A-Level Sociology: Education, Families and Households

Education appears on nearly every specification, and families and households on most. Both are marked on the same thing: whether a claim is attached to the perspective that makes it, and whether you can say what would count as evidence for it.

The two questions on differential achievement are built around the distinction the examiners care about most. An explanation that locates the cause inside the school — streaming, a teacher's expectation becoming true — is a different kind of claim from one that locates it outside, in a cold house and a poor diet. Students routinely blur the two, or offer cultural capital when they mean material deprivation, and each question here is written so that only one of those readings fits what the scenario actually describes.

The family questions do the same work on contested ground. Parsons argues the nuclear family fits industrial society because it can move; feminists describe the dual burden that arrangement places on women; and when cohabitation and lone-parent households rise, a postmodernist and a New Right sociologist look at identical figures and disagree about what they show. That last question endorses neither. What it asks is whether you can state both accounts accurately without collapsing one into the other — which is exactly what the essay questions ask too.

Every family form described here is treated the same way: what sociologists say about it, not whether it is better or worse. Real sociologists are named only where the claim is genuinely theirs, and the researchers in the invented scenarios are invented.

Nothing is taken from any exam board specification, past paper, mark scheme or textbook.

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• Tell a functionalist account of education from a Marxist one, and say what each claims about meritocracy
• Distinguish an in-school explanation of differential achievement from an out-of-school one, and match each to the evidence that supports it
• Use cultural capital and material deprivation precisely rather than interchangeably
• State the intended effect of marketisation in English schools
• Set out the functionalist fit thesis and the feminist account of the dual burden
• State the postmodernist and New Right readings of the same household figures without collapsing one into the other
• Explain what is claimed when childhood is called a social construction, and what evidence Ariès used

In England the proportion of couples living together without marrying has risen steadily, and lone-parent and reconstituted families now make up a substantial share of households. A postmodernist sociologist and a New Right sociologist are each asked to account for the same figures. How do their accounts differ? — one of ten questions written for this set.