Student Experience
Sociology: AQA A Level, topic 2.3.4
Student Responses to the Experience of Schooling
Pupils experience a wide variety of ways that schools attempt to categorise and label them and, in response, they react and adapt in different ways.
Lacey
- Reactions often include the formation of pupil subcultures, which can influence pupil identities, motivation in schools and levels of achievement.
- As part of this process, there is, what Lacey described as, ‘the process of differentiation and polarisation’.
Differentiation & polarisation
- Differentiation is the process by which pupils are ranked and categorised into different streams or sets.
- Polarisation is when pupils become divided into opposing groups or ‘poles’; those labelled as top-stream conformist high achievers and those labelled as lower stream failures.
Responses
- Differentiation and polarisation can then lead to a range of subcultural responses, including pro- and anti-school subcultures.
Pro-school subcultures
- Pro-school subcultures encourage peer-group support for success in education and are most likely found among middle-class or skilled working-class backgrounds.
Anti-school subcultures
- Anti-school subcultures are those likely to adopt a set of delinquent values as a means to resist a system of schooling that has labelled them as failures.
Woods
- Woods found that there were a range of responses between pro- and anti-school subcultures that would change over time as pupils moved through different stages of schooling; this might be different in respect of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Test yourself on Student Experience
Pro-school subcultures are most likely found among which class of pupil?