ABSTRACT
Coleman’s (1966) large-scale survey of equality of educational opportunity in United States’ schools found no apparent relationship between resources available to schools and pupil outcomes measured in terms of the academic achievements of the students who attended them. For Coleman, different types of academic achievement were by-products of the social background and personal characteristics of the students themselves. In Britain, an equivalent view was propounded using theories of linguistic difference put forward by Basil Bernstein. Workingclass children appeared to lack a capacity for conceptual thinking that was a feature of the cognitive resources of middle-class children. An ‘elaborated code’ of linguistic representation was superior to a ‘restricted’ code in its potential for advanced reasoning and abstract thought (Bernstein 1970a; Bernstein and Henderson 1969). In a phrase that was to prove ominous for subsequent generations of researchers, Bernstein
declared that ‘schools cannot compensate for society’ (Bernstein 1970b:344). The limits of school achievement were set at an early age by linguistic mechanisms children acquire within families (Chitty 1997:49). Subsequent work by Jencks et al. (1972) in the United States revealed that ‘if all high schools were equally effective, differences in attainment would be reduced by less than one per cent’ (Ouston et al. 1979:67). Similar conclusions were reached by those who carried out the initial evaluation of Head Start programmes (Ouston et al. 1979).
