The world of work (considered here in its widest sense - to
include people who want to work in paid employment but who, for whatever
reason, cannot) may seem not always seem an obvious suspect, mainly because by the time
people come to enter the workplace on a full-time they have completed their compulsory
period of formal education. In one sense, this is significant because the influence of
workplace is not always particularly direct and it is, therefore, sometimes easy to
discount it's influence on people's behaviour and achievement.
In this respect, the contribution of the workplace
to differential educational achievement is likely to be subtle and indirect
(to continue the criminological analogy, the workplace is equivalent to someone who pays a
"professional assassin" to commit a murder on their behalf, while they carefully
create an alibi for the time of the murder...).
There are a number of ways such influence on educational performance may be considered to be subtle and indirect, but all relate to the way people with different social characteristics (class, gender, age, ethnic background and region, for example) reflect on and understand both their present social circumstances and their likely future circumstances.
For example, if we think, very generally, in terms of employment opportunities it's clear that certain types of work have clear gender associations. Nursing, secretarial work and so forth have, traditionally, been viewed as "female employment", whereas heavy manufacturing industry has, traditionally, been the preserve of males. If this is the case, then it's more than possible that school students thinking about their future adult lives and careers will have taken this type of information and board and related it to their educational needs.
Similarly, children from
a working class background may develop a perception of their future
employment in terms of traditional working class jobs. Middle
class children, on the other hand, may perceive themselves as being destined for professional
employment. The consequence of this idea, if valid, is that children of different
class and gender backgrounds will see the requirement for educational
qualifications differently. For working class males, for example, A-levels and a
degree may be seen as irrelevant to their future lives', whereas the very opposite would
be true of their middle class counterparts.
Within the workplace itself, various forms of class, sex and racial discrimination may operate, sometimes overtly (in the form of abuse, harassment and the like) but also covertly (in terms of stereotypical assumptions about the characteristics, qualities and abilities of different class, gender and ethnic groups). While gender and ethnic groups (rightly) receive most attention in this respect it is important not to dismiss the idea of class discrimination / inequality as a factor in both the workplace and education system.
The above ideas, therefore, provide us with a number of areas in which to develop theories that explain the relationship between work and educational performance.