William Tyler – författare

What is the most significant factor for explaining why some individuals are more successful than others – genetic inheritance, privileged background or luck? Although conventional approaches stress the prime importance of one of these, Tyler argues that such theories fail to deal adequately with the complexity of educational inequality and suggests that Boudon’s model of opportunity and mobility would provide us with a more productive explanation. By applying this model to post-war British education he shows how we might effectively think our approaches to the ‘cycle of deprivation’, comprehensive reform and educational spending.

What is the most significant factor for explaining why some individuals are more successful than others – genetic inheritance, privileged background or luck? Although conventional approaches stress the prime importance of one of these, Tyler argues that such theories fail to deal adequately with the complexity of educational inequality and suggests that Boudon’s model of opportunity and mobility would provide us with a more productive explanation. By applying this model to post-war British education he shows how we might effectively think our approaches to the ‘cycle of deprivation’, comprehensive reform and educational spending.

The internal organisation of the school touches on many areas of contemporary debate. Is there such a thing as a ‘good school’? Are large urban comprehensives necessarily impersonal? Are the charges of indiscipline, conflict and declining standards in modern schools based on a failure to understand schools as institutions? At the time this book was first published sociological analysis had neglected to consider schools as organisational entities, preferring to see them as either the sites for negotiated encounters between teachers and pupils or else as agencies of class reproduction. The author redresses this imbalance and by relating the various literatures on the school to the constitutive patterns of its internal organisation he demonstrates the need for a more intensive sociological study of this embattled institution.