Social justice, race and class in education in England: competing perspectives

ABSTRACT

‘Narrowing the gap’ and addressing low educational achievement of specific social class and ethnic groups has long been an expressed government concern. This paper considers the links between poverty, ethnicity and gender and school attainment and the interrelations of these factors using national data sets and other quantitative data. The limitations of single-theme analyses and their potentially misleading implications are explored. Related to this, the failures of social and educational policies to bring about greater equality are examined. Competing perspectives on low attainment and their positions are critiqued. The paper argues that ethnic and class discrimination stems from the same structural arrangements contrived for the advantage of more affluent sectors of society. Theoretical development is needed to bring together class, race and other discriminatory features and construct more sophisticated causal analyses that relate to the web of economic, status and power regimes and the negative processes of ‘racialisation’.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• ethnicity
• gender
• educational attainment
• social justice

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues who commented on earlier drafts: David Ewens, Gill Fairbanks, Ray Godfrey, Amanda Henshall, George Hudson and Stephen Steadman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The process of applying for data from the National Pupil Database is arduous, in identifying the variables of interest and specifying these in the terms in which they are held and in satisfying the DfE of the robustness and high-level conformity of the institution’s data protection procedures. The database is a repository of complete cohorts of pupils in schools in England and allows multiple analyses.

2. Data could be missing because the children were not at school in England at these earlier assessment points.

3. Attainment 8 is students’ average achievement across eight subjects: English, mathematics, three other English Baccalaureate subjects and three other subjects. Progress 8 is a calculation of progress from the measured attainment at key stage 2; 0 indicates satisfactory progress with positive and negative numbers expressing better or worse progress.

4. The Gender Inequality Index gives a score from 0 to 1, the lower the more gender equal. The GII has three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment and labour market participation. The dimensions are captured in one synthetic index, so as to account for joint significance. The UNDP claims that none of the measures pertains to the country’s development and a less-developed country can perform on this measure for which the dimensions are considered to be complementary in that inequality in one tends to affect inequality in another.

5. The different powers of the major factors are presented in different ways from ‘odds ratios’ to ‘gaps’ to multiple regression calculations. The answers, in common-sense terms, are much the same in the ranking of factors.