Education attainment and poverty inextricably linked
Derren Hayes
Monday, June 8, 2015
The unveiling of the government's legislative priorities offered both reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic over the prospects for children and young people over the coming parliament.
Bills to double the amount of government funded early education and improve the adoptions process offer the potential to improve the chances of vulnerable children (see analysis, p8). However, the government's plans to cut welfare support for the most disadvantaged families and force some schools deemed underperforming to become academies are more problematic.
Taking the latter first, the Education and Adoption Bill enables, among other things, academy chains to take failing maintained schools out of the state system without consulting local communities first (see analysis, p11). Children's services leaders say such a move is undemocratic and implies genuine scrutiny and debate by the parents of pupils attending such schools is an ideological obstacle to brush aside. As advocates for getting the best education for their children, there are few such passionate voices as parents, so for the government to dismiss this as an inconvenience is an own goal.
The main problem with the bill is that it takes the premise that academisation is the only route to improvement, when in fact some of the interventions it introduces could be equally useful for local authorities to tackle underperformance. That there is a need to address inconsistency in school standards was highlighted by last week's Sutton Trust report on GCSE grades among disadvantaged pupils. It found that the economic background a pupil comes from is a key determinant in exam performance - in other words, poorer pupils are far less likely to achieve top marks in GCSEs than their wealthier peers.
In a society where educational achievement increasingly dictates the access a young person gets to the best further education, training opportunities and careers, this is a cause for serious concern.
Think-tank Impetus-PEF has long warned about this, and is now calling for radical action by government to avoid education underachievers from the next generation of young people - those born in 2000 who will be taking their exams in a year's time - slipping into a post-16 life not in education, employment and training (Neet). It wants to see the creation of a five-year Neet prevention plan based around better work preparation and skills development that is delivered by a Cabinet-level minister.
Considering the government's focus on apprenticeships and vocational training, such a move should be within its wherewithal. It would also go some way to recognising the problems it could be storing up with its ill-though-out welfare reforms. If leaked reports in the national newspapers are to be believed, the government's own internal analysis estimates that 40,000 more children will fall into poverty as a result of the cut in the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000.
With poverty being a major factor in determining education success, the policy could serve to undermine many of the well-intentioned measures to improve the life chances of vulnerable children and families.