Material Deprivation

Material deprivation (by which we mean the extent to which people have or are denied certain material things in life - which includes things like your level of income, standard of housing, access to consumer goods and so forth) is frequently cited as one of - if not the - main cause of differential educational achievement.

Although the theory has gone in and out of political (and sociological) fashion over the past 50 or so years, most of the research in this area does suggest that there is some form of relationship between material deprivation (and it's mirror concept, material affluence) and educational success or failure.

For example, with the development of School League Tables in Britain in the 1990's, two very important points flow from their publication:

Firstly, the high proportion of students from affluent home and private school backgrounds who achieve high levels of success at GCSE and A-level.

Secondly, the fact that the students who, overall, achieve the least in our education system are over-represented in poor inner city and rural areas.

Thus, the above would suggest a strong correlation (at least) between material deprivation / affluence and educational achievement, with students from materially-advantaged backgrounds achieving high rates of success and students from highly-deprived regional and family backgrounds achieving the least.

We can, for example, see this idea in action when we think about pre-World War 2 Britain. In this society, with it's wide disparities of wealth and income, poverty and deprivation were obvious explanations for educational differences in achievement between upper / middle class children and their working class peers.

However, in the years following the 2nd World War 2, material conditions generally improved for the working classes (with the introduction of the Welfare State, National Health Service and 1944 Education Act that provided free, compulsory, schooling), their relative level of achievement (compared, that is, with other social classes) did not improve significantly. This "educational discrepancy" was not only clear in the 1950's, but was also manifest in the more generally-affluent 1960's.

This, in part, led the Plowden Report ("Children and Their Primary Schools", 1967) to conclude that only in extreme cases did poverty play a significant part in explaining differential educational achievement.

In addition, Haley, Floyd and Martin ("Social Class and Educational Opportunity, 1956) found the proportion of working class children admitted to Grammar schools between 1952 and 1954 fell - despite the belief that the use of "objective" intelligence testing at 11 (the "11-plus") would result in "bright" working class children over-coming any disadvantages in their environment and being able to enter Grammar schools (a belief based on the idea that intelligence was inherited genetically and it was only certain environmental conditions, such as material deprivation, that prevented these "bright" children from achieving their full educational potential).

Despite this evidence, Halsey et al's study did, however, reject the idea that material deprivation was a major cause of differential achievement, mainly because even among those working class children who attended Grammar schools, their educational success-rate was below that of their middle class peers. Working class children, for example, were more likely to leave Grammar school at the earliest opportunity (age 15) than their middle-class peers.

While they found a correlation between income and educational opportunity (mainly in relation to the financial hardship experienced by working class families in terms of not being able to afford school uniforms, educational trips, etc.), they noted two more-significant factors involved in explaining educational differences:

Firstly, home encouragement and parental attitudes. In particular, they noted the difficulties created from "cultural clashes" arising when a working class child entered the middle class environment of the school.

Secondly, material factors at home and school. For example, the uneven distribution of Grammar schools, which were largely built and maintained in middle class areas - Secondary Modern and Technical Schools (the other two parts of the Tri-partite system that formed the basis of the 1944 Education Act) were more likely to be built and maintained in poorer neighbourhoods.

Thus, while material conditions did seem to play a part in explaining why many working class children went to Secondary Modern schools rather than Grammar schools, it didn't adequately explain why working class children who did attend Grammar schools still experienced relative educational failure.

Following Halsey et al, Douglas ("The Home and the School", 1964) demonstrated that material deprivation - while significant in specific ways - was too broad an explanation for working class educational failure. This was mainly because it is possible for children from "impoverished" or "materially-deprived" backgrounds to succeed educationally. The main question here, therefore, is how are such children able to overcome their material disadvantages when others in the same kind of material situation do not?

In this respect, while there is a clear correlation between material deprivation and educational failure, the above suggests that material deprivation alone is not a simple causal factor. One obvious reason for this is that, as has just been noted, not all working class children fail educationally. Furthermore, Douglas (like Halsey et al) argued that working class attainment levels tended to diminish throughout a child's educational career and Halsey et al showed that where the measured IQ of both working class and middle class children is the same, the latter still, on average, gain more educational qualifications- which suggests that some other factor or factors are at work in relation to educational attainment.

While it's probably true to say that material deprivation plays some 9possibly important) part in terms of class differences in educational achievement, it's more difficult to see how this theory can be successfully applied to gender differences in achievement (except, perhaps, on a very broad level of class analysis - the difference sin achievement between working, middle and upper class males and females). This is true of both the current position of girls generally outperforming boys, the past position in which the reverse was broadly true and the fact that, within each of these broad classes girls generally outperform boys of the same social class.

In ethnic terms also, the fact that children of Asian origin are generally more successful than their white social class peers suggests that we need to broaden the investigation to include factors other than material deprivation (important as it undoubtedly is - and bearing in mind the fact that the material conditions of people's live's are influential in areas such as cultural deprivation, the school system and the workplace.