WRITING INEQUALITIES: LITERACY AND SOCIAL CLASS IN THREE PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

Educational statistics in Britain make depressing reading. Recent surveys show that 80% of children from professional families gain university degrees compared with 14% from working class homes:¹ that black children are more likely to leave school with fewer academic qualifications even though they enter the system showing promise: that only a small minority of children from comprehensive schools² gain places at Oxbridge although 90% of the population attend such schools: that a mere 4% of medical and dentistry students come from working class backgrounds etc. In spite of John Major’s³ optimistic insistence that Britain has become a classless society, it would appear that class differences in educational performance are not disappearing. On the contrary, a recent OECD⁴ survey, based on data gathered from 16,000 people born in 1958 and 1970 shows that the detrimental effects of inequality of opportunity are actually growing and that the opportunities gap between those from different social backgrounds is no better for those born in 1970 than it was for those born a generation earlier in 1958.

Citation

Williams, A. and Gregory, E. (2004), "WRITING INEQUALITIES: LITERACY AND SOCIAL CLASS IN THREE PRIMARY SCHOOLS", Jeffrey, B. and Walford, G. (Ed.) Ethnographies of Educational and Cultural Conflicts: Strategies and Resolutions (Studies in Educational Ethnography, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 67-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-210X(04)09005-9