ABSTRACT
This paper is part of a much larger project undertaken between 1979 and 1991. It grew out of an organizational and administrative need to establish computer records of the children's educational, medical and social experiences. In 1976 this database began to be used to provide qualitative data in order to make sense of the teacher's empirical observations concerning the level of pupil achievement within the middle school of which I was deputy headteacher. Over this period, I constructed a definition of underachievement based on the difference between potential (as measured on an IQ test) and achievement (as measured on a reading test) (Satterly, 1985). This measure confirmed that the school was indeed receiving an unrepresentative range of achievement when compared to the national population at 9+. A further analysis confirmed that whilst the school population over this period was not significantly different from the national population in terms of IQ, it was one standard deviation below both the national and the wider local population in terms of achievement. This was profoundly disturbing as it had been previously assumed that the whole local population was similar and related to the deprived socio-economic group from which it drew (Bernstein, 1971).
