The name is absent

The importance of context

through income, aspirations and lifestyle. The stratification of neighbourhoods by
social class and education is not total but is strongly apparent in most urban
environments. Evidence strongly supports this association. However, although the
theoretical grounds for an effect of parents’ education on neighbourhood choice are
strong, to our knowledge there is no evidence that identifies and establishes
empirically a causal role for parents’ education. We conclude therefore, that
neighbourhoods are a mediator of education effects, but only moderately so.

3.3. Schools

The literature on the role of schools and schooling for children’s achievement and
attainment is voluminous and covers influences such as pedagogy, curriculum and
assessment, size of school and teacher effects, teacher expectations and pupil-teacher
interactions and the impact and consequences of school choice and diversity.
However, the focus of this paper is not to describe in detail the determinants of
effective schools but to situate within our framework the school as an important
developmental context.

As noted above developmental contexts other than the family can also be modelled
using an ecological framework and there are many channels for interactions between
these contexts. As with the family context, influences operate at distal, characteristic
and proximal process levels. For example, the characteristics of the schools make
them differentially effective so that pupils make greater educational progress in some
schools than in others. Equally the processes within schools, such as pupil-teacher
interaction and the influences of peer groups, are important for development across a
variety of developmental domains.

3.3.1 The effects of schools on child development

The Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman et al., 1966), was
one of the first attempts to provide a comprehensive insight into understanding the
critical factors relating to the education of minority children. One of its main findings
relates to the variation between schools in terms of achievement and explores the
question; what accounts for this difference? The report claims that schools are
remarkably similar in the effect they have on achievement of their pupils when the
socio-economic background of the student is taken into account. Thus when
controlling for these characteristics the differences between schools account for only a
small fraction of differences in pupil achievement. He notes however, that schools do
differ in the degree of impact they have on different ethnic groups with the white
pupil’s achievement being less affected by the school’s facilities, curricula and
teachers than is that of the average minority pupil’s.

Coleman also finds that the variability between individual pupils within the same
school is approximately four times as large as the variability between schools.

More recently, however, Mortimore et al. (1988) examined the progress of 2000
pupils in 50 London primary schools and found that the effects of schools on primary

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