Students that are in a working-class have the tendency to underachieve in school, in contrast to those students that are middle-class, this is due to external and internal factors. External cultural factors are claimed to be a key cause of social class differences in educational achievement according to various sociologist. These factors consist of Cultural deprivation, cultural capital and material deprivation.

Students from working class backgrounds often experience economic problems (poverty) more so than any other class; this is linked to material deprivation which these pupils are exposed to throughout their time. Being in poverty could entail the students not having enough money to buy all the essential equipment that they will …show more content…

However this then suggests that the working class will be at a disadvantage as at school students are taught with the elaborated code. The attitudes and values that parents have upon education is key to their child’s educational achievement. Sociologist Feinstein argues that WC parents don’t have a key interest in education and lack importance of it. However he claims that MC value education highly which influences their children to do so too. In addition to this he also claims that WC parents and children have an attitude of fatalism towards their success – having the assumption to fail. WC also only focus on present time orientation however MC focus on future time orientation therefore they are more likely to success as their children will be taking sacrifices now in order to succeed in the future. A criticism of this is that this can also be caused by internal factors as opposed to cultural/ external. In addition to this, a sociologist – Keddie has also claimed that cultural deprivation is a myth therefore she is challenging the claims that have been made.

The middle class children have more cultural capital then working class children do. They are in a better place because they can take advantage of the opportunities that they have on offer in the marketised education system, as they have more money than working class, therefore they can afford to go to private