1970) | Observation, US kindergarten | Children grouped by appearance/home within days; groupings harden into careers |
| Dunne & Gazeley (2008) | English secondary schools | Working-class underachievement "normalised"; middle-class treated as fixable |
| Hempel-Jorgensen (2009) | English schools | "Ideal pupil" = behaviour in working-class schools, engagement in middle-class schools |
Rist (1970) provides the classic demonstration of how early and how arbitrarily labels are assigned. Observing an American kindergarten, he found the teacher grouped children by table within the first few days, using information about home background and appearance rather than any test of ability. The clean, well-dressed children from better-off homes (the "tigers") were seated nearest the teacher and given the most attention and the most stimulating work; poorer children (the "clowns" and "cardinals") were seated furthest away and taught less. Because the tigers were taught more, they pulled ahead — a self-fulfilling prophecy set in motion before any child had been formally assessed.
Key Definition: The self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when a prediction (such as a teacher's label) becomes true simply because it has been made: the label changes how the labeller treats the pupil, who then behaves in ways that confirm the original prediction.
The Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) field experiment at "Oak School" in California (covered in Lesson 3) demonstrated the positive self-fulfilling prophecy: when teachers were falsely told that certain randomly chosen pupils were "spurters" about to bloom, those pupils made significantly greater measured progress a year later, purely because teachers gave them more warmth, attention, and challenging work. For understanding inequality, however, the negative self-fulfilling prophecy is arguably more important, because it explains how a small initial disadvantage compounds across a whole school career:
This cycle is best understood as a loop, in which the "confirmation" at the end feeds straight back into the labelling at the start:
flowchart TD
A[Teacher labels pupil 'less able' on class, accent, ethnicity, appearance] --> B[Teacher treats pupil accordingly: less attention, easier work, lower demands]
B --> C[Pupil internalises the label; academic self-concept falls]
C --> D[Pupil reduces effort or disengages]
D --> E[Pupil underachieves]
E --> F[Original label 'confirmed' and reinforced]
F --> A
It is essential to stress that the self-fulfilling prophecy is a tendency, not an iron law — a point that prevents labelling theory from collapsing into determinism. Fuller (1984) showed that a group of Black Caribbean girls in London responded to negative labelling not by conforming to it but by channelling their anger at racism into working harder to disprove it. Mirza (1992) found a similar combination of ambition and resistance among Black Caribbean girls. Mac an Ghaill (1992) documented how some Black and Asian sixth-form students developed conscious strategies to manage and deflect racist labelling. Pupils, in short, are active interpreters of the labels applied to them, not passive recipients — which is exactly why structure-and-agency is the live debate beneath this topic.
Key Definition: Streaming places pupils in a single fixed ability group for all subjects on a general judgement of overall ability; setting places them in ability groups subject by subject, so a pupil can be in a high set for one subject and a lower one for another. Both institutionalise the labelling process by turning a teacher's judgement into a structural placement.
Ability grouping is one of the most consequential in-school processes affecting achievement, because it converts a fluid, day-to-day label into a hardened, official position in the school's hierarchy. Research consistently shows that:
Keddie (1971) added a crucial dimension by observing classroom interaction directly: teachers did not merely treat streams differently, they gave them different knowledge. Pupils in higher streams received more abstract, theoretical, "high-status" knowledge geared to examinations; pupils in lower streams received more concrete, watered-down, "common-sense" knowledge. Lower-stream pupils were thus denied access to the very knowledge they would need to succeed — a structural barrier built into the act of streaming itself, quite apart from any motivational effect.
Lacey (1970), in his study of Hightown Grammar, identified two linked processes that explain how ability grouping generates subcultures:
Ball (1981), studying Beachside Comprehensive, found that teachers held lower expectations of pupils in lower bands, taught them less enthusiastically, and expected them to misbehave — a textbook self-fulfilling prophecy. Crucially, when the school abolished banding in favour of mixed-ability teaching, the influence of anti-school subcultures declined and polarisation softened. Because this approximates a natural experiment — changing the structure and watching the effect — Ball's study is unusually strong evidence that streaming itself, not just the pupils within it, generates underachievement. Hargreaves (1967), in Social Relations in a Secondary School, had earlier found the same dynamic in a secondary modern, where boys branded "worthless" in the bottom streams formed a delinquent subculture that rewarded toughness and defiance as a way of recovering self-esteem.
Schools are not just places of learning — they are sites where identities are formed, negotiated, and contested. A pupil subculture is a group sharing distinctive values and behaviour, typically formed in response to the labels and the stream the school has assigned. Woods (1979) argued that the simple pro-/anti-school binary is too crude and identified a fuller range of adaptations — ingratiation (the eager "teacher's pet"), compliance, ritualism (going through the motions), retreatism (daydreaming indifference), and rebellion (outright rejection) — and noted that an individual pupil may move between adaptations over time.
Archer et al. (2010) found that working-class pupils often experienced a fundamental conflict between their class identity and the identity the school demanded. Being a "successful learner" was associated with middle-class characteristics — being articulate, confident, and "switched on" to high culture — which felt alien and inauthentic. Rather than accept symbolic exclusion, some pupils invested instead in "Nike identities" built around branded clothing, trainers, and street style, which gave them status and self-worth among peers but brought them into direct conflict with the school's uniform rules and academic values. Reay (2006) drew on Bourdieu's concept of habitus to show that working-class pupils who did succeed often experienced a painful sense of being "out of place," a "fish out of water" who had to suppress their class identity to fit a middle-class institution — so educational mobility can be psychologically costly as well as materially rewarding.
Mac an Ghaill (1994), in The Making of Men, identified multiple masculinities in school. The dominant "Macho Lads" identity was anti-academic, treating mental work as feminine and beneath "real" men, while other forms — the "Academic Achievers" and "New Enterprisers" — were compatible with educational success. This shows masculinity is plural and contested, not a single fixed thing. Connell (1995) introduced the concept of hegemonic masculinity — the culturally dominant ideal of manhood in a given context, which often emphasises physical toughness, heterosexuality, and emotional stoicism while devaluing academic effort, especially in subjects coded as "feminine." Boys who challenge this ideal by working hard in English or art risk being marginalised or bullied, which helps explain why the gender gap is widest in literacy-based subjects.
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