David Hargreaves
("Social Relations In A Secondary School", 1967)

A significant aspect of Hargreaves' study touched on the various ways teachers use their experience to label and categorise pupils. For example, Hargreaves observed that:

"When a teacher takes a new class, he (sic) will tend to divide the class into three categories. Firstly, the "good" pupils who conform to his expectations. Secondly, the "bad" pupils who deviate. Thirdly, those who are not outstanding in either conformity or deviation. It is the names of the pupils in the first two categories that are learned immediately by the teacher. For those in the residual category, actual names are learned very much more slowly.
These inferences which the teacher draws in such a highly selective way from the pupils' behaviour, and the "categorization process" to which it leads, act as a definition of the situation in which teachers and pupils find themselves. This definition provides the plan for all future interaction between the two parties".

The implications of this labelling process are clear when we think about the likely consequences for the future achievements of each of these groups. Thus, according to Hargreaves, the assumptions made and conclusions drawn by teachers will affect the behaviour of pupils - whether the result is outright rebellion, a withdrawal from the competitive process or an increased immersion in that process.

In this respect, Hargreaves' study indicates much the same kind of things (in an English school) as Becker observed in American schools some thirty years before.

For Hargreaves, the labelling process is set in motion on the basis that teachers create definitions of "pupil types" based on their past experiences. The ability to apply labels (such as "intelligent / stupid") and to make them stick to pupils comes from the relatively powerful position of the teacher in relation to their pupils (power - or authority - that comes from the teacher's and pupil's relatively different positions in the school hierarchy).

Hargreaves noted that once the teacher has defined various categories (types) and pupils had been allocated to a category, two main things tended to happen:

Firstly, the teacher used the "pupil category" as a reference point for the interpretation of a pupil's behaviour. That is, the teacher used knowledge of the category into which he / she had mentally placed the pupil in order to interpret or make sense of that pupil's behaviour. Consider, for example, a pupil who is having difficulty completing a piece of work:

• If that pupil has been classified as "intelligent", then the teacher is likely to interpret the child's difficulty benignly; they will offer help and guidance.
  
• If that pupil has been classified as "stupid" or "lazy", then the teacher is likely to interpret the same behaviour differently; it may be taken as an indication that the child "isn't trying hard enough" or that they "obviously weren't listening" when the task was explained.
  

Secondly, because pupils need to refer to the behaviour of others towards them in order to get a picture of how relatively successful they are, pupils internalise the image they get of themselves from what G.H.Mead has called significant others - in this instance, the teacher (although in other instances these significant others could be fellow pupils). The child relies on the teacher to provide a self-concept - to tell the pupil, in other words, how successfully or badly they are playing their allotted role.

Charles Cooley used the concept of a "looking-glass self" to express the idea that we understand who we are from the way others behave towards us. When we interact with others, the way they behave towards us gives us a concept of who and what we are. Just as we look into a mirror in order to physically see ourselves, so we look into the mirror of how others behave towards us to see ourselves socially.

When we think about who we are, we think about the way others behave towards us. We interpret the behaviour of others towards us in order to "see ourselves as others see us". This process is a highly subjective one (we may interpret the behaviour of other people incorrectly), but it is a significant one. As W.I.Thomas, has noted, whenever we define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.

Additionally, in terms of labelling, other pupils and other teachers will come to recognise the label any child has attracted and will consequently behave towards that pupil on the basis of an already existing label. While it is not impossible for a child to shake-off a label, it does become extremely difficult if the label is widely shared. Teachers, for example, compare perceptions about their pupils and this reinforces a consensus label about pupils - a teacher who has, for example, never taught a particular pupil will already have knowledge about him or her supplied through the labels attached by other teachers.