Cambridge International AS & A Level Sociology (9699): Paper 3 Education 6.3-6.4 – Ethnicity, gender and educational attainment – Study Guide

This guide covers sections 6.3 (Ethnicity and educational attainment) and 6.4 (Gender and educational attainment) of the Cambridge International AS & A Level Sociology (9699) syllabus for examination in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Both sections sit in topic 6, Education and inequality, which is part of Paper 3 – Education. Paper 3 is an A Level paper, not an AS Level paper.

Use it with the Cambridge A Level Sociology hub and the Cambridge A Level Sociology checklist. For quick recall, go to the revision notes for this unit; to test yourself, try the practice questions for this unit. Gender socialisation and identity first appear in Paper 1, so the Socialisation, Identity and Methods study guide is useful background.

Coverage

Syllabus reference	What you must know or be able to do (from the syllabus)	Where assessed
6.3	Racism in schools	Paper 3
6.3	Cultural explanations for patterns in ethnicity and educational attainment	Paper 3
6.3	Ethnicity and subcultures	Paper 3
6.3	The relationship between ethnicity, social class and gender	Paper 3
6.4	The relationship between gender socialisation and educational attainment	Paper 3
6.4	Wider social changes and gendered educational achievement, including changing female expectations and the crisis of masculinity	Paper 3
6.4	Gender and subcultures	Paper 3
6.4	Teacher expectations and gendered behaviour in the classroom	Paper 3

The syllabus links topic 6 to two key concepts: Inequality and opportunity, and Socialisation, culture and identity. It does not name any required studies for 6.3 or 6.4. The studies below are well-established examples; your teacher will confirm which ones your class uses, and local evidence from your own country is just as valid.

How Paper 3 tests this unit

The syllabus prints these facts. Paper 3 – Education is a written paper of 1 hour 15 minutes and 50 marks, worth 21% of the A Level. It has four compulsory questions, worth an increasing number of marks.

• Question 1 is a short-answer question (AO1).
• Question 2 asks for two explanations of an issue, theory or viewpoint (AO1 and AO2).
• Question 3 gives a quotation; you use sociological material to give two arguments against it (AO2 and AO3).
• Question 4 is an essay worth 26 marks (AO1, AO2 and AO3).

The marks for Questions 1 to 3 are not printed separately; your teacher will confirm them. Within Paper 3, the approximate AO weightings are AO1 36%, AO2 28% and AO3 36%. The printed command words include Describe, Evaluate, Explain and Give.

6.3 Racism in schools

Key terms

• Racism: treating people unfairly on the basis of their supposed race or ethnicity.
• Institutional racism: discrimination built into an organisation’s routines, not just the views of individuals. The Macpherson Report (1999) described it as “the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin”.
• Labelling: attaching a fixed identity (for example “troublemaker”) to a pupil, which can shape how they are treated.
• Educational triage: sorting pupils into those who will pass anyway, those who can be helped to pass, and those seen as hopeless.

Key studies

• Coard (1971), who had worked as a teacher in London, published a booklet arguing that the British school system was biased in favour of White pupils, so West Indian children were wrongly labelled “educationally subnormal” and placed in special schools.
• Gillborn (1990), “Race”, Ethnicity and Education, studied City Road, a multi-ethnic inner-city school, using interviews and classroom observation. He showed how white teachers’ expectations about discipline, ability and attitude shaped the school lives of African-Caribbean and Asian pupils.
• Gillborn and Youdell (2000), Rationing Education, observed two English secondary schools. Pressure to raise league-table results created an “A-to-C economy”. Schools used sets, exam tiers and educational triage, which rationed teaching towards pupils near the pass borderline and reproduced inequalities of class, ethnicity and gender.
• Gillborn (2008) used critical race theory (CRT). He argued that a long-standing gap between Black African-Caribbean and White pupils in England was hidden when debate focused on pupils receiving free school meals, and that official “gap talk” disguised deep-seated race inequality.

Evaluation

• Strength: these are detailed ethnographies that show how inequality is produced day to day, not just that it exists.
• Limitation: small samples of one or two schools are hard to generalise.
• Counter-evidence: Dave Hill (2009), a critic who stresses social class, argued that Gillborn misused statistics on class and overlooked the high attainment of Indian pupils. Gillborn (2010) rejected these claims. If racism were the whole story, it is hard to explain why some minority ethnic groups do very well.

Worked paragraph

One explanation is racism within schools. Gillborn and Youdell found that pressure to meet A-to-C targets led schools to ration their effort through educational triage. If teachers see some pupils as having low ability, those pupils may be placed in lower sets or foundation tiers, which caps the grades they can reach. This links labelling to a structural outcome: lower attainment results from a school’s decision rather than the pupil’s ability. However, the study covered only two schools, and the claim struggles to explain why groups such as Indian and Chinese pupils achieve highly in the same system, which suggests that culture and class also matter.

6.3 Cultural explanations and ethnic subcultures

Key terms

• Cultural deprivation: the claim that some groups lack the values, language or attitudes that help success at school.
• Subculture: a group with norms and values that differ from those of the wider culture, such as an anti-school peer group.
• Ideal pupil: the image of the “good student” that teachers hold.

Cultural explanations

• Early cultural accounts blamed family structure. The Moynihan Report (1965) in the USA linked Black poverty to the rise of lone-mother families and to aspects of ghetto culture. Critics saw this as blaming the victim.
• Francis and Archer (2005) studied British-Chinese pupils, the highest achieving ethnic group in the British system. Pupils and parents placed an extremely high value on education, regardless of class and gender. This supports the idea that family values can help attainment.
• Archer (2008) argued that teachers’ image of the “ideal pupil” is White, male and middle class, so minority ethnic pupils are rarely seen as authentic successes, even when they achieve.

Ethnicity and subcultures

• Sewell (1997), Black Masculinities and Schooling, used interviews and observation in an urban English school. African-Caribbean boys responded to school as conformists, innovators, retreators or rebels (many textbooks write “retreatists”; the book’s own term is “retreators”). Black boys received a disproportionate amount of punishment, and Sewell argued that teachers could not escape wider social perceptions of young Black men. He also stressed the pull of a street-fashion peer culture.
• Mirza (1992), Young, Female and Black, followed 62 working-class young African-Caribbean women from two south London comprehensives for 18 months. They did well at school, yet a labour market segregated by race and gender limited their jobs.

Evaluation

• Cultural explanations can explain differences between groups, but risk treating a whole group as having one culture.
• Sewell’s typology shows that boys of the same ethnicity respond in different ways, which challenges simple labelling theory.
• Mirza shows that a pro-education outlook does not guarantee a fair outcome, so structure matters as well as culture.

Worked paragraph

A second explanation is culture. Francis and Archer found that British-Chinese parents and pupils valued education extremely highly, whatever their class. A family that treats homework and exams as a priority passes on cultural capital that helps attainment. This suggests that values inside the home, not just processes in school, shape results. Yet Archer and Francis also found that teachers saw British-Chinese girls as “passive” and quiet, so even a “positive” stereotype can restrict pupils, and cultural accounts can ignore the racism such pupils still face.

6.3 Ethnicity, social class and gender

Key term

• Intersectionality: the idea that class, ethnicity and gender combine, so they cannot be studied one at a time.

Key studies

• Gillborn and Mirza (2000) reviewed national data for England and Wales. African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils were disadvantaged. Class and gender were linked to attainment, but they could not account for persistent ethnic inequalities.
• Vincent, Rollock, Ball and Gillborn (2012–2013) studied middle-class parents of Black Caribbean heritage. They concluded that race cannot simply be added on to class, because race changes how class works and is experienced.
• Connolly (2006) studied 5- to 6-year-old boys in an inner-city, multi-ethnic primary school. Their masculine identities, built around physicality, violence and racism, made sense only in the context of the local community and school.
• Archer (2002) found British Muslim boys described Muslim girls’ post-16 choices as decided by parents, while the girls said social change gave them wider choices.

Worked paragraph

Ethnicity cannot be separated from class and gender. Gillborn and Mirza found that class and gender were linked to attainment but did not explain away ethnic gaps. Vincent and colleagues showed that even middle-class Black parents faced subtle racism, so class resources did not protect their children fully. However, Hill, who stresses class, argues that it is not “whiteness” that most advantages or disadvantages pupils in England and Wales, so a balanced answer weighs class and ethnicity together and avoids treating any one factor as the whole story.

6.4 Gender socialisation and wider social changes

Key terms

• Gender socialisation: learning the norms and expectations linked to being male or female.
• Crisis of masculinity: the argument that, as traditional male manual jobs and the breadwinner role decline, some boys feel uncertain about their identity and see less point in school.
• Moral panic: an exaggerated public reaction to a group seen as a problem.

Gender socialisation

• Oakley (1972), Sex, Gender and Society, separated biological sex, which is fairly constant, from gender, which varies between cultures.
• Francis (1996) found that children aged 7–11 named varied jobs in interviews, but in role play most chose gender-stereotyped roles.
• Skelton and Francis (2012) found popular high-achieving boys could enjoy English without threatening their masculinity, while high-achieving girls struggled to combine sport with acceptable femininity.

Wider social changes

• One argument is that feminism and equal opportunities laws, such as the UK’s Equal Pay Act 1970 and Sex Discrimination Act 1975, raised girls’ sense of what was possible.
• A related argument is that growth in service jobs and in women’s paid work gave girls role models and a reason to gain qualifications. Your teacher will confirm the employment trends in your own country.
• Francis (2002) found that girls aged 14–16 had become far more ambitious in their career choices, though choices still followed a deep gender divide.
• Crisis of masculinity: the decline of manual jobs removed a route into work that once needed few qualifications.
• Epstein et al. (1998), Failing Boys?, argued that public reaction to boys’ “underachievement” was simplistic and asked “which boys?” fail. Francis (2006) described a moral panic about boys’ underachievement, noting feminist concern that it had negative effects for girls’ schooling.

Worked paragraph

Changing female expectations help explain why girls’ results have improved. Francis found that girls’ career aims had become far more ambitious, and sociologists argue that equal opportunities laws and growth in women’s employment give girls good reasons to gain qualifications. Yet the gain is uneven: Francis also found career choices still followed a gender divide, and Epstein et al. ask “which boys?”, warning that a simple boys-versus-girls debate hides differences of class and ethnicity within each sex.

6.4 Gender subcultures and teacher expectations

Key terms

• Laddish culture: a peer culture in which effort is “uncool” and status comes from humour, sport and defiance.
• Hegemonic masculinity: Connell’s term for the dominant, most valued form of masculinity in a setting.

Gender and subcultures

• Willis (1977), Learning to Labour, followed 12 working-class boys at “Hammertown Boys”. Their counter-school culture rejected the school’s authority and helped lead them into working-class jobs.
• Mac an Ghaill (1994), The Making of Men, showed that schools produce a range of masculinities through the official and hidden curriculum.
• Jackson (2002) explained laddishness as self-worth protection: if you do not try, failure cannot be blamed on lack of ability. Jackson (2006) interviewed 100 pupils and 30 teachers about “ladette” cultures among girls.
• Archer, Halsall and Hollingworth (2007) studied 89 working-class young people in London. Some girls invested in “glamorous” femininity, boyfriends and the “ladette” image, which could draw them away from school.

Teacher expectations and classroom behaviour

• French (1984) transcribed a lesson with 10- to 11-year-olds. Boys received more teacher attention, partly through attention-seeking strategies.
• Spender (1978) argued that stereotypes kept many girls from speaking up in mixed-sex classes.
• Jackson (2010) found 30 teachers’ strategies for tackling “laddish” boys were themselves gendered.

Evaluation

• These studies show attainment is shaped by interaction, not only by ability.
• Laddishness is not limited to boys; Jackson’s work on ladettes challenges a simple boys-versus-girls picture.
• French’s evidence comes from one lesson, so generalising is risky.

Worked paragraph

Pupil subcultures help explain some boys’ lower attainment. Jackson argues that laddishness protects self-worth: a boy who messes around can blame failure on not trying. This links boys’ identity to hegemonic masculinity, where visible effort is seen as feminine. However, Archer and colleagues found some working-class girls also disengaged through “ladette” identities, so subcultures are shaped by class as well as gender.

Common errors

• Treating “ethnic minorities” as one group that underachieves.
• Using Coard or Gillborn to argue that all teachers are racist.
• Describing cultural explanations without the criticism that they can blame the victim.
• Saying girls are “naturally” better students, which is biological, not sociological.
• Calling the crisis of masculinity a fact rather than a debated argument.
• Ignoring class when discussing gender or ethnicity.

Official syllabus

Cambridge International AS & A Level Sociology (9699) syllabus for examination in 2024, 2025 and 2026. This unit covers Paper 3 – Education, sections 6.3 and 6.4.