What should we do, to improve the educational outcomes of children who live in poverty? The question faces every headteacher of England’s state schools and plays on the mind of many school leaders and teachers alike. Coming to the end of a large study into the use of pupil premium funds, I’ve come to see how difficult and even bizarre it is to want to equalise the qualifications of children from the poorest homes in England with those of the richest. It sounds like a moral and just aim, but it is conceptually broken and messy. We’re running to fix something we don’t understand, like paying for a barber-surgeon to take away a tumour with leeches.
We don’t understand the mechanisms of learning well enough
First up, and most obviously, we don’t have a detailed grasp of the physical, biological, social and psychological processes that cause the association between socio-economic status and academic achievement. Intuitively, of course, we can grasp how an individual aspect of a child’s life (hunger, parental financial stress, lack of educational resources, parental love of science, parental interest in homework, private tutors) can impact on a child’s learning. But, there are two big buts:
- We don’t have any grasp whatsoever of how significant each of these factors is, in which contexts, and which are the most critical in their impact on learning (it is quite possible that each has a minuscule impact on the national attainment gap).
- Even if we could identify critical factors, in most cases we don’t know how to overcome them. (I mean, really, our best strategies to date are extra lessons—more of the same that hasn’t worked so far—as well as oddities such as ‘ask them more questions in class’ and ‘mark their books first’.)
These buts are two sides of the same coin: if we had solid, detailed evidence of how to reduce the attainment gap in many different contexts and situations, we would have a much better understanding of its causes. The kind of nuanced, scientific understanding that would be nice to have would explain the differential impact of socio-economic status on different subjects, the relationships between socio-economic status and other factors, such as genetics, and the impact at all levels of the socio-economic scale (why do children in the richest 5% of households achieve more than the next 5%?). But education isn’t really a science. And the problem isn’t really the negative education consequences of poverty. It’s poverty.
The end aim is nonsensical
We take the ‘zero attainment gap’ as a natural aim for educational equality. This means, roughly, that we want the academic achievements of children from homes in the bottom-third of the socio-economic scale (roughly our ‘pupil premium’ or PP children) to be (on average) the same as the top two-thirds. And we then focus on these children in this bottom third.
But notice that socio-economic disadvantage is associated with academic outcomes at all points of the socio-economic scale. Children living in the 10% most affluent postcodes do better than those in the next 10%. Therefore, in order to reduce the attainment gap to zero, without changing the spread in the top two thirds, we would have to create a new bottom – children just above the PP line would have end up doing slightly worse than those below. A zero attainment gap doesn’t recognise the linear nature of the association. It is one of many crude simplicities of our current conceptual framework.
A minor point, you say? A zero attainment gap is just a rough pie-in-the-sky aim that gets us in the right direction. But we don’t actually have any idea what a fair and good endpoint would look like, most obviously because we don’t know the impact that genetic factors are playing.
The evidence to date suggests that genetics plays some part in the difference between the academic achievements from children from the poorest and richest homes. I can’t make links to this work, because I disagree with how much of it is presented. We can and will mistakes by talking about genetics, as well as by not talking about genetics. We don’t know enough to be sure of what to say, and the relationship between genetics and environmental is complex. It would be good start to be able to acknowledge that genetic factors may play a role in the attainment gap, but only, of course, if we can do so without distracting from the real issue and the one we are much more sure about: that the structures of our society are unjust.
Most of all, the pie-in-the-sky aim is nonsensical because of how huge the impact of poverty on a child’s life is. Not only are we focussing on the symptoms of the disease instead of the disease itself, but—by concentrating on examination results—we’ve even chosen to fix our sights on one particular symptom. Are children living in poverty happy and flourishing in school and do they go on to live happy and flourishing lives? Do we really even want to attempt to measure this by their GCSE scores? (Aren’t we making academic qualifications more important than they should be by convincing ourselves of how meaningful they are?) Of course, this is not to dismiss academic measures, but to put them into their proper place, as a part of a bigger whole.
For many teachers, its really about doing what is right to help kids out
Of course, we do lots and lots of good things with pupil premium money. There’s been no obvious resulting change in the attainment gap nationally for some years (although there was a few years ago at the initial introduction of the pupil premium). But in the end, many of the best pupil premium initiatives are just in place to make life better: easy access to a counsellor, linking students with mentors that understand what it is like, paying for a bike to get to school, poverty-proofing the school day. Some of the best initiatives don’t need any justification at all: they are responding to the moral void of a individualistic society.
After all, look at how odd it is that schools have to justify using the pupil premium to fund a breakfast club. They have to describe the impact on children’s performance and learning. That’s the world we live in—it’s not good enough to give kids food just because they are hungry. Isn’t the poverty the thing we should be fighting against in the first place, not the fact that it reduces your GCSE mathematics result by half a grade?
It is simply bizarre that we are most worried about the SAT or GCSE results of children in poverty, instead of being worried about poverty itself. So there is a ridiculousness to the question of what we should do to improve the educational outcomes of children who live in poverty. We’re saying the poverty bit is okay, it’s just this negative consequence of it we need to deal with.
A different feeling after Covid-19
Two school leaders I’ve spoken to recently have told me its peculiar that, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, they never thought about spending the pupil premium on individual tablets, smart phones, and internet access. Of 300 schools we’ve worked with, we didn’t find one that did. In fact, the opposite was true: schools complained that there was an expectation from families that the money would be spent on them. But maybe that was always the best way to go…