Closing the disadvantage gap

Dominic Smalles, an assistant headteacher at a secondary school, discusses the disadvantage gap in schools

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on We Are In Beta

We are happy to accept that the gender gap is caused by society and family life – but what if schools are institutionally sexist?

We believed that schools are probably inherently racist (well I do anyway) but this doesn’t prevent virtually every national and racial group out-performing white British; this is the group, measured by progress measures and outcomes, who suffer the most. For the record, I’m a labour voting, black-lives-matter kind of guy – but my point is that white, and especially working-class students, is where the real story of educational disadvantage lies, doubly so if they are boys. That’s what national Progress 8 and Attainment 8 tell us.

The national story

Here’s the story in 2019.

Attainment 8 for EAL students, 47.6, compared to English speaking students, 46.6. 

Progress 8 for EAL students, +0.48, compared to English speaking students -0.11. 

Attainment 8: girls 49.5, boys 44. 

Progress 8: girls +0.22, boys -0.27 

Progress 8 by ethnicity: white -0.1, mixed -0.02, black +0.12, Asian +0.45, Chinese +1.03 

Progress 8 Disadvantaged -0.45 

Progress 8 SEN -0.67 

How we ignore the national story

We are mistakenly obsessed with the disadvantage gap. It is impossible to close this gap. Yes, a school with very high EAL student numbers may be able to do so, because these students simply outperform white British students, both in terms of progress and attainment.

The gender gap is even greater at -0.49, but we accept it far more readily, don’t we? There is no extra spend, like the pupil premium, for boys and there aren’t any policies for boys which we are obliged to publish on the school website. There is an unspoken acceptance that, well, ‘boys will be boys’, won’t they? The sexist labour market will look after them anyway, so their underachievement is not really damaging in the long term and (though we would never say this out loud) provides a sort of social justice.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask for a fairer deal for working class white students here, or for boys, or even white working-class boys. I offer this as proof, I hope that, when it comes to our data, we all tell ourselves stories which don’t necessarily match the national data.

This blog is, instead, about the disadvantage gap, how we can close it, and the importance of the stories we tell ourselves (as they could so easily be wrong).

What I got right

Closing the gap

There are only 31 schools in the country where disadvantaged students have a progress 8 of 0.4 or greater. I should say that I have excluded schools where Year 11 comprised more than 30% EAL students, and included fewer than 30 disadvantage students in the year group. The former is to identify schools which are making great progress with the most disadvantaged groups – white British. The latter is to make sure there is a cohort that doesn’t have a wildly unstable confidence interval. (You can find the list of these schools at the bottom of this article).

Gender, ability, belief

Out of these 31 schools, seven are girls’ schools and 11 are faith schools. The average size of Year 11 is 165 students, which is encouraging, and suggests that what these schools are doing may be scalable in more typical schools; that said, 8 have cohorts of below 120.

The average percentage of lower attaining students is 8%! And the highest percentage of low ability students is 19%. Conversely 49% of students are higher ability. 15 schools have cohorts where 50% or more are higher ability.

Compare this to the 2014 national Key Stage 2 results for the 2019 Year 11, which were:

• 21% below level 4 (low attainers), 
• 24% above level 4 (high attainers) 
• 55% at level 4 (middle attainers). 

So, none of our schools have even an average spread of low, middle and high ability students – never mind a below average spread. This confirms that the parents of these disadvantaged students may be a very aspirational subset of such parents, nationally.

There may be a boost from EAL students who are also disadvantaged. The average for this group of schools is 17% EAL, and only 6 of the schools have 10% or fewer EAL students.

The average SEN cohort is also low, at only 13%, which also suggests an academically advantaged cohort. However, there are 6 schools where SEN is greater than 20% of the cohort

These findings so far all seem to confirm my original hypothesis, or, if you prefer, prejudices.

School culture v excellent teaching and curriculum

Disadvantaged students make most progress in English, with a Progress 8 of 0.59, compared to 0.42 in maths, and 0.47 in EBacc subjects. The open bucket is where disadvantaged students really gain, averaging 0.85, as predicted.

My contention that it is not the curriculum and great teaching as a whole that is producing these results is partly borne out by the number of schools with a greater than 0.5 gap between their best and worst performing subject groups. This happens in a significant 26 out of the 31 schools, and 8 of these have a gap of at least a grade difference – between 1 and 3 grades.

However, I haven’t factored in the likely difference in difficulty of each subject – it may be that national differences in Progress 8 for English, maths, Ebacc and Open might suggest that we would expect a gap of 0.5.

What I got wrong

The average number of students in the disadvantaged cohort is 47, which does give us some hope that whatever these schools are doing is real, rather than a statistical blip on a wide confidence interval.

Pupil premium spend

There is one apparently exciting piece of data which suggests that, actually, these schools are closing the gap, and this is seen in the different performance of low, middle and high prior attaining students. Their Progress 8 is 0.82, 0.76, and 0.61 respectively. This is probably the opposite of what I expected – annoyingly, I didn’t make a prediction about this.

Although it is possible that some of this extra gain in lower ability students is accounted for by them also being EAL students, the opposite is also possible. It may be that the spending of pupil premium funding has, indeed, had an impact on lower prior attaining students who are also disadvantaged. So, reasons to be excited.

However, set against this, is the disappointing fact, remember, that only 8% of students are low prior attainers in this cohort. Consequently, when we look at the overall progress of disadvantaged students it is overwhelmingly the middle and higher prior attainers who contribute to the whole school figures. It may still be true that the greater progress of middle attaining disadvantaged students also reflects pupil premium spend – because we would expect the higher prior attainers to make even more progress, all other things being equal.

How many qualifications should diadvantaged students take?

Another trend is that disadvantaged students tend to be entered for the minimum number of qualifications, averaging 8.3, thereby ensuring maximum teaching and learning time on qualifying subjects. This may be particular to the disadvantaged cohort, or to schools limiting the number of options for the whole of Year 11. In only three of these schools do disadvantaged students average 9 entries or more. So, we have our first practical solution – make sure that your disadvantaged students take 8 subjects, and only rarely take 9 (for example, if they are high prior attainers).