Becky Francis

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at UCL and Education Endowment Foundation

Internationally, there are concerns that more needs to be done to address the inequalities in participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the degree level. In response, research focused on better understanding what influences young people’s STEM participation has focused on a range of factors. This paper co...

Scant sociological attention has been given to the role of luck within social mobility/reproduction. This paper helps address this conceptual gap, drawing on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working-class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10–21. We explore the potential significanc...

There are international concerns about decreasing rates of chemistry degree enrolment. This article seeks to understand students' reasons for not/choosing to pursue a chemistry degree, drawing on (i) open‐ended survey responses from a sample of 506 students in England aged 21–22 who had studied advanced level (“A level”) chemistry at age 18 (as eit...

Despite extensive research on attainment grouping, the impact of attainment grouping on pupil attainment remains poorly understood and contested. This paper presents evidence from a study conducted with 2944 12–13 year olds, from 76 schools in England, who were allocated to between‐class attainment groups (‘setting’) in English and mathematics over...

The impact of self-fulfilling prophecy in education, and of attainment grouping on pupil self-perception, remain topics of longstanding debate, with important consequences for social in/justice. Focusing on self-confidence, this article draws on survey responses from 9,059 12-13 year olds who were tracked by subject (‘setting’). They provided surve...

Participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is widely recognised as being highly important for national economic competitiveness, greater upward social mobility and active citizenship. There is a strongly-held belief that our future society and workforce will need more, and more diverse, young people continuing with STE...

International evidence shows that students from more disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend university. We examine the potential link between university aspiration and secondary schools’ attainment grouping practices (tracking/setting). Modelling of longitudinal student questionnaires (N = 6680) completed in England suggests that there...

Drawing upon data gathered from 9301 Year 7 students (12–13 years old) from 46 secondary schools in England, this study represents the first larger‐scale attempt to compare their actual set allocations in maths with the counterfactual position where their allocation to sets is based solely on their prior attainment at the end of primary school [usi...

Prior research suggests that where pupils are 'tracked', better qualified, more experienced teachers tend to be deployed to higher attainment groups, at the expense of pupils in lower tracks. This is especially pertinent from a social justice perspective, given consistent findings in the UK that pupils from socially-disadvantaged backgrounds are ov...

There is a substantial international literature around the impact of different types of grouping by attainment on the academic and personal outcomes of students. This literature, however, is sparse in student voices, especially in relation to mixed-attainment practices. Research has indicated that students of different attainment levels might have...

‘Ability’ or attainment grouping can introduce an additional label that influences teachers’ expectations of students in specific attainment groups. This paper is based on a survey of 597 teachers across 82 schools and 34 teacher interviews in 10 schools undertaken as part of a large-scale mixed-methods study in England. The paper focuses on Englis...

Setting’ is a widespread practice in the UK, despite little evidence of its efficacy and substantial evidence of its detrimental impact on those allocated to the lowest sets. Taking a Bourdieusian approach, we propose that setting can be understood as a practice through which the social and cultural reproduction of dominant power relations is enact...

The concept of “female masculinity,” first applied by Judith Halberstam, is elaborated. The theoretical rationale for its application, and the strengths and limitations of the concept, are briefly explained. The concept's main contribution is a decentering of the body in productions of gender.

Within-school segregation of pupils by attainment remains prevalent, despite evidence that these practices detrimentally impact outcomes for those in low attainment groups. This article explores the hypothesis that ‘ability grouping’ by setting impacts pupil self-confidence, precipitating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Survey data from 11,546 11/12 ye...

The high achievement of British Chinese students in the British education system is established in the official literature and has recently been subject to increased attention and comment; albeit it remains the case that few studies have asked students or their families about the factors contributing to their success. This paper revisits findings f...

The present article investigates explanations for gendered trends in Physics and Engineering access, reporting findings from a large-scale study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and drawing primarily on data from interviews with 132 15–16 year-old adolescents and their parents. Survey results in our study and elsewhere show str...

The article builds on prior arguments that research on issues of social justice in education has often lacked constructive engagement with education policy-making, and that this can be partly attributed to a lack of clarity about what a socially just education system might look like. Extending this analysis, this article argues that this lack of cl...

Hyper-femininity and the construction of the ‘girly girl’ label have been documented widely, but there has been less attention to their content (or any distinctions between these constructs). Indeed, it can be argued that the content of femininity remains a controversial and somewhat under-researched topic in feminist scholarship. This is also the...

Female underrepresentation in postcompulsory physics is an ongoing issue for science education research, policy, and practice. In this article, we apply Bourdieusian and Butlerian conceptual lenses to qualitative and quantitative data collected as part of a wider longitudinal study of students’ science and career aspirations age 10–16. Drawing on s...

Mixed-attainment teaching has strong support from research and yet English schools are far more likely to teach students in ‘ability’ groups. Although research has considered some of the specific benefits of mixed-attainment grouping, there has been little attention to the reasons schools avoid it. This article explores data from the pilot and recr...

Currently, science in England is distinctive at General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in comparison to most other subjects, in that there is a notable stratification of award routes. The most prestigious of these, ‘Triple Science’ (the route for entry for three separate science GCSEs), is championed by English government and industry, b...

Grouping students by ‘ability’ is a topic of long-standing contention in English education policy, research and practice. While policy-makers have frequently advocated the practice as reflecting educational ‘standards’, research has consistently failed to find significant benefits of ‘ability’ grouping; and indeed has identified disadvantages for s...

Developments in the field of gender theory as applied to education since the 1970s are briefly reviewed in order to highlight key challenges and debates around gender categorisation and identification in gender and education. We argue that conundrums of categorisation have haunted, and continue to haunt, the field of gender theory, and empirical ap...

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outrea...

This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chine...

Academisation of the English secondary school system has been extremely rapid and represents significant changes to the governance of the English school system. However, there has been a relative scarcity of attention to the rationales, rhetorics and discourses underpinning the academies programme. Seeking to address this gap, a poststructuralist d...

Gender distinction has been shown to characterise both undergraduate experiences and outcomes. Yet research recounted in this article supports work that shows that young people are often unaware of such trends, subscribing instead to individualist perspectives that foreground equality of opportunity and agency. This article examines the gender cont...

A socially just education system seems further away than ever, as we write. The financial crisis in Europe continues, with austerity measures meaning significant cuts to public services (including Education). In spite of the banking crisis of 2008, the austerity climate in many countries in the Global North means government attachment to neoliberal...

This paper draws on the concept of the ‘Renaissance Child’ to illustrate the ways in which gender influences the opportunities and possibilities of high-achieving pupils. Using data from a study of 12–13-year high-achieving boys and girls based in schools in England, the paper considers the ways in which a group of popular boys was able to show an...

The development of an analysis of gender which avoids conflations with sex, but which also acknowledges the powerful role of embodiment in gender production, has tantalised gender theorists for some time. Many writers have critiqued the slippage back to sexed bodies underlying various apparently social constructionist analyses of gendered behaviour...

High achievement, and in particular, the role of the academically diligent and successful ‘boffin’ or ‘geek’, are notably under-researched areas in the sociology of education. Issues around gender and other aspects of identity in relation to such pupils are particularly under-researched. In this Viewpoint article we draw on evidence from our recent...

The National Assessment of Educational Progress statistics show that boys are underachieving in literacy compared to girls. Attempts to redress the problem in various Global North countries and particularly Australia and the United Kingdom have failed to make any impact. However, there are boys who are doing well in literacy. The aim of this articl...

This paper draws on data from a research project investigating gendered identities and interactions of high‐achieving students in Year Eight in England (12–13 years old), particularly in relation to students’ ‘popularity’ amongst their peers. As part of this study 71 students were interviewed from nine different schools in urban, rural and small to...

The notion of ‘impact’ is interrogated in the context of academic education research. A moral agenda for increasing the impact of academic education research is distinguished from the ‘impact agenda’ reflected in UK research assessment practices. It is argued that, especially in the English case, academic educational research currently has relative...

Die Beziehung zwischen Geschlecht und Bildungserfolg bildet eine kontroverse Thematik. Während die second wave feminists (frühe 1960er Jahre bis späte 1970er Jahre) den Bildungsmisserfolg von Mädchen fokussierten, hat sich in den letzten Jahren eine internationale Sorge hinsichtlich des scheinbaren Bildungsmisserfolgs von Jungen herausgebildet. Die...

The concept of the learning society is analysed in relation to the healthcare sector and various occupations within it. It is maintained that although traditional boundaries have been blurred or eroded in the workplace in recent years, there remains strong opposition to this erosion on the part of many healthcare professions. This professional dema...

Recent gender theorising has been enlivened by post‐structuralist accounts of gender as ‘disembodied’; the reading of gender performances as distinct from sexed bodies. However, there has been little application of such theoretical positions to empirical analysis in gender and education. This article employs two such positions – that of ‘female mas...

Notions of culture, ethnicity and identity are highly political (and also personally meaningful) issues within diasporic communities. Complementary schools are particularly interesting sites in this respect, as they are often set up with an explicit cultural agenda of ‘preserving’ or ‘maintaining’ ‘traditional’ culture and language within diasporic...

In spite of continuing patterning of curriculum subject preference and choice by gender, there has been little recent attention to the argument developed in the 1970s that children play with different toys according to their gender, and that these provide girls and boys with (different) curriculum‐related skills. The article describes a small‐scale...

In recent years educational policy on gender and achievement has concentrated on boys' underachievement, frequently comparing it with the academic success of girls. This has encouraged a perception of girls as the “winners” of the educational stakes and assumes that they no longer experience the kinds of gender inequalities identified in earlier st...

In spite of research showing that pupils—particularly boys—tend to experience tension between high academic achievement and popularity with peers at school, some pupils continue to maintain simultaneous production of both. This article focuses on a sample of 12–13 year‐old pupils, identified as high achieving and popular, to examine classroom subje...

User perceptions and experiences of complementary education are neglected in the research literature, yet they are important in providing understanding concerning complementary schools and their impact on educational and social identities. This paper explores the constructions of parents of pupils attending these schools, and of teachers at these s...

Chinese supplementary schools have been accused of having ‘old‐fashioned’ and ineffective teaching methods, with most teaching being undertaken by ‘unqualified’ volunteer parent teachers. But how do pupils themselves interpret and experience the complementary school setting and to what extent do they feel it affects their learning? Drawing on empir...

The gendered subjectivities of high achieving school pupils are examined, demonstrating the uneasy relationship between high educational achievement and peer popularity. Drawing on data from a study involving classroom observation and interviews with 71 high-achieving pupils across nine secondary schools in England, the article focuses on the gende...

Pupils' experiences of complementary education are neglected in the research literature, yet they are highly important in terms of understanding complementary schools and their impact on pupils' educational and social identities. This article explores British‐Chinese pupils' discursive constructions of the purposes and benefits of Chinese complemen...

This viewpoint explores and shares our experience of ‘doing’ feminism in the context of its apparent ‘demise’. We were recently invited to attend an event at the Cabinet Office, to ‘discuss the impact aspirations and expectations within the community have on the educational achievement of young people in deprived areas’. The seminar was entitled, ‘...

Remarkably, little academic attention has been given to the phenomenon of Chinese language schools in the UK. This paper aims to address this important gap in knowledge through the development of a detailed mapping of the population and practise of Chinese complementary schooling in England. The paper draws on ethnographically informed observations...

A recent project involving Year 3 (seven-eight year-old) pupils and their teachers revealed that "gender matters" differently to boys and girls, and teachers. The study sought to elicit whether pupils and their teachers felt the gender of a teacher mattered to their experiences of schooling. Pupils were concerned about how effective teachers were i...

The extent to which the ideas of certain influential, contemporary social theorists who arguably analyse selves as disembedded from social structures can contribute to the theorising of gender and education is explored in this article. We begin by considering hegemonic explanations of neo-liberal society and particularly the emphasis on conceptions...

In her article on ‘the Sign Woman’ on gender studies and feminist theory, Robyn Weigman identified the most profound challenges for contemporary feminist theory as twofold: ‘not simply to address the divide between genetic bodies and d\scursive gender but to offer a political analysis of the socially constructed afflictions between the two’. This a...

In many western countries, government statements about the need to recruit more men to primary teaching are frequently supported by references to the importance of male teachers as role models for boys. The suggestion is that boys will both achieve better and behave better when taught by male teachers, because they will identify with them and want...

The notion that teachers’ classroom behaviour and interaction with pupils may be predicted on the basis of their gender underpins recent controversial campaigns to recruit more male teachers in the UK. Teachers’ performances of gender are explored in this article, which draws on three cases from a larger study to analyse the ways in which teachers...

British government policy on teacher recruitment gives a high priority to increasing the number of male teachers, particularly in primary schools. This focus stems from concern to challenge ‘boys’ underachievement’: policy‐makers believe that ‘matching’ teachers and pupils by gender will improve boys’ engagement with school. Yet there is little evi...

Feminism and 'The Schooling Scandal' brings together feminist contributions from two generations of educational researchers, evaluating and celebrating the field of gender and education. The focus throughout is on the years of compulsory schooling, examining key concepts in gender and education identified and developed by international thinkers in...

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http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/6547/1/WP59_Breaking_down_the_stereotypes.pdf%3Fpage%3D20654

Various studies have found that British girls' curriculum subject preferences and future aspirations have changed and diversified in recent years. Other work has suggested that girls educated in single-sex schools might have a different (perhaps less gender-stereotypical) experience of education in comparison with their contemporaries at co-educati...

Providing fresh insights and understandings about educationally 'successful' minority ethnic pupils, this book examines the views, identities and educational experiences of those pupils who are undoubtedly 'achieving', but who tend to remain ignored within popular concerns about under-achievement. Combining a broad analysis of minority ethnic pupil...

The mechanisms behind children's constructions of gender are examined in an attempt to identify the various narratives that children draw on. The ways in which these narratives are used in children's talk about gender are analyzed in order to provide a greater understanding of discursive resources available to children. The different types of disco...

Students' post‐compulsory pathways and occupational aspirations in the UK have been shown to differ considerably according to gender, social class and ethnicity. School‐based work experience provides many pupils with their first significant encounters with the world of work, and is positioned as providing diverse experiences in this regard. Yet gen...

The moral panic concerning ‘boys’ underachievement’ is well established in the UK and Australia, and is spreading to other countries. Feminists have articulated concerns that this debate has reflected a ‘poor boys’ discourse with negative permutations for girls’ schooling; and there is much evidence to support this claim. However, it is argued here...

British Chinese identities remain under-theorized within sociology and the sociology of education – and yet they offer a potentially interesting angle to debates around the (re)production of privileges/inequalities given the growing phenomenon of Chinese educational ‘success’. British Chinese pupils’ educational success is especially interesting gi...

British Chinese pupils stand out as a high achieving group within the British education system and yet very little theoretical or policy attention has been given to these pupils' identities and experiences of education. In this paper we consider British Chinese pupils' (and parents') reports of their experiences of racism/s and their views on the p...

Challenging current theories about gender and achievement, this book assesses the issues at stake and analyses the policy drives and changing perceptions of gender on which the 'gender and achievement' debates are based. This new topical book guides the reader through the different theories and approaches, drawing together and reviewing work on gen...

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British-Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British-Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Educ...

This paper reports on findings relating to a project on gender and essay assessment in HE. It focuses on one aspect of the study: the assessment of and feedback given to two sample essays by 50 historians based at universities in England and Wales. We found considerable variation both as to the classification awarded to the essays and to positive a...

This paper examines the ways in which British Chinese pupils are positioned and represented within the popular/dominant discourse of teachers working in London schools. Drawing on individual interviews from a study conducted with 30 teachers, 80 British Chinese pupils and 30Chinese parents, we explore some of the racialised, gendered and classed as...

The high achievement of British–Chinese pupils in the British education system is established in the official literature, but few studies have asked British–Chinese pupils or parents about the factors contributing to their success. This paper explores value of education as a possible contributory aspect. It investigates the extent to which British–...

British-Chinese pupils are the highest achieving ethnic group in the British education system, and British-Chinese boys performance equals that of girls. This paper investigates aspects of British-Chinese pupils constructions of learning, focusing particularly on subject preferences and their constructions of themselves as pupils. The results are a...

Academic assessment of their coursework is of great importance to undergraduate students. Yet little attention has been paid to the perceptions of undergraduate writing that academics draw on in their assessment practices and the ways in which these perceptions may be gendered. This article reports findings from a study that asked lecturers about t...

This paper reports on the discussion at a recent 'salon' on feminist agency. The views of the two invited speakers, who raised concerns about the impact of post-modernism on political projects, are reported. The content of the general discussion around subjectivity, agency and structure are then set out. The group struggled with the possibilities a...

This study examines the perceptions of 100 university lecturers in history and psychology regarding the impact of gender on their students' achievement. Qualitative data were gathered from semi‐structured interviews and analysed according to discipline and gender of respondent. Key findings were that most respondents (with the exception of most fem...