More funding for pupils experiencing persistent disadvantage, combined with salary supplements for high-quality teachers working in deprived areas, could help to close the attainment gap between poorer pupils and their peers, experts have said.
The recommendations come in a new report, which shows that the pupil disadvantage gap in 2019, before the Covid pandemic, was equivalent to 18 months of educational progress across all GCSE subjects and core GCSE subjects.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) report, Inequalities in England and Wales, says that government needs to “do more to narrow the disadvantage gap” as schools are “unlikely to be able to close the disadvantage gap on their own”.
In order to “improve social mobility across each nation”, the EPI suggests “a renewed focus to be targeted at narrowing disadvantage gaps within schools”.
Pupils are classed as “disadvantaged” if they were eligible for free school meals in the past six years, and “persistently disadvantaged” if they were eligible for free school meals for 80 per cent of their time in education.
The analysis, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, was based on key stage 4 results, school census data, the pupil-level annual school census and geographical data.
Disadvantage gap: call for a ‘wider focus on child poverty’
The report recommends that “a significant narrowing of the disadvantage gap” would require a “wider focus on child poverty” as well as on certain public services, such as early years public services.
The authors of the report, Dr Luke Sibieta and Dr Joana Cardim-Dias, said that in order to reduce the disadvantage gap, “policy and practice need to be aligned with empirical evidence on what works”.
They suggest that more funding should be “specifically targeted at pupils experiencing persistent disadvantage in both nations”.
The report also says that a focus on teacher quality is “crucial” and the government could look at policies to improve recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers in more deprived areas. The measures could include salary supplements.
And it also recommends one-to-one and small-group tutoring, which “has been shown to be highly effective”.
The report, which looked at pre-pandemic data, also acknowledges that evidence has suggested that “inequalities have probably worsened during the pandemic”.
The disadvantage gap in summer assessments in 2019 was equivalent to 18 months, down from about 20 months in 2011 - a decrease of only two months.
Analysis found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds were much less likely to reach the top quintile of GCSE scores and more likely to be in the bottom quintile.
And it found that persistently disadvantaged pupils experienced an even larger disadvantage gap of 23 months in 2019.
The report says that only 6 per cent of students experiencing persistent disadvantage ended up in the top quintile of GCSE scores in 2019, while 44 per cent of students experiencing persistent disadvantage in England ended up in the bottom quintile of GCSE scores.
The research also found that these gaps were larger in Wales, where the persistent disadvantage gap was about 29 months of educational progress in 2019, which was unchanged from the level in 2011.
Dr Sibieta, research fellow at the EPI, said “the gap in education outcomes between poor children and the rest” is “far too wide” in England.
He added that policymakers need to” redouble their attempts to give poorer children a better chance in life”.
David Laws, executive chairman of the EPI and a former schools minister, said the report highlights the “huge attainment gaps” in England that “have almost certainly widened since the Covid crisis hit”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said that since 2011, the government had “narrowed the attainment gap between students from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers at every stage of education up to the pandemic”.
The spokesperson added that the DfE is “committed to levelling up opportunities for all”, which is why the department has set the “ambitious target” for 90 per cent of children to leave primary school at the expected standard in reading, writing and maths by 2030.
“Our education recovery programme is already getting children back on track following the pandemic, with the revolutionary National Tutoring Programme providing nearly 1.5 million courses of high-quality tuition for the children and young people who need it most.”
