Schools, Families and Academically Able Students: contrasting modes of involvement in secondary education

Abstract

Over the past few years, we have been gathering data on the educational careers of a previously researched group of students who were identified as ‘academically able’ in their early teenage years. The 347 young men and women who have taken part in this later research attended 18 different secondary schools and are now in their mid‐twenties. This paper attempts to make sense of their school experiences using Basil Bernstein's theorisations on the ‘sources of consensus and disaffection in education’. Despite a number of recent critiques directed at theories of ‘socio‐cultural determinism’ in general, we argue that Bernstein's framework provides a useful means to unravel some of the varied biographies of our sample of students. More specifically, in this paper we compare and contrast different levels of student involvement at two of our 18 research schools. Data from these schools, our sample of students and some of their parents are used to make connections between the cultures of the schools, family perceptions and subsequent forms of student involvement. Although these connections are by no means straightforward, we argue that they provide a way of understanding many facets of our respondents’ various orientations to schooling that are significant not only for their own educational careers, but also for future educational decision‐making.