‘Why our education system is letting down so many children’

A former teacher working as a charity chief executive in Leeds, Fiona Spellman says some of the solutions to the North-South education divide can be found outside the school system.

“I FELT like a very hard-working cog in a machine that was basically pretty dysfunctional”, Fiona Spellman says as she looks back on her time as a teacher in Manchester and London.

The 32-year-old, now the chief executive of the Leedsbased education charity SHINE, echoes the concerns of teachers up and down the land as she describes how their best efforts are undermined by an education system where large numbers of children fall through the cracks.

Originally from Hertfordshire, the University of Leeds economics and politics graduate got into teaching via the Teach First programme after hating the experience of a summer internship at a big corporation.

Her two placements, firstly in the Moston area of Manchester and later at Finsbury Park in the London borough of Islington, exposed her to contrasting educational challenges that sum up the ongoing North-South divide on children’s attainment.

The children she taught in Jeremy Corbyn’s home borough were often new to the country and living in poor, overcrowded housing, but in an ethnically diverse area many parents placed a premium on education and wanted their children to succeed.

Typically in polarised London where pockets of affluence exist next door to abject poverty, children with challenging backgrounds would on a daily basis see commuters, the Tube and the buzz associated with the vibrant capital city.

The challenges were very different in Moston, where generations of families had become used to unemployment and poor educational attainment. And for teachers, most of whom did not live in the area, there was a sense of disconnect with the communities they served.

It was during this period she realised the education of disadvantaged children would be her life’s work, but could not ignore the injustice of children most in need of help being the ones who miss out.

“Our system tends to work in favour of those who already have significant advantages from home and so on where they disproportionately attend more effective schools, staffed by more high quality teachers.

“I felt that I was doing my best around that as a very hardworking maths teacher but that there were ways in which the system structurally was letting down large numbers of those children.

“I was teaching maths to some children for whom learning how to multiply fractions was not their most urgent need. I often felt that disconnect between what was really going on for some of these young people and what the education system was delivering for them.”

Leaving teaching with no job to go to at the height of the recession in 2011, she joined SHINE, then a London-based charity supporting work with disadvantaged children in the capital and in Manchester.

It was six years later that the charity’s trustees, struck by the increasing gulf between children in the capital and those in the English regions, took the bold move of leaving London and setting up in Leeds.

“We decided that actually, if we were going to be really true to our founding mission and objectives the right thing to do would be to manage a responsible exit from what we were doing in London and refocus completely on the North of England in future.”

The North-South gap in educational outcomes is unarguable. Though the picture varies across the North, from coastal communities to big cities and smaller towns, overall northern children are finishing school with poorer grades and are less likely to go on to further education.

And Ms Spellman, who is now based full-time in Leeds, says the diversity of the North means it is not as simple as applying the same methods that worked in the capital.

“We really believe in the power of great teachers to come up with programmes and solutions for children,” she says. “Some of the work we do supporting directly with teachers we find that they often know what the challenges are and they often know what the solutions are actually but what they lack often is any access to support to help get those things off the ground.”

With the issue of the regional education divide now on the radars of those in power, Ms Spellman says there is now “a will to do something about it”.

But she says the emphasis on accountability of schools and the focus on league tables and results fail to recognise that schools in deprived areas are often fighting an uphill battle from the moment a child walks through the gates.

A child in a low-income family will hear 35 million fewer words than a child from a high income family by the time they start primary school, a fact she says public policy does not address.

She suggests that as well as focusing on how older children find work and education opportunities as teenagers, the state, business and the voluntary sector should be focusing more on working with younger children at risk of starting school well behind their peers. Doing so is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of a poor education in adulthood and can have knock-on effects for families where parents do not have any qualifications.

“That’s the space that I think is really ripe for investment and support but it has to start with the recognition that we’re continually allowing huge numbers of these children to fail and that’s not something we can actually sustain as a country.”