Today marks a week since I began the #40DayChallenge and have posed some tough questions in this first week, mostly on Education and Theory and Methods. My initial focus of these questions will be on Paper 1 as I am sure that is the one that most students will be focused on first. The 10 markers on this paper are ‘apply and analyse’ for education and ‘outline and explain’ for the theory and methods, and it’s wrong to assume that Paper 1 will deal with purely methods on the 10 marker. So far we have seen one on methods and one on theory in the real exams and the two specimen papers both dealt with theoretical or debate questions.

However, today we are going to look at another requested topic – marketisation. This seems to be one of student’s problem areas. Essentially, there have been a series of policies that have made schools compete with one another, whilst giving parents and students more choice over their education. However, this has caused a ‘myth of parentocracy’ according to Ball et al, who suggest that the choice is only really there for the middle classes and that the working classes and some ethnic minority groups are left with little option. To see this in practice, yesterday parents of 4 and 5 year olds were allocated the schools that their children will go to and Twitter was awash with proud middle class parents declaring their children got into their first choice, but very few mentions of those children that did not.

Today’s question revolves around just that… parental choice, and although this was on the 2017 exam, it is worth revisiting as many students struggled to get into top bands on it. However, I have added a little twist in the question and written a slightly different item. Here goes…

The answers to yesterday’s #40DayChallenge question on why sociology should not be a science can be found on https://thesociologyguy.com/model-answers/