Social background and inequality of educational opportunity: a New Zealand case study

Abstract

A major concern of the research described in this thesis was to find out whether family environment factors influenced the educational performance of New Zealand secondary school pupils to an extent similar to that found to exist in other countries. A second aim of the research was to find out whether the "social climate" of schools affected educational performance. The educational aspirations and the achievement of manual and non-manual pupils attending two state secondary schools in the Wellington area were correlated with variables measuring parental education and occupation, parent-child interaction patterns, and family literacy. It was found that although the social climate of a school may influence aspiration levels, it does not seem to affect actual achievement, at least not to any significant extent. The findings also indicate that although New Zealand may boast of a very close approximation of equal educational opportunity in the traditional sense - which relates equality of opportunity to equality of access to educational resources - equality of access has not led to equality of achievement. In New Zealand, as in other advanced industrialised countries, the educational aspirations and achievement of secondary school pupils are closely associated with social class. The present system of education does little to overcome the handicaps with which individuals from lower socio-economic strata enter educational institutions. The intellectual, and especially the linguistic environments of the families into which children are born exert a greater influence on their educational performance than the schools they go to. Proportionately, almost three times as many children from non-manual homes as from manual homes gained School Certificate passes at the two schools surveyed. This disparity was not due to a proportionate difference in educational aspirations. Although, as a group, manual children did have lower aspirations than non-manual children, the difference in their aspirations was only half as great as the difference in their achievement. Much of the explanation for this disparity was found in the higher level of education possessed by non-manual parents. Children whose parents' educational qualifications included U.E. or higher both aspired and achieved higher than did children whose parents' qualifications were less than U.E. Further explanations were sought in parental attitudes. Studies in other countries have established strong relationships between the interest parents show in the educational progress of their children, and their involvement in the cognitive development of their children, and educational performance. In this study variables measuring parental interest and involvement ("talk about schoolwork" and "read to as preschooler") were found to be related to educational performance as well. But it was also found that there were significant differences in the influence exerted by parental attitudes on the educational performance of manual children compared with that of non-manual children. These differences seem to stem from the linguistic environments children from different social strata grow up in. The findings of the thesis cannot claim to present proof, but they do suggest support for Basil Bernstein's hypothesis that middle-class and working-class families use different "linguistic codes", and that the scholastic failure of many working class children is a function of their use of a "restricted code", which does not allow for the development of abstract-conceptual abilities as much as does the "elaborated code" of the middle-class. The conclusion reached in this thesis is that the only realistic measure capable of bringing about equality of educational opportunity, or at least a reduction of inequality, is the provision of unequal opportunity, or the unequal treatment of children within educational institutions, especially in the area of language training.