From your reading, explore the issues of educational inequality either 'race', or 'class' or 'gender'.

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From your reading, explore the issues of educational inequality either ‘race’, or ‘class’ or ‘gender’

This assignment will be exploring and focusing into the educational inequalities that still exist today in our societies based on the social class system within Britain. There have been significant changes to the structure of the educational system throughout the twentieth century, from the compulsion of secondary Education (Education Act: 1944) to the government’s introduction of the tri-partite system of schooling and the beginning of the comprehensive system in 1988 and finally to the emergence of the National curriculum in 1998. Even though there are many official statistics that suggests the overall rise of educational attainments through the changes made to the educational system it can be quite clear to notice the ever growing educational inequalities and the fall of attainment levels based on social class. As there are many official reports, researches, theories and evidence to suggest otherwise and will be looked into further within this assignment.  

The term ‘social class’ is a complex and complicated term to define, as there can be many meanings to it. However social class is most commonly judged by money, occupation, education, accent and the residential area of an individual, that determines which ‘class’ an individual falls in, i.e. upper, middle or working class. (Meighan, R and Siraj-Blatchford, I, 2001).  Also social class can be labelled in numbers for example social class 1 (SC1) (upper class) to Social class 5 (SC5) (mostly known as the working class).

It is well known and obviously clear that there is a strong correlation between a child’s performance at school and their social background, in other words the higher the social class of the child, they are more likely to achieve and perform well in school. One major factor that plays an important role in defining social class is based on money. It is a proven fact that the more financially well off a child’s family back ground is the more opportunities arise in the educational system for them, so therefore the more advantages they have in performing well within school. As revealed in the report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Social inequality increases in Britain (Julie, H. 17 May 2000), which contains strong evidences to indicate the growth of social inequality in Britain over the last few decades "Social Inequalities”. Within the report, it looks into the effects of poverty and discusses children’s social class and their educational performances. A worrying fact that the government had actually cut public spending by reducing financial aid given for the welfare had a damaging effect in the growth of poverty.

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According to the report children from disadvantaged families, who are defined as children who receive free school meals have overall lower exam result rates than their fellow pupils from advantaged households. The report states ‘In 1998, only a fifth of those 15- and 16-year-olds whose parents were employed in unskilled manual jobs achieved five GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) passes at grades A to C, compared to two-thirds of children of the professional and managerial classes.’ (Hyland, J. 17 May 2000)  From this it can be seen the amount of inequality faced upon a child due to ...

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