Can an academic curriculum really solve educational inequality?
Nick Gibb said something this morning that caught my attention. He was speaking in the Education Select Committee and was pushing the argument that poverty was the cause of educational disadvantage (rather than other factors such as skin colour), and that ‘the key’ to solving this was a knowledge-rich curriculum with the EBacc at its’ heart. He also pointed to certain schools like Michaela, Dixons Trinity and Harris Bermondsey who appear to have ‘closed’ this gap. My interpretation of these comments from the Schools Week twitter feed reporting back on this meeting (and there’s more to it in their article here, which quotes him as saying):
““If you really want to address unequal opportunities in our school system, we need to challenge schools with low EBacc entries. They need to be giving all young children a proper curriculum, proper behaviour policies and so on. That’s how you address that cycle of poverty.”
I think we have a problem here. Firstly, I do agree with Mr Gibb in some areas. I think a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum in theory is more often than not, a good thing, and that disadvantaged children are often further disadvantaged by being denied access to that knowledge (leaving aside the whole other question of ‘what knowledge’ for now). I think it’s probably a good thing that more young people are pursuing qualifications in more of the academic subjects to the age of 16, although more work needs to be done across the system in persuading students of the intrinsic value of subjects like History, Geography and MFL beyond ‘it can help me get a job’. I’ve certainly experienced in a number of schools an almost cultural opposition to doing MFL and unless school leadership are absolutely behind promoting it as really important and vital and enforcing high standards (they need to value it intrinsically themselves), you’ll see things go off a cliff quite quickly if you start to demand that it essentially becomes compulsory. He’s also right to flag up schools like Michaela and Dixons who do incredible work that the rest of us have much to learn from (although perhaps he could vary up the diet of exceptional schools that he name-checks in the interest of fairness).
However, I do not believe that these approaches alone are ‘the key’ to solving educational disadvantage. Fundamentally, this is because it ignores the grinding effect of actual full-blown poverty on young people.
I’m very fortunate — I grew up in a household that was, shall we say, ‘wealthy enough’ although by no means rich. I grew up in areas (both in the North-East of Scotland where I spent my primary school years, and near Stratford-on-Avon where I spent my high school years) that were generally well off areas. I went to a selective state school for my secondary education. I am not going to sit here and say I know what it feels like to be in poverty, because that would be a nonsense.
However, until recently, I spent nearly 13 years living in Harehills in Leeds. My postcode area ranked comfortably in the bottom decile of the IDACI index. Although my family and I lived comfortably there, we lived in close proximity to real, actual, grinding, oppressive ‘in your face’ poverty.
There was one family we knew of a little bit who stand out as an example of people that struggled with actual poverty. I won’t go into loads of detail but I think I can reasonably illustrate my wider point with a flavour of their story, which I only know small bits of to be fair. Our street of terraced houses had a back street that divided the houses from the small gardens behind. This was really nice because it would become a communal area for the adults and the children on the street to socialise together, so these kids would often come up to our end of the street to play with some of the children there. They were fairly recent arrivals to the country, from an Eastern European background. It was a large family with (if I remember) 6 children— primary aged or younger. Their house basically had no furniture in it at all let alone books or multiple devices with which they could access remote learning. Those children (and there are many like them in that area of the city) will often play outside unsupervised pretty late at night. They’ll walk on the back streets with no shoes on. The children in the house had never been to Roundhay Park which is about a 5 minute drive from where we lived, let alone to the city centre or another part of the country (because the bus is too expensive and a car is out of reach). We have large numbers of other children in that area of the city living in tower-block housing that is totally unsuitable for families with children — especially in a lockdown — but it’s all that is available. Let’s not even get into the issue of cladding on those tower blocks!
The pandemic has exacerbated the problems. Since it struck this country in March, at least one of those children to my knowledge has not been back to school at all. They are not accessing ‘vulnerable’ student provision in school, to my knowledge even though they would more than meet that description. They are out of reach, seemingly, of the system that ought to be looking out for them above all. These children by the way are kind and well-mannered, they want and like to learn and they have huge potential if nurtured and supported properly. They more than anyone deserve to have the arms of society wrapping round them and protecting them. But too often we know how this story ends — seeing the start of that is pretty crushing to be honest. There’s a not unreasonable chance that one or more of these young people will end up either informally or formally ‘excluded’ from education, maybe because of behaviour or because of attendance or some other factor. That’s just what the odds suggest — I hope they come out on the right side of them.
The idea that putting these children through the EBacc when they hit secondary school will fix their educational disadvantage is patently a nonsense (and I’m sure Nick Gibb, who isn’t an idiot whatever you think of his politics, knows that). That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged to pursue those subjects. I’d argue the opposite to be honest. But an academic education alone is not a panacea for society’s ills. Pretending that it is, is silly. The pandemic is only making this disadvantage chronically worse.
The problem is that Nick Gibb and Gavin Williamson and a large section of our political class has no idea what this type of disadvantage actually looks like. They don’t encounter it. They don’t bump into it. Many will actively avoid it. The trouble is, there are no votes in solving these problems because people like the family I mention are societally perceived as ‘undeserving poor’, they tend not to vote (or are not able to vote) and the solutions would likely make people in government and across the political class ideologically uncomfortable. It certainly did for me which is one big reason why my political leanings have shifted substantially in the last 15 years. They also don’t need my, or anyone else’s pity or empty words.
In education alone, some solutions might include vastly more investment in supporting inclusion and ‘catch-up’ in schools — not between this year group and non-pandemic year groups, but to deal with the widening inequalities within the pandemic-affected year groups themselves. More investment in expert, properly remunerated, phonics-trained colleagues who can teach older children to read. More investment in EAL and SEN support with people employed who can speak the language of our new arrival families and who know the community the school is situated in. More investment in ‘shoe-leather’ work to do actual community outreach with our hardest to reach families to help them engage with the education offer. More appropriate provision outside of mainstream schools to give some of our most challenging young people a fighting chance of being able to be at least partly included in mainstream in the future. Alternative Provision, if we can lose the negative connotations of it, should be an essential part of this, but they need the resources to attract and retain good staff and then to train them so they can deliver high quality teaching that meets the needs of the young people there — and probably as part of that there needs to be much closer links between our Alternative Provision schools and mainstream schools. I’d argue that many young people end up in AP when it’s too late — instead we need to think the other way round. Intervention should be happening much earlier — we know the warning signs from when these children are 4 years old oftentimes. That is when the gap is smallest — let’s think creatively about trying to close the gap there. By the time these young people get to their teenage years it is often way too late.
A good education in a school where there are clear boundaries and high expectations and a great curriculum and the promotion of achievement as being important is a really good start, but it won’t fix these problems. The solutions will need to go much, much further than that. That’s the job of our political class and broader society to try to address, not just schools.
