Matt Cochrane
Spoilt for Choice? Pupil perceptions of the options process at year 9
Matt Cochrane, Edge Hill University
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007
Introduction
For most individuals, the first significant occasion when young people have a say in their educational direction occurs at 14+, although one could perhaps argue that some have demonstrated agency in the way they have approached 11-plus or entrance exams at the younger age, and a few may be allowed to exercise a degree of choice. Vincent (2001) describes her own and others’ work into parental involvement at this stage, and this seems to suggest that pupil involvement is quite small. Much of this work describes the different approaches (and, therefore the different outcomes) from families across the social spectrum. Vincent (2001) studied the interventions of parents and discovered that the parents who intervened most were ‘largely white, overwhelmingly home-owners, most[ly] higher educated .. .’ Significantly,
The most obvious form of activated capital in this group is cultural.
Vincent (2001, 349)
Moore (2004) builds a description of various forms of capital through reference to economic capital, using terms such as ‘investment’ and ‘return’. These forms of capital include social, linguistic, and particularly in the context of this investigation, cultural.
Cultural capital is defined largely in terms of qualifications gained through formal education, but also in the duration and quality of that formal education.
But how much of this capital is evident in a young person when they start to make their own decisions? The concept of cultural capital is described by Bourdieu (1997) as invested in the family – therefore implying that it will be evident in young people at the age of 14. But to what extent are they able to make use of and take advantage of this cultural capital? Are they able to invest for themselves? Clearly the young people themselves will not be familiar with concepts such as these, but nonetheless when I carried out a pilot study of year 10 pupils, they had a clear idea of their own identity, or ‘subjectivity’ as Bourdieu would prefer.
However, I suspect that this self-knowledge disposed the pupils to reinforce their current position rather than to set a different path for their futures. In fact, the pupils are exercising a range of dispositions, or as Nash (2005) puts it ‘tendencies to act’. The combinations of dispositions are referred to by Bourdieu as habitus.
In describing the concept of habitus, Reay (2004a) implies that young people’s habitus is evident in their behaviour – that they are conscious of a set of learned behaviours that infer membership of their own cultural and social group.
The effect of habitus (however the individual may recognise the concept) to reinforce membership of a social and cultural group may well inhibit the investment of cultural capital in the individual.
Pupils are therefore faced with a dilemma at age 14 – do they invest in cultural capital, which will tend to modify their habitus and take them away from their fellows, or do they yield to their membership of the group and continue on a path which perhaps to them seems destined? If this is a conscious process, then the young people can be said to have an understanding of cultural capital and a knowledge of their own habitus even if they would not use the same words to describe them.
This is all well and good, and assumes that the individual has a certain degree of agency in the choices they can make at this stage. However, there are constraints laid on them from a number of directions. These constraints are the product of how the school as an institution perceives the subjectivity of individual pupils and of the habitus and cultural capital of the pupils’ families.
First, the choices are not without limitations – as I described above, very often the courses open to the individual are fixed by the school’s perception of what is best for the individual. Thus low-achievers will be directed towards vocational-type courses, and the high achievers will be encouraged in the opposite direction – the poor esteem in which vocational courses are held acts as a barrier to their adoption.
Second, and linked to the above, many families displaying a high level of cultural capital will seek to influence their children to take a course of action which invests further capital – in this case in the form of higher-level qualifications (and these qualifications will tend to be sought in certain preferred subjects – academic subjects carry more cultural capital).
Third, the school will be anxious to maintain its position in the league tables, and will be influenced to steer young people towards those courses which will give the best statistical return.
Add to this the well-documented effect (see below) of socio-economic status on the education of young people, and there is precious little for them to decide!
Hatcher (1998) refers to studies carried out in 13 industrialised countries in which the vast majority show a continued effect of educational attainment of social origin. Reay et al (2001) also explore the effect of race and social class on choices in higher education, and find that in spite of some encouraging progress, white middle class students occupy a privileged position in their ability to access courses.
This paper reviews the thinking behind the decision making process for a group of young people in year nine of a comprehensive school – to what extent does the policy and practice they encounter at school impact on their choice of subject and on their perceived choice of career. From the pupils’ points of view, what, and how effective are the interventions offered to them by the school and by other influences?
Discussion of available literature
There is a wide range of studies in this area, though they generally fall into four categories.
Those which provide a voice for pupils in the age range 14-16 tend to bypass issues of cultural capital: Howieson and Semple (2000), relate children’s experiences of guidance and counselling in a number of Scottish secondary schools. They found that the children, in the age range from 14-18, were able to articulate their opinions of the guidance processes in their schools, and that these opinions were capable of contributing to the general debate on school evaluation. There was no attempt here to relate the pupils’ experiences to their background in any way. Adey & Biddulph (2001) carried out a survey into pupils’ motivations for choosing History and Geography at 14+. They discuss the influences of the subject (whether the subject itself was rewarding, or whether they liked the teachers) and of adults (parents and teachers), but again do not go into factors such as social background, cultural capital or habitus as setting the parameters of the social practice of subject selection.
Others which relate to the choices of children in this age group tend to focus on the parental aspect of choice, and are therefore implicitly influenced by cultural capital, though this is not always made explicit. Ball and Vincent (1998) for example study the choice of secondary school made by parents on behalf of their children. This is a useful study in that it refers to the concepts of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ knowledge used by families to inform their decisions. The ‘hot’ knowledge is that which is credible and has direct relevance to their situation, and relates to social and cultural issues. ‘Cold’ knowledge is supplied by schools and experts, consisting of data from league tables and examination results. This official knowledge needs to be backed up by personal recommendations.
Foskett et al (2003) studied post-16 choices in London, and although the study looked at a range of cultural issues in some detail, one factor relevant to this project which emerged was the influence of fashion, and the need for pupils to seem acceptable to their colleagues.
A third category focuses on the methodology and sociology of researching educational choices. These tend to refer to Higher Education as the goal of the compulsory education phase.
Reay (2001) provides an interesting perspective on the history of education, which is relevant here. She describes how the educational system was set up in the late nineteenth century by the middle classes to provide a system of control of the working classes, rather than of education. She goes on to argue that “We still have an educational system in which working-class education is made to serve middle-class interests”; that although in the immediate post-war years “working class histories were histories of plenitude rather than histories of lack”, the right-wing educational revolution that began in the 1970s saw the end of this period by once again providing a system which empowered middle class children at the expense of the working class.
Reay (2001) seems to be suggesting that the contemporary working class consists of single parents, recipients of benefit, and low-paid service workers rather than the ‘outmoded traditional image of the male industrial labourer’. In a single generation, with the demise of manufacturing industry in the UK, the term ‘working class’ has come to mean something other than a white male working in industry. There is no reference here to working class involvement in HE – does attendance at university negate membership of the working class? The use of class as the basis for my study is therefore problematic, and the use of social and cultural capital become more helpful in describing the motivations and backgrounds of the participants.
Although this is not to say that class is not an issue: Reay et al (2001: 857) point out that the proportion of children from social classes III and IV achieving two A levels or the equivalent is roughly two-thirds of that from social classes I and II and go on to say
The inequalities arising from lack of information and general perplexity and confusion about post-compulsory education among … working class families of forty years ago have, in the new Labour era, been compounded by the introduction of fees and loans and the abolition of maintenance grants.
The final category of studies focuses on the work of Bourdieu in analysing situations such as these. For some there is too much structure to a Bourdieuan perspective, but in reality the young people in a typical school situation are bound closely to a number of structures which are beyond their control: the school, the family and the educational qualifications system and their own ‘socialised subjectivity’ (habitus). Seeing how they relate to and deal with these structures is the purpose of my study. Reay (2004b) draws on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to analyse research projects which show how cultural capital is employed in the quasi-market place of the educational system to reinforce the advantaged position of middle-class families. In particular, middle-class mothers were demonstrated as having greater confidence than their working-class counterparts in dealing with professionals in the education system in order to advance their children’s progress further. This evidence is used to describe how the middle classes are able to use and invest cultural capital in their children, and to explain the persistence in the differential educational outcomes between working class and middle class children.
Not all studies favour this approach via Bourdieu, referring instead to Rational Action Theory: Hatcher’s (1998) critique describes the primary and secondary effects of social stratification – the primary effects are generated by family backgrounds and manifest themselves in differences in academic ability and the secondary effects concern the choices made at the various transition points in educational careers. Hatcher (1998) goes on to point out that the transition points offer a variety of points of departure; so that some pupils are able to make more of their careers if they have more cultural capital to invest by transferring to a school which they perceive as better. An assumption is made by policy makers that decisions about progression in education are made on the basis of a benefit analysis, and because people from different classes make different judgements about the benefits of a certain choice, there arise differences in pathways for people from different backgrounds. People from middle-class backgrounds have more to lose from a downward choice than those from working-class backgrounds who are able to maintain or even improve their social position simply by completing compulsory education. This argument contrasts with the position of Bourdieu in that these differences arise through choice rather than circumstance.
In using a class analysis to explain why differentials related to class persist in the educational system, Goldthorpe (1996) also argues for the use of Rational Action Theory, and argues against the proposition by Bourdieu and others that ‘cultural reproduction is necessary to social structural reproduction, and dominant classes therefore use their power in order to ensure that schools operate in an essentially conservative way’. He explains that differentials persist, first because the costs and benefits of educational options prohibit those individuals for whom there is a greater requirement for success, and second, because of the imbalance in resources available when class is taken into account.