ABSTRACT
Differences in academic achievement across social groups have been a long-standing concern among educators, policy-makers and the public. However, until recently, the literature on academic achievement and social class, and that on achievement and gender, have tended to be somewhat separate. A concern about social class probably predominated in the 1950s and 1960s, at least in the UK, but a sensitivity about gender differences, especially in mathematics and science education, was in the ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, people have tended to focus on several dimensions of difference: gender, social class and ethnicity.1
