Factors Affecting Children’s Performance in Primary Schools

Concern over the ‘wastage’ of ability, particularly working-class ability, created an alliance between sociologists and policy-makers, as illustrated by this passage from the Plowden Report. The Committee accepted the sociological findings concerning the relationship between social class and educational disadvantage and believed that the publication of their report presented ‘an opportunity for reform’. The part of the report dealing with the relationship between home and school was imbued with a ‘social democratic’ stance towards the reduction and, preferably, elimination of inequality (see p. 77).

As part of the background to its deliberations, the Plowden Committee instigated a national survey to investigate the relationship between home and school and the attainment of children. Data were collected on about 3,000 children in 173 schools through interviews with the pupils’ mothers, information on their schools from headteachers and HMIs, information on the children from their class teachers and assessments of children’s attainments on reading comprehension tests and, for top juniors, on a picture intelligence test.

The passage reproduced below stresses as ‘the most striking feature’ of the comparisons made in the survey the large part played by parental attitudes in accounting for the variation in children’s performance within and between schools. The Committee optimistically claims that since parental attitudes are not monopolized by any one class, the attitudes of large numbers of parents can be altered in the direction of supporting their children’s efforts to learn. Some sociologists, however, later criticized the Committee’s loose definition of ‘parental attitude’ and argued that parental attitudes might be more resistant to change than the report suggested, since attitudes could be regarded as dimensions of deep-rooted social class differences (Bernstein, B. and Davies, B., 1969, ‘Some sociological comments on Plowden’, in Peters, R. (Ed.) Perspectives on Plowden, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 55-83).