Back to the Future: the problem of change and the possibilities of advance in the sociology of education

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Abstract
With reference to the ‘meritocratic’ and ‘equal opportunities’ (EO) paradigms, the paper discusses the problem of explaining the relationship between changing differentials in educational attainment and changes in social opportunities more generally. It is argued that, for the former, progressive changes expected to follow from social democratic educational reforms failed to occur and, for the latter, unanticipated improvements in the relative attainments of girls and blacks have occurred. In both cases, the paradigms fail to provide systematically‐convincing explanations of these events. Essentially, there is a conflict between accounts of the ideological positioning of categories of pupils within education and their positions within the system of relative attainment. It is argued that this situation relates to the manner in which the sociology of education in Britain has been, to a significant degree, relocated within the educational field through its association with teacher training and functions more as a sociology for education than as a sociology of education.