Social class, families and the politics of educational advantage: the work of Dennis Marsden

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Notes

1. See the ESDS website: www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/pioneers/marsden/dmresearcher.asp.

2. Building upon Lancelot Hogben’s research agenda, the concerns of the handful of post-war sociology of education researchers were focused initially upon problems of mass participation in the education system and the debilitating effects, for some children, of economic and material deprivation. The assumption of those at work at this time appeared to be that if such extrinsic sources of inequality could be removed or ameliorated, the repeatedly evident and apparently tight bond between educational attainment and social class could be broken; leaving residual differences that could be explained in other ways, such as differential intelligence distribution or selection bias. This served to establish social class as the major, almost the only, preoccupation in research in the sociology of education for the next 40 years.

3. See http://oro.open.ac.uk/21486/.

4. See Vincent and Ball (2007) on social class and musical instruments.

5. The book addresses the difficulties that the working-class parents experienced in accessing information about their children’s schooling and this contributed to the founding by Brian Jackson of the Advisory Centre for Education, which celebrated its Golden Anniversary in 2010.