The intersection between socio-economic status and scholastic attainment in selected schools in Fort Beaufort education district, province of the Eastern Cape

The aim of this study was to examine and highlight the effects of socio-economic status on scholastic attainment in selected high schools in the Fort Beaufort Educational District. Participants were children in Grades 10 to 12 and included children from both high and low Socio-Economic Status (SES) families, and with varying qualities of education owing to biographies of distinctive insertion into the part apartheid educational structure. Utilizing Pierre Bourdeu’s concept of cultural capital as a theoretical framework, the study ardued that children from high SES in the Fort Beaufort Education District perform better at high schools owing to acces to relevant educational materials and the general academic culture in their home environment. The opposite is however the case for children from low SES who lack access to such material, culture and language, thus making it difficult to perform optimally in their high school studies. The study used both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The purpose of using triangulation was to decrease or counter-balance the deficiency of a single strategy, thereby increasing the ability to interpret the findings. The adoption of the mixed method approach in this study was also directed at increasing the reliability, validity and the generalizability of the results of the study. The most expressive measure of SES was the average income for the area in which the child lives or is educated. The quality of education was estimated based on whether the school was previously disadvantaged or previously advantaged. The child’s academic achievement was measured using the two most recent school reports. As predicted, the research results showed that children from high SES families and with a high quality of education scored better on their examinations than did children from low SES families and with a low quality of education. The data also revealed an interesting interaction between SES and quality of education. Participants from low SES families but with a high quality of education scored significantly better on examination assessment performance than did participants from low SES families and with a low quality of education. These findings suggest that children from low SES families in the Fort Beaufort Education District might be at a grave disadvantage in terms of their ability to succeed academically but that the quality of education might be a more important factor than SES in determining levels of general intellectual functioning