Education gap is growing for the poorest pupils
IT IS widely expected that the Covid- 19 pandemic will exacerbate inequalities within education, presenting a clear challenge to the Prime Minister’s promise to ‘ level up’ the country.
Pupils have lost several months of learning at a time in their lives when every month of learning counts. Evidence shows that during lockdown richer pupils are more likely to have had teacher input through remote classes, private tutoring and a comfortable home learning environment.
But our recent EPI research shows that it’s not just the pandemic that we should be worrying about. It is poverty.
The latest data shows that even before the pandemic struck, the disadvantage gap – that’s the difference in school attainment between poorer pupils and their peers – stood at 18 months by the end of secondary school.
Yorkshire has some of the highest disadvantage gaps in the country: poorer pupils are 21.5 months behind in Bradford, 22.8 months behind in Rotherham and 23.1 months behind in Sheffield.
In recent decades, policies designed to tackle educational inequalities had helped narrow the gap. But this progress has ground to a halt since 2015. On the eve of the pandemic, the disadvantage gap had started to widen across the early years, primary school and secondary school.
We know that this is being driven in part by worsening outcomes for pupils in persistent poverty. For the very poorest pupils – those who are eligible for free school meals the majority of their time at school – the education gap at GCSE rises to 23 months. Since 2015, the gap for these pupils has risen almost every year.
We also know that the proportion of poor pupils in persistent poverty is on the rise for the first time in years, from 35 per cent in 2017 to 37 per cent in 2019. It is likely that this is being driven by austerity and welfare reforms, such as the benefit cap and two- child limit, which disproportionately hit poorer and larger families with children.
Other research also shows that the depth of poverty – how far below the poverty line poor families fall – has been increasing over the last 20 years.
Some areas in Yorkshire have relatively high levels of persistent poverty which help explain why they have large disadvantage gaps – 13 per cent of secondary school pupils in Sheffield are in persistent poverty, while 12 per cent are in Bradford and 10 per cent in Rotherham. This compares with just three per cent of pupils in Windsor and Maidenhead and Buckinghamshire. The socioeconomic profile of pupils in these areas is therefore wealthier than that of many areas in Yorkshire.
We also looked at what would happen to the disadvantage gap if we controlled for levels of persistent poverty. When we did this, we saw that the gap shrunk in Bradford, Rotherham, Sheffield, Leeds, Kirklees, Hull, Barnsley and Doncaster. This shows that these regions are not doing as badly with education gaps as it might seem – they are merely dealing with high levels of persistent poverty, which make the challenge of closing the gap harder.
The Covid- 19 pandemic and the impending return of schools in September has put a spotlight on the gaping inequalities between rich and poor within education. But these inequalities are not peculiar to the pandemic.
We have been warning that the gap would increase for years now based on the data but this month’s exam results fiasco
– in which the Government’s proposed results by algorithm were shown to be systematically biased against disadvantaged pupils – showed that education
Yorkshire has some of the highest disadvantage gaps in the country.
policy can have a huge impact on children and young people’s lives.
Within this context, the Government’s promise to ‘ level up’ school funding is deeply disingenuous and is at risk of coopting the language of equality of opportunity to cover up the very reverse. EPI research shows that the Government’s newly announced school funding allocations will mean extra funding is disproportionately funnelled into schools with more affluent, white British pupils. This will make closing the gap even harder.
The Government urgently needs to prioritise closing the gap. This means reassessing funding to ensure that the most disadvantaged pupils are given the support they need. It also means a crossdepartmental focus on tackling the social determinants of education outcomes, especially persistent poverty. Without it, decades of progress will be lost to the detriment of the poorest children and young people in society.