The Explanations Of Working Class Underachievement Essay

This essay will aim to outline and evaluate the explanations of working class underachievement. This will be through examining the home and school factors that affect these individuals and then reaching a conclusion that highlights the most influential factors while finding connections between them. A person is considered working class if they are typically employed in manual or industrial work in order to achieve a wage. Home factors play a major role in the underachievement of the working class. The April 2013 Great British class survey found that the traditional working class had an annual average income of  £13,000, approximately  £34,000 economically worse off than the established middle class (Savage, et al., 2013). This links into an important area called material deprivation, this is the idea that children who come from families that are denied certain material things in life due to their low of income and so may not have access to, for example, standard of housing or to consumer goods which could expand intellectual understanding and this puts them at an educational disadvantage. This can be supported by Halsey (1980) who found that the most important factor that influenced whether a working class child decided to stay on at school after 16 was the amount of financial support they received. 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