Numeracy Practices at Home

We begin this chapter by looking at some data from a home visit made during the research. This data reveals some of the complexities inherent in attempting to understand relationships between home and school numeracy practices and the possible impact of home practices on attainment in schools. So far in the book (cf. Chapter 1) we have referred to the work of Machin (1999) Feinstein (2003), Ginsberg et. al.,(1997), Walkerdine (1998), Reay (1998), and Reay and Lucey (2000) where they revealed the effect of visible social factors such as relative poverty, social class and socio-economic status on children’s educational attainment in formal schooling. The event we describe below suggests that material poverty alone does not fully explain the impact of social factors on children’s school educational achievements. This has led us to consider ways in which a model of cultural resources, which we have developed from Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (see below) may help understandings of the effect of such social factors.