There was an interesting article on BBC News Online today on the fallout from a debate that has taken place on the Times Educational Supplement website over judgements teachers make based on childrens names.

On one side are parents who have complained to the Department for Education and Skills over teachers pre-judging pupils over their name, however on the other side you have the teachers with the perceptions of which children would be difficult, from their point of view learned by experience.

Although some names come up on both lists, there are some names that seem to come up more often on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lists. The two lists of names are as follows – firstly the ‘good’ list:

Kate, Gregory, Sean, Charlotte, Jamie, Daniel, Lucy, Isobel, Ben, Sam, Harpreet, Imran, Asam, Alice and Joseph.

Now the ‘bad’ list:

Bobbi-Jo, Kloe, K’tee, Kristopher, Jayne, Wayne, Charlie, Liam and Ryan.

What is interesting is that just by reading the two lists, most people would be making a whole load of stereotypical judgements about the people, their social class, their level of education, even down to where they might live, so in some ways the teachers are only doing what anybody else would do.

So perhaps the question is whether the names are an indication of sources of problems, or whether the stereotypes many people apply as a result of the choice of name mean that we invariably push people towards stereotypical behaviour.