Equal access does not mean equal benefit says professor

EQUAL access to remote learning is not enough for everyone to benefit equally from it, says one sociology expert.

Alexander Law, professor of sociology at Abertay University, believes the disruption to schooling Covid-19 has brought is and will further “deepen existing patterns of educational inequalities”.

Professor Law believes unequal starting points to facilitate remote learning, including space, privacy and material and emotional investment from parents, will exacerbate the attainment gap and its long-term impact on wider society.

He said: “Covid-19 has negatively exposed the underlying fragility of what in Scotland is called ‘the democratic intellect’, which assumes everyone has an equal opportunity based on ability and effort in a society where qualifications are a guarantee of a career and a decent standard of living.

“It is well known that children and young people living in the most deprived communities do significantly worse at all levels of the education system than those from our least deprived communities.

“Remote learning compounds this because of differences of space, privacy, the digital divide, and the grossly unequal cultural starting positions of the sort that education particularly values and rewards. Even if remote learning is made available to all, as teachers have worked incredibly hard to achieve, this would not by itself increase the ability for all to benefit from it equally.”

Professor Law says after the “covid war”, long-term, structural reform is necessary to begin to equalise the preconditions for student learning alongside significant investment in professional jobs.

He said: “Schools have achieved a lot over the past decade to improve student attainment in disadvantaged areas but social mobility is at a standstill and will likely go into reverse unless income inequalities, closely related to educational inequalities, are tackled root and branch.

“Inequality in the UK is among the worst in Europe. Low educational attainment is devastating in a society increasingly reliant on qualifications as a measure of a person’s worth. If we seriously want to address social scarring and repair the broken education of this generation then the progressive redistribution of society’s resources is necessary.

“Serious public investment could then take place in essential services and infrastructure. Education should be seen as a public good not a private right.”