ABSTRACT
We shall now meet children and teachers from the top classes of two junior schools. In order to examine the idea that girls’ performance, while good in primary school, declined in secondary school we decided to follow a group from the top of the junior school to the first year of secondary school. This idea of a falling-off in performance was not supported by what we found, and we realized that a reworking of the whole debate was necessary. This aspect of the research has been written up in Walden and Walkerdine (1985). We reproduce some of that work within the context of our research as a whole. It was here that we consolidated various ideas about ‘positioning’.
