ABSTRACT
The major preoccupation of the few sociologists studying the English educational system in the 1950s was the relationship between social class and educational opportunity. Sociologists documented the access to selective secondary education (through the 11+ examination) by children from different social classes and attempted to provide explanations of what brought about these differences of access. The passage below comes from the conclusions of a major sociological study of the social distribution of access to grammar schools by boys in South-West Hertfordshire and in Middlesbrough. In their investigation the authors documented the marked differences in the chances which boys of different social classes had of obtaining grammar school places in both the areas studied. They concluded that although there was a close relationship between ‘ability’ (defined as ‘measured intelligence’ on IQ tests) and ‘opportunity’ (defined as access to grammar schools), ‘the problem of inequality of educational opportunity’ was ‘not thereby disposed of, since material and cultural differences in the environment of children from different social classes affected their performance on tests and hence their access to selective secondary education through the 11+ examination. The social determinants of ‘educability’ in which the authors were interested became a major focus of sociological investigation at the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, as illustrated by the work of Bernstein (pp. 220-3) and the 1964 National Survey conducted for the Plowden Committee (pp. 206-10). At that time there was general agreement with the concluding sentences of the study from which the passage below has been extracted:
The problem of equality of educational opportunity is now more complicated than when it took the simple form of the need to secure free access to grammar schools on equal intellectual terms. With the expansion of educational opportunity and the reduction of gross economic handicaps to children’s school performance the need arises to understand the optimum conditions for the integration of school and home environment at all social levels in such a way as to minimise the educational disadvantages of both and to turn their educational advantages to full account.
