Educational inequalities in France: A survey on parenting practices during the first COVID-19 lockdown

What does the analysis of school support practices during lockdown in France tell us about the fabrication of educational inequalities? The question of parental monitoring of schoolwork has long been absent from French sociology of education. Based on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural assimilation, the traditional assumption was that family socialisation operates in an “osmotic” way and that studying parents’ concrete, voluntary and explicit practices to support their children’s schoolwork would not yield much new information. This research note takes the opposite view and demonstrates, on the basis of a survey using a questionnaire (n = 31,764) supplemented by a series of interviews (n = 18) conducted in France during the spring 2020 lockdown, that there are strong differences depending on social background. The early results of this survey suggest in particular that limiting explanations for social inequalities in homeschooling to a digital divide is too simple. The pedagogical dimensions of social inequalities in children’s educational achievements must also be taken into account. The author introduces French theories about the “relationship to knowledge” (les théories du rapport au savoir) as a suitable theoretical approach to investigating this dimension.