How are working class more likely to underachieve in education compared to middle class students

Working class children are more likely to underachieve due to internal and external factors. External factors are the those that are culturally deprived meaning that it is outside of the education system and more to do with the socialisation of the children at home. On the other hand, internal factors are those that contribute to the underachievement due to the treatment inside of the education system such as classrooms and teacher discipline.An example of an external factor is language which was suggested by the sociological thinker bernstein introducing speech codes. He stated that working class students use restricted code which is the use of limited vocabulary but middle class students use the elaborated code which is more complex and uses a wider range of vocabulary. This leads to underachievement for working class pupils because the education system such as textbooks and exams use the elaborated code meaning that the working class pupils can not understand fully and struggle to answer many questions due to the language. However, an argument against the cause of underachievement being external is that the cause my be internal due to teacher labelling argued Becker going against Bernstein. Becker argued that working class pupils tend to underachieve due to teachers seeing working class pupils more negatively and not as the ideal pupil unlike middle class students. This is due to middle class pupils having cultural capital. This results into the teacher giving more attention and help to middle class pupils as they are more likely to achieve well due to being ideal benefitting the educational triage. Therefore, they do not allow working class pupils to expand on their basic knowledge and do not help them to achieve higher leading to self fulfilling prophecy of under achieving