sociology homework

Why do some pupils achieve more than others?

As we all know, there are always inequalities among pupils' achievement: some of them hardly get 3 GSCE's, some of them pass 10 with As. But these inequalities may take place due to different reasons.

Some of the reasons become clear after looking at the statistics: for example, girls tend to achieve more that boys. Girls are brought up to be more modest and behave well, while boys tend to be more active and even aggressive, which, of course, affects their performance at school.
Boys are approximately 7 times more likely to be excluded from school than girls due to their bad behaviour, as the statistics says.

Another important point is that parents often expect girls to do better than their brothers, parents put the responsibility of being 'a sensible pupil' on a girl rather than a boy.
However, according to my own experience, I'd say that boys are more clever than girls on average. Girls perform better at subjects asking to remember and retell information while boys are better at interpreting information.

The second thing that affects pupils' achievement is the existence of peer groups, in some of which under-performance at school may be considered as 'normal' or even 'cool'.

As you can see from the bar chart below, there is a tendency of pupils of higher classes to achieve more than those of the lowest classes.


But why is the correlation between the family income and children performance is so strong?
I guess, that is because children of higher and middle class families have larger access to educational sources (e.g. computers with internet access, educational toys, textbooks) and they can afford to go to private schools and hire private tutors.

Child from low-income families may have part-time jobs as well as problems within their families (alcoholism, domestic violence), which prevents them from achieving educational standarts.

People from middle and upper class tend to live by principle 'work today for better life tomorrow', while the situation with low class families is rather the opposite.


I can also outline 'labelling' as a reason for inequality in pupil's achievement. Teachers often label children as good or bad performers, sometimes without any reason for that ( for example, a quite and peaceful girl may be labelled as 'clever' without really being so). Pupils labelled as 'bad' will continue to perform badly, while 'good' pupils try to impress teachers even more.


The way pupils are taught may also influence their performance at school, for example single-sex schools/ordinary schools, size of the classes make difference as well as teacher's actual interest in subject and the ability to teach it and make pupils interested and involved in the process of thinking.


Moreover, exams are created in a way that often leaves only one way of thinking of a subject and we are, of course, taught not to really learn the subject but to perform well in an exam. That is the problem for people, whose find it difficult to think in a one 'right' way, proposed by examiners and teachers.


Having said all of that, I'd like to add that the problem of inequality in school achievement can not be investigated only on a large scale - that is also the problem of individuals. And if educational policies have effect on general problems, these 'personal' problems can be solved only by individuals themselves.