For decades now, we have been trying to tackle the attainment gap between disadvantaged and advantaged pupils. But despite the intense focus, and persistent injections of time and money in schools, we are struggling to have an impact.

Though research in 2017 suggested that the gap has been closing, it has been doing so at a very slow rate (see bit.ly/AttGap). And there has not been progress across the board. In fact, for pupils who are persistently disadvantaged - those who have been eligible for free school meals for at least 80 per cent of their school lives - the gap at the end of secondary school widened between 2007 and 2016 by 0.3 months to 24.3 months: a difference of more than two years’ worth of learning.

Why, then, is this such a persistent issue? The problem, according to Robert Slavin, director of the Centre for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, US, is that too often governments focus on unproven approaches rather than supporting evidence-based reform - despite there being plenty of proven approaches available. However, he suggests that this is beginning to change.

“I think there is a movement right now - both in the US and the UK - to focus more on approaches that have strong evidence of effectiveness,” he explains. “Previously, people would tend to talk about changing governance ... and in the UK that meant more academies. It hasn’t led to dramatic improvements across the board.”

And it is not just national reform that has been implemented based on shaky evidence, Slavin says.

“If you go into most English primary schools, you will see an adult standing around or sitting next to a child with special educational needs. What are they doing? Often, not very much. The cost of that adult is substantial.

“If those same people were instead tutoring those same children - which has been demonstrated to be effective by lots of research - they could be obtaining fantastic outcomes for more pupils. But nobody tested the outcome of providing that service.”

He argues that spending on unproven interventions has been widespread, meaning money that could have been spent to good effect has been squandered “over and over again”. Edtech, he says, is a prime example.

“When we do reviews of the research on technology, one of the things that we find is that the impact of adding technology to classes is usually at best very small,” he continues. “If you line that up compared to things like tutoring, and cooperative learning, the differences are frankly night and day. And yet, technology is debated in terms of it being ‘the future’ ... it is just infuriating beyond expression.

“So much money that would otherwise go to proven innovation goes to just putting a laptop in front of every kid and hoping our problems will be solved. Putting in vast amounts of technology just because it is theoretically a good thing to do is irresponsible.”

In terms of improving outcomes among disadvantaged students, Slavin believes the evidence base is now strong enough for schools to know with some degree of certainty what is effective.

Approaches that have been proven to work include “various forms of one-to-one or one-to-small group teaching, even using teaching assistants rather than teachers because of cost and availability”.

“You improve the quality of instruction, then back it up with tutoring,” he says. “Then there are other changes, such as helping parents to do things at home to support success; dealing with attendance issues, or truancy; and building social emotional skills - there are very effective programmes to improve those sorts of things.”

These approaches are all included in the Success for All model, a whole-school approach to improving literacy in primary schools developed by Slavin in the US. Scripted lessons for children from Reception to Year 6 are provided. There is also a strong emphasis on cooperative learning. According to the programme, children should “learn in small teams where each child is responsible for ensuring that all team members are successful in their learning”. The programme lists the three principles of cooperative learning as:

* Team rewards/recognition;

* Individual accountability;

* Equal opportunities for success.

An Education Endowment Foundation evaluation of the programme in the UK, involving 54 schools and around 1,700 pupils, found it to be effective at improving literacy outcomes, particularly for children who were eligible for free school meals (see bit.ly/SuccessAll). But it cautioned that implementation in the UK content needed to be carefully considered.

Slavin says of the report: “That [free school meals children benefited the most] is not terribly surprising, because a lot of the elements of the programme relating to things like truancy are less likely to change things [for pupils who are not disadvantaged]. We always find outcomes are stronger for those who are in the greatest difficulty at the outset.”

“Eligibility for free school meals doesn’t mean that you will inevitably be in trouble academically but, on average, it does.”

Success for All began in the US in the late 1980s after Slavin, an educational psychologist, was approached by the city of Baltimore - an area of high poverty where half of students were not graduating from high school - and asked what it should do.

“We engaged with a number of people in the school system and developed something that used practices that were the best available at that time in terms of how to teach reading, but also to try and anticipate every way things could go wrong with disadvantaged children and make sure those things didn’t happen,” he explains.

“The reading programme had a strong emphasis on phonics, and on collaborative learning; and a strong emphasis on comprehension strategy, so they could figure out how to get to the meaning of the book they were reading.”

Even with the “very best of instruction”, though, Slavin says there will always be “kids who are going to have difficulty”.

“We arranged for those kids to have tutoring - at that time we were doing one-to-one tutoring by certified teachers. We then found we could get nearly the same impact using one-to-small group teaching with teaching assistants, so we use that now.”

The approach was, and remains, simple: incorporate approaches that have been proven to work, but do it in a coordinated way. “Some will apply to all students, others to individuals having difficulties, but whatever happens there is a Plan A for all, a Plan B for those with moderate difficulties, and a Plan C for those who need intensive support,” he says.

By the end of the 1990s, the programme was used by around 1,500 schools in the US, and in 1997, Slavin created a UK version, which was “very much the same, though we had to change a lot of words and some of the characters’ names; instead of ‘Pablo’ we had ‘Ahmed’”. “The problems in England are not terribly different from the problems in the US,” Slavin says. “In the US, we have problems with children who are immigrants and speak a language other than English at home, just as the UK does; we have problems of deprivation for children in formerly industrial areas. Doncaster, for example, is equivalent to Pittsburgh, where there used to be a lot of industry and now there isn’t.”

Schools in these types of areas often struggle to recruit the best teachers, Slavin says, making it all the more important that structured, evidence-based approaches are in place to support educational progress - whether that is Success for All or other well-evidenced interventions.

“Obviously there are inequities caused by the difficulties children experience, but also in the quality of teaching they receive,” he says. “I mean, let’s be honest, many teachers generally, if they can, will gravitate towards the more middle-class places where the schools already get their pick of teachers. But to find teachers to work in [more deprived areas] is a much more difficult process. You may have to take whoever shows up.”

In the US, “places like Baltimore, Philadelphia or Detroit have to hire almost anyone who comes in with a teaching certificate - some of them may not even have that”, Slavin explains.

Unfortunately, he believes that while the movement towards evidence-based interventions to tackle inequalities in attainment has progressed in recent years, the UK government may just have squandered its best hope of embedding effective practice at scale.

In August, ministers announced the closure of the £140 million Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) without spending £84 million of the pot. The scheme gave schools rated “inadequate” by Ofsted - many of which are in disadvantaged areas - access to funding to help improve their outcomes if they could provide evidence that their proposed intervention was proven to be effective.

“The intention was to provide substantial government money to schools suffering from disadvantage to help them adopt proven programmes. If this had continued, you would have had hundreds, then thousands, of schools in the UK using proven programmes, getting tremendous results, and generating more evidence on how to make a difference on a grand scale,” Slavin says. It would, he believes, have “utterly changed everything”.

“You would have had the Fins coming and looking at English schools to find out what works, instead of the other way around.”

Slavin is, however, an “eternal optimist”.

“I think, if you look forward five or 10 years, this is what will happen. It will no longer be a case of putting your finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing - people will be making school change based on solid evidence.”

Ultimately, he says, that is what will help schools - and governments - to tackle the attainment gap.

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

Meet the academic

Robert Slavin is director of the Centre for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. He has authored or co-authored more than 300 articles and book chapters on such topics as cooperative learning, comprehensive school reform, ability grouping, research review and evidence-based reform. He is also author of books including Two Million Children: Success for All (Corwin, 2009).

Further reading

* Miller, S, Biggart, A, Sloan, S, and O’Hare, L (2017). Success for All: Evaluation report and executive summary, Education Endowment Foundation

* Duncan, G, and Murnane, R (2014). Restoring opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education, Harvard University Press

* Slavin, RE (2017). “Evidence-based reform in education”. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 22 (3), 178-184.

Websites:

www.evidence4impact.org.uk

www.evidenceforessa.org

www.bestevidence.org