Closing the Gap (Mission Impossible)

Closing the Gap (Mission Impossible)

The gap in educational attainment between students from wealthier and poorer homes in England has been widely reported for many years. Successive governments have railed against the stubborn existence of the gap and have ostensibly sought to close it through the use of various policy levers. Recently, governments from both major parties have placed a great emphasis on the responsibility which schools bear for closing the gap: Surely we must agree that good teaching will equate to good outcomes for all pupils?

Fig.1. GCSE attainment gap 2011-2017 (Ofsted 2018)

But schools will continue to fail to close the gap. They are but one element of a broader social framework. Within this social framework ‘the gap’ is created long before children arrive at school. Further, the schools system as a whole, through the way it is set up and managed, largely serves to perpetuate and widen the gap as students grow.

So what are the important factors which ensure that individual schools, try as they may, are so unlikely to be successful in closing the educational attainment gap in the English context? The many impacts of poverty, the duties of wealth and social policy at the macro-scale all have significant contributions to make and we shall attempt to assess these individually and together.

Income and Wealth Inequality

Income inequality is very high in the UK; it has the seventh most unequal income distribution of 30 OECD countries in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2015).

Fig.1. Income inequality in UK 2015-16  (ONS, 2016 in Equalitytrust 2016)

Social Mobility

And social mobility is low, and worsening. Government reports provide findings such as ‘only 1 in 8 children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high-income earner as an adult’ (Social Mobility Commission 2016) Interestingly, given that social mobility must by definition work in two directions,  reports do not highlight the startlingly low proportion of those born to high-earners who go on to become poor.

Link between Socio-Economic Status (SES) and attainment

The correlation between a student’s likely GCSE attainment grades and the Socio-Economic Status (SES) of their family background is high – there is no better predictor of GCSE maths outcomes than SES. (Sammons et al 2014)

Poverty and Stress

So what is it about growing up in relative poverty which makes it so hard to achieve in school? Even more important than the type of school you will probably attend, is the stress which poverty engenders. Most children growing up in poverty in England are in households where the wage earners are working in low-paid jobs often with little or no job-security, often on zero-hours contracts. (Guardian, May 2017) This means that adults are often worried about providing for themselves and their families in the immediate future. They are also aware that what they are able to provide appears inadequate by comparison to what is seen daily in the media and that they experience a lack of agency and self-expression in their own lives. The result of this worry is stress, a heightened sense of anxiety which had its uses in facilitating a fight, flight or hide response when it evolved in our human ancestry, but which now has no socially useful expression and thus tends to become chronic when the stimulus that causes it doesn’t go away. (McGarvey, 2018)

Stress is deeply unpleasant to experience and adults under stress will find it harder to be as patient, empathetic, nurturing and playful as they would wish to be.

Stress and Development

Chronic stress leads also to an array of destructive results which help to form and then sustain the attainment gap. Modern neuroscience is beginning to explain to us the mechanisms by which stress hormones, principally cortisol, influence brain function in the moment and brain development and learning over time, eg (Brito and Noble, 2014). Chronically raised cortisol levels cause significant degradation in the development of the amygdala (emotional regulation), the hippocampus (working memory) and the pre-frontal cortex (executive function, powers of concentration). All of these differences make themselves felt in a classroom environment. Inhibited working memory makes any given task harder to ‘hold in mind’ and think about. Poor executive function and control may make me more likely to be ‘off-task’ at any given moment, and perhaps distracted by some peer-peer interaction which makes me harder to teach. Poor emotional regulation will make me far harder to manage in a classroom and make far higher demands upon the skills of my teacher if I am to stay calm and attend to the learning in hand.

Stress and Classrooms

If, as a student, my classes on average contain say four or five people who really struggle with self-regulation, instead of just one or two, then there is likely to be far more daily disruption to the planned learning experience which my teacher intended, with obvious consequences for my long-term learning. This, as we shall see is an important differentiating factor between classrooms at different English schools.

Fig 2 Influence of SES upon areas of brain development: (Brito and Noble 2015)

There is a significantly higher prevalence of pupils who have been affected by the stress of poverty in some English schools than in others. This means that the demands upon teachers’ skills of empathy, emotional regulation, consistency and nurture will be very significantly higher on aggregate in those schools serving lower SES groups. Teachers in these schools might thus expect to be accorded greater respect for the more complex work they do, but as we shall see, the converse is true.

In addition to these primary effects of stress, if my friends and my family are mostly engaged in work for which education has not been important and rarely spend time debating the matters that I am taught about in school, I am unlikely to see education as of great significance to my life and culture or be driven to invest heavily in it. Numerous studies find that students from Low SES backgrounds tend to receive less linguistic, social and cognitive stimulation in their homes, eg (Hart and Risley, 1995) and this is often seized upon by theorists who would like to suggest that these are faults of the ‘undeserving poor’ rather than seeing these as consequences of living in poverty.

The Gap in the Schooling System

As we have seen, societal factors which create the learning gap are beyond the control of schools, but why cannot the schools system address the disparity once the children are safely within it? The answer is that the ‘design’ of the system ensures that it cannot. (NB the author is not suggesting that the structure of the system is purely the result of purposeful design over time, only that ‘design’ is a useful metaphor to use to better understand some of the principles which create order in that structure).

England has a long and distinguished history of educational elitism which ensures that students from significantly disparate SES backgrounds are educated separately to a very significant extent. First and foremost amongst the mechanisms perpetuating division are the ‘Independent’ schools, whose intake (about 7% of the school age population) are selected ostensibly on the grounds of ‘ability’ via entrance examinations, which effectively means on the grounds of parental SES.

Pupils in these schools benefit from smaller class sizes, better school resources and an extensive and impressive array of extra-curricular opportunities. Expectations for their academic attainment are extremely high. Independent schools’ pupils more commonly access such expensive things as private tutors and ‘Oxbridge preparation weekends’ and can tap social networks which will ensure them well-remunerated work in future. Their separation from the realities of poor people’s lives helps them to believe that their own circumstances are the just rewards of their superior work ethic and intelligence and they naturally feel superior since they have more control over their own lives. Dorling, 2014). Educational equality is against the economic and perceived social interests of this group as a whole.

In the state-funded schools sector there is also significant social segregation for the 93%. The school ‘choice’ agenda and competition between schools, alongside house price economics ensures that comprehensive schools teaching students from a balanced mixture of SES profiles are extremely rare in England. The competition between schools is overseen and promoted by Ofsted inspections and school league tables. In both cases, pupils from higher SES backgrounds confer better results and higher status upon their host schools. In terms of absolute GCSE attainment grades, there is no better predictor than pupils’ SES background, and these grades still find a place in the league tables under the heading ‘Attainment 8’. 5 of the top 6 ranked schools (Attainment 8) in Nottingham in 2017 serve high-SES groups (Ofsted, 2018)

Measures of pupil ‘progress’ (which are supposed to enable a fairer comparison between schools on the basis of the impact of their teaching quality) also tend to favour high-SES pupils, who are predominantly to be found in schools serving higher SES catchments.

Fig 3. Pupils who’ve never been eligible for Free School Meals almost always get higher P8 than peers who have been eligible. (FFT Education Data Lab, 2018)

Fig 4. Strong link between P8 data and Ofsted Grading (FFT Education Data Lab, 2018)

The use of attainment and progress data by Ofsted inspectors means that most schools graded as Outstanding are schools with a high proportion of high SES and that most schools placed into Special Measures are schools with a lower SES profile (see Figs 3,4 and Hutchinson, (2016))

In public discourse, the language colloquially used to describe schools is simple and judgemental, like Ofsted grading: Schools range from ‘fantastic’ or ‘great’ through ‘good’ to ‘poor’ and these terms, on closer inspection, map closely onto schools serving high-SES, moderate-SES and low-SES pupils.

Teachers

The ranking and rating of schools further consolidates their differences. As has been mentioned, teaching pupils from poor, stressed homes is more challenging, requires more skill and is more emotionally draining than teaching pupils from less stressed homes for whom the education system holds more promise. Paradoxically then, it is the schools serving higher SES catchments which tend to receive the kudos from Ofsted, the media, and thus large swathes of the public. This means that many schools serving poor SES communities struggle to recruit well-qualified teachers, carry more unfilled vacancies in departments and have higher rates of staff turn-over. These difficulties further exacerbate the issues of helping pupils to concentrate calmly, engage and learn. Creating and honing subject departmental expertise and curricular coherence takes time and is much harder to achieve in circumstances of high staff turn-over and high individual teacher stress levels.

Even within any given school, the widespread English practice of setting by ‘ability’ serves to sustain or widen the attainment gap (and promote internal separation by SES). The narratives which are widely used to justify setting are plausible and self-consistent: Lower attaining groups will be smaller, so that these children each get more teacher time to help them progress. These justifications ignore the enormous impacts upon self-expectation, self-esteem and peer-peer learning which result from telling some pupils that they have ‘low ability’. Setting by ‘ability’ starts at a surprisingly young age.  Many primary schools are already separating pupils into different tables by y2 or y3 and the membership of these separate groups is remarkably stable over entire school careers.

When politicians place significant responsibility upon schools and teachers for closing the educational attainment gap (and thus facilitating social mobility) they are asking the impossible. 

Individual teachers will almost always have the best intentions in terms of improving the lives and life-chances of the students they teach, but at the system level, powerful structural inequalities ensure that the gap remains. 

Whether sometimes politicians knowingly ask the impossible of teachers in order to distract attention from the structural inequalities which they choose to leave in place or reinforce is, of course, a political question.

Brito, N., and Noble K., (2014): Socioeconomic Status and Structral Brain Development in Frontiers in Neuroscience at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2014.00276/full (accessed 20/3/18)

Butler, P., (2017) Record 60% of Britons in poverty are in working families-study. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/22/record-britons-in-work-poverty-families-study-private-rented-housing (accessed 2/5/18)

Dorling, D., (2014) Inequality and the 1%. London, Verso

Equity Trust (2016) The Scale of Economic Inequality in the UK  at https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk (accessed 20-03-18)

Hart, B., and Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes Publishing.

Hutchinson, J., (2016) School Inspection inEngland: Room to Improve? Education Policy Institute. Available at: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/school-inspection-in-england-web.pdf (accessed 3/5/18)

McGarvey, D., (2018) Poverty Safari (Understanding the anger of Britain’s Underclass). Edinburgh, Luath.

Ofsted (2017): Find and compare schools in England at https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk (accessed 20/3/18)

Ofsted (2018):  Revised GCSE and equivalent results in England, 2016 to 2017 at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/676596/SFR01_2018.pdf (accessed 20/3/18)

Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Siraj, I., Taggart, B., Toth, K. and Smees, R., (2014) Influences on students’ GCSE attainment and progress at age 16 Effective Pre-School, Primary & Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) Research Report. London: DfE.

Treadaway, M., (2017) Long-term disadvantage at https://educationdatalab.org.uk/2017/07/long-term-disadvantage-part-one-challenges-and-successes/