Processes Inside Schools
What Happens Inside Schools?
Sociologists who focus on macro-level structures — class, capitalism, patriarchy — risk overlooking the daily processes within schools that shape individual outcomes. Interactionist sociologists argue that what happens in classrooms and corridors — how teachers perceive and label pupils, how pupils are grouped, how peer cultures develop — has a profound effect on achievement that cannot be explained solely by external factors such as class or home background.
Processes within schools affecting achievement include: streaming, setting, labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy and the development of anti-school subcultures.
The Hidden Curriculum Revisited
Before examining labelling, it is important to be precise about the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum is not what appears on the timetable — that is the formal curriculum. The hidden curriculum refers to the implicit lessons schools transmit through their everyday routines and organisation: pupils learn to queue, sit in silence, accept the authority of the teacher, observe punctuality and behave in gender-appropriate ways. Bowles and Gintis (1976) linked the hidden curriculum directly to the correspondence principle: these lessons prepare working-class pupils for factory discipline and routine employment rather than critical independent thinking. In sport, boys and girls are often directed into different activities, reinforcing gendered norms of physical behaviour alongside academic learning.
Hargreaves: Labelling Deviant Pupils
David Hargreaves’s study Deviance in Classrooms (1975) examined how teachers label pupils as “deviant” within school settings. Hargreaves found that teachers rapidly formed assessments of pupils based on limited early interactions — assessments that then became stable and resistant to change. Pupils labelled as deviant or difficult tended to be placed in lower streams, received less academic encouragement and were disproportionately subject to formal discipline. Hargreaves argued that this labelling process was self-reinforcing: once a pupil was categorised as a “troublemaker”, subsequent behaviour — even relatively minor incidents — was interpreted through that lens. Hargreaves’s research is notable because it specifically focused on the school as the site of label formation, rather than locating the source of deviant identity in the pupil’s home background.
Becker and Master Status
Hargreaves’s findings connect to Howard Becker’s broader interactionist work on labelling. Becker (Outsiders, 1963) applied the concept of master status: a label that overrides all other aspects of a person’s identity. In the school context, once a pupil is labelled as “a problem”, that label can become their master status, colouring every interaction they have with teachers. A pupil whose master status is “troublemaker” may find that even cooperative or positive behaviour is interpreted with suspicion. The self-fulfilling prophecy then follows: the pupil internalises the label and acts in ways that confirm it, transforming a teacher’s initial (possibly inaccurate) judgement into a social reality.
Stephen Ball’s study Beachside Comprehensive (1981) investigated the introduction and effects of banding in a secondary school. Ball found that the band a pupil was placed in at the start of secondary school significantly shaped their educational trajectory regardless of actual ability. Pupils in lower bands received a less academic curriculum, had lower teacher expectations placed on them, and developed more negative attitudes towards school. Ball demonstrated that banding was not a neutral administrative process — it was laden with social consequences, particularly for working-class pupils who were disproportionately placed in lower bands. The act of grouping by ability thus became a mechanism of class reproduction.
Paul Willis’s 1977 ethnographic study Learning to Labour followed twelve working-class boys (whom Willis called “the lads”) in a West Midlands comprehensive school. Willis found that “the lads” developed a counter-school culture: a system of values that actively opposed the school’s emphasis on academic work, obedience and qualifications. The lads valued masculine physical toughness, resistance to authority and the anticipation of manual labour, seeing conformist peers (“ear’oles”) as passive and weak.
Willis’s study is significant in several ways. First, it challenged Bowles and Gintis by showing that working-class pupils actively resist rather than passively absorb the hidden curriculum. Second, it revealed the paradox that this resistance — experienced by the lads as freedom — ultimately prepared them for working-class factory jobs just as effectively as conformity would have. Third, Willis drew on interactionist ideas about peer culture while grounding the analysis in a Marxist concern with class reproduction.
Labelling comes first: a teacher attaches a label (“troublemaker”, “high achiever”) to a pupil. The self-fulfilling prophecy describes what happens next: the pupil internalises the label and begins to act in ways that confirm it. Hargreaves showed that this process is particularly powerful in schools, where early labels quickly become stable and resistant to revision.