Open any book on sociology, whether it is about education or not, and you can almost guarantee that there will be chapters on social class, gender and race. There are also likely to be other common themes – the family, ageing, deviance and so on – but none of them are regarded as quite as foundational as the three familiar pillars of social structure. That is, not everyone has a family, or is old, or deviant, but everyone is deemed to have a social class, a gender and a race/ethnicity, and more often than not, where you stand in relation to these categories correlates fairly directly with access to power, resources … and education. This part will examine these three social axes and draw some conclusions about how they structure our society, and how they affect the probability of success within our schools.

Though these conclusions may still be interesting and informative, sociological analysis has moved on somewhat from the belief that there are three straightforward categories that shape the structure of our society, categories that have an objective reality that we can come to know – i.e. the singular ‘truth’ of social class, gender and race/ethnicity. While this modernist understanding has had some interesting things to tell us, it has largely been superseded by more postmodern approaches to the same issues. These approaches attempt to avoid the sweeping generalisations, and the either/or logic, of previous work in the area. As such – while staying on the same terrain as social class, gender and race/ethnicity – this part will also examine how these three solidly nineteenth- and twentiety-century concepts can be best understood in the more nuanced sociological environment of the twenty-first century.