Achievement in British Education is a branch of British sociology which examines and discusses the factors influencing the achievement of pupils who are taught by the British education system. Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Education in the United Kingdom is covered in the following articles: Education in England Education in Northern Ireland Education in Scotland Education in Wales Grammar schools in the United Kingdom Achievement in British Education List of schools in the United Kingdom British universities School inspection organisations: Office for Standards in...

As in most countries, there are strong class-based inequalities in educational outcomes in Britain. Gender and ethnicity also affect outcomes strongly. Social class describes the relationships between people in hierarchical societies or cultures. ... In sociology, gender identity describes the gender with which a person identifies (i. ... This article or section should be merged with ethnic group Ethnicity is the cultural characteristics that connect a particular group or groups of people to each other. ...

The effect of intelligence

Measured IQ is strongly positively correlated with educational outcomes. Nevertheless, class factors may intervene in that measures of intelligence such as IQ may not be immune to contamination from cultural differences and acquired characteristics. For instance, there are class differences in the profile of IQ over time, with inter-class differences increasing through the school career. IQ redirects here; for other uses of that term, see IQ (disambiguation). ... Intelligence is usually said to involve mental capabilities such as the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ...

The effect of class

Being born into a higher class family is the greatest determinant of educational achievement in Britain, understood as success in national GCSE and A level examinations, with the average child of a higher class family doing far better than an average working class child. GCSE is an acronym that can refer to: General Certificate of Secondary Education global common subexpression elimination - an optimisation technique used by some compilers This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The A-level, short for Advanced Level, is a General Certificate of Education qualification, usually taken by students in the final two years of secondary education (after GCSEs). ...

There are many factors that may be involved in this effect:

Financial factors

• Wealthy families can send their children to private schools (though the most prestigious of these are paradoxically called public schools in England and Wales), where the achievement rates are far higher than even prestigious state schools.
• Working-class children are far more likely to go to schools with poor funding and other problems, which middle-class parents have the resources and awareness to avoid.
• Possible cultural deprivation of working-class children, both before and during their school years, due to financial constraints e.g. lack of foreign travel, restricted exposure to the arts
• Material factors evident in working-class families may also adversely affect educational achievement:
  • Poorer housing - This usually means smaller housing, which means that children may not get a chance to study in peace and quiet.
  • Diet - Not getting the right nutrients or in some cases not getting a sufficient supply of nutrients means that some working-class children may not be able to concentrate effectively.
  • Sickness - A working-class child is statistically more likely to get sick, and this means they miss lessons at school.
  • Low income - This means that certain extra school activities which must be paid for, such as excursions, may not be available to working class children.
  • Part-time work - Because of the (usually) greater financial pressures on working-class families, children may take part-time work, either to give themselves an income ot to supplement their parents' income. The added pressure of part-time work on a child can affect their achievement in school.

The term public school has different meanings: In Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and most other English-speaking nations, a public school is a school which is financed and run by the government and does not charge tuition fees. ... A precise definition of the arts can be contentious, but the following areas of activity are usually included: Art / Visual arts Architecture Crafts Dance Drawing Film Literature Music Painting Photography Pottery Sculpture Theater Unlike art, design focuses less on the aesthetics of a thing and more on the functionality of...

Cultural factors

• Working-class families may lack cultural capital, which means that their culture could be incompatible with that of schools which have adopted the middle or upper class culture.
• Parents in some working-class families may have more negative attitudes toward education than their middle-class counterparts, meaning that they would not try as hard to get the most out of the system (e.g. checking on their child's achievement, making sure they get into good schools etc.).
• Working-class parents are likely to be less educated than their middle-class counterparts, and therefore may not be as well-placed to help their children with pre-school learning and school homework as middle or upper class parents.
• Teacher expectations of working-class children may be lower.
• One practice in British education is to group children according to their ability, either in all subjects (called streaming) or in particular subjects (called banding or setting). It has been claimed that working-class children end up in the lower streams/bands/sets more often than their middle class peers. Being put in lower bands may make children achieve less, as teachers believe they are teaching a less able group, and the children may be demotivated by their placement.
• A 'present time orientation' that may be present in working-class culture - living from day to day with no long-term goals - may make education, which involves present sacrifice (such as staying out of the workforce to study) in the pursuit of long-term goals seem less important.

No-one of these factors is strictly deterministic and many working class children achieve high results in British education. Nevertheless, it may be harder for potential high-achievers from a working-class background to reach the same level of educational achievement as children of similar natural ability from higher classes. Cultural capital (le capital culturel) is a sociological term used by Pierre Bourdieu. ... The term deterministic may refer to: the more general notion of determinism from philosophy, see determinism a type of algorithm as discussed in computer science, see deterministic algorithm scientific determinism as used by Karl Popper and Stephen Hawking deterministic system in mathematics deterministic system in philosophy deterministic finite state machine...

The effect of gender

After ethnicity, gender is the next greatest determinant of achievement.

Up until recently, girls did not do as well as boys. However, in recent time this has reversed, with Girls doing better than boys in education, on average. However, the statistics do vary significantly from year to year.

There are many factors that may be involved in this effect:

• Girls may be more motivated and work harder than boys.
• The equal opportunities movement has (by necessity) concentrated more on improving opportunities for girls than for boys.
• There may be an anti-learning sub-culture among some boys.
  • A conseuqence of this may be that teachers often do not expect as much of boys as they do of girls both academically and behaviourally.
  • Relatedly, boys' behaviour and concentration in the classroom may be poorer than that of girls.
• Boys tend to mature later than girls

While girls currently achieve better results than boys across the spectrum, it is still argued that girls are denied equality, perhaps by lingering stereotypes about male-dominated subjects such as the sciences. Equal opportunity is a descriptive term for an approach intended to give equal access to an environment or benefits, such as education, employment, health care, or social welfare to members of various social groups, some of which might otherwise suffer from discrimination. ... In modern usage, a stereotype is a simplified mental picture of an individual or group of people who share a certain characteristic (or stereotypical) qualities. ...