... needs, but instead may be instilled by a ruling minority, whether white, male, wealthy or a combination of the three. The idea that schools are meritocratic fails to take into account that individuals from different backgrounds may experience external factors which affect their educational ability and performance. The functionalist viewpoint can also be seen as overly deterministic, not allowing for individual variance, and the shaping of teacher/pupil relationships through interaction. However, functionalist theory has played an important part in the formation of educational policy in the UK since the end of the Second World War. The 1944 Education Act manifested the functionalist belief that schools performed a sorting process - pupils were filtered into a tripartite school system based upon the results of the Eleven Plus examination. Academic pupils attended grammar schools, pupils with more practical abilities were relegated to secondary modern schools, and technical schools existed for pupils whose strengths ...

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