Lee Elliot Major argues that there is no simple solution to education’s worst performers

You can find them in coastal towns and inner city estates. On street corners in Portsmouth, Bermondsey and Huddersfield. In any given school year in England there are over 25,000 of the free school meals variety. They are a British phenomenon. And I once was one of them.

Yes, I am talking about that much maligned species: white working class boys.  Once again they are vexing the greatest minds in education. Barely a quarter of British boys on free school meals manage to get the basic benchmark expected of our teenagers:  5 GCSEs at grades A*-C including English and maths. I don’t need to spell out what this means for their life prospects. This week MPs began their inquiry into the education system’s worst performers.

Many explanations will be offered from the experts. An anti-school culture (from our chief inspector);  low expectations from growing up with jobless parents and grandparents; loss of identity; plain old poverty; poor parenting; peer pressure; teenage angst; an ill-suited school curriculum (from academics); lack of school discipline; lack of role models; low expectations in the classroom (the chief inspector again); a fear among teachers of being tarred with racism (from yesterday’s hearings).  The list goes on.  The truth however is that we don’t really know.

It is easy to see why this indigenous male species has held such a fascination for so long: take your pick from the incendiary issues immediately sprung – class, immigration and genetics for starters. This TES story following the Chief Inspector’s concerns could have been written this week. Yet it dates from 1996. The depressing fact is that for all the attention, the school results in comparison to other pupils have if anything got worse in recent years.

So what do we know? They do less well at school than their richer peers. They do less well than all other major ethnic groups who are equally poor. And they do less well than girls who are also poor and white. They progress less well through school. And year on year they are losing ground on all other pupils. For a good summary of the research see Conor Ryan’s blog in the wake of the (good) suggestion by universities minister, David Willetts, last year that poor white boys should be treated as a distinct ethnic group deserving special attention.

We also know that the way children learn is universal. We found this when reviewing education research for our toolkit – a popular guide on what works in schools. There are no silver bullets for particular types of children. Programmes that work for poorer kids, work for kids as a whole. The key is recognise groups of pupils who are underachieving and to target what works on the most in need.

So what would I advise a school to do? Well given that we are working in the dark, I would advocate an evidence based approach. That means first scrutinising school data to diagnose what the specific challenges are, and then trialling approaches which have had some evidence in the past of working elsewhere.

I would look at the approaches being trialled by the Education Endowment Foundation covering three broad areas – learning outside school, improving teaching, and specific pupil interventions. Some of the more radical EEF projects include texting parents to improve learning in the home, to Japanese lesson study for teachers, to financial incentives for pupils. Other interventions being trialled include enabling parents to understand learning approaches, improving feedback from teachers in the classroom, and changing the mind sets of pupils as well as more conventional catch-up tutoring in numeracy and literacy.  Some of these trials are only just started. But the potential tools are already available. I suspect it will need a powerful combination of these to help crack one of education’s most enduring problems.

Comments

Dylan Wiliam, Institute of Education, University of London | 20 January 2014

What is not clear, either from the evidence presented here, or from Conor Ryan’s blog, is whether the achievement of white working class boys is lower than we would expect from the fact that they are white, they are working class, and that they are boys. Work by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in the US suggests that there are huge differences in the language experiences of children brought up socioeconomically disadvantaged households and those brought up in more advantaged households. One particularly stark statistic given by Hart and Risley is that by the age of 3, students in advantaged households will have had spoken to them, by adults, 25 million more words than those in the most disadvantaged households (35 million versus 10 million). Given that language competence is essential in accessing the secondary school curriculum, it is not surprising that many studies show the gap widening in secondary school. Since substantial increases in our spending on education are unlikely for the foreseeable future, the question is whether we are prepared to re-allocate resources to tackle the problem. There are several practical ways in which we could do this.

The first is to flip the inverted pyramid of our education spending. Currently, the older the student is, the more money we spend on her or his education. We should flip this to spend more money on the education of the youngest children, reduce class sizes to 15 in key stage 1, and fund Reading Recovery for every child at risk of failing to reach, by the age of 11, a standard of literacy that we currently associate with a high level 4. The second is to take resources away from the students who find learning in our school systems relatively easy, and divert them to those who find learning much more difficult. The most important resource that we have in the system is good teachers, and work by Simon Burgess and his colleagues at the University of Bristol shows that the very best teachers advantage all students, but benefit the lowest achievers most. In the classrooms of the best teachers, achievement gaps actually get smaller, so we need to find ways of getting the best teachers to the lowest achieving students. Schemes like “Teach First” are a good first step in this direction, but it is important to note that most low achieving students are not in low achieving schools. We need to create incentives for the best teachers to work with the lowest achieving students. Many of our best teachers already do this, out of a moral imperative to make a difference, but our educational system does not create incentives for people to do this. We can do this in many ways, including with pay, with working conditions, or by providing formal forms of social recognition, and no doubt others can think of other ways. But as long as teacher quality is the most important variable in the system, any approach to addressing the achievement of white working class boys that does not address getting them more of the best teaching available is, to my mind, little more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Children differ in their talents, their aptitudes, and their interests. And some of these differences are innate, even genetic. That’s fine. But when certain groups of students (boys, working class children, white children) do less well than other groups, then a fair society should take notice. John Rawls, the American philosopher has proposed “the veil of ignorance” as a way of thinking about fairness in society. If you didn’t know whether you were going to be born white or not, male or female, into a working-class household or an affluent one, is ours the kind of society you would choose? I suggest it is not. I think we would want a society where educational outcomes for boys and girls, rich and poor, white and non-white students, were at least approximately in line, and we would accept that the job of government is to allocate resources to achieve this.

Richard Day, York St John University | 21 January 2014

We must, of course, agree with Dylan Wiliam here; does he ever say anything that doesn’t make complete sense? However, without wishing to sound defeatist (we’ll leave that to the classroom cynics, of whom there are a few…) the changes advocated here, such as inverting the pyramid of funding and group sizes, although achievable, are unlikely without political will and a revolution in attitude from policy makers. I remember hearing similar arguments from the likes of John Abbott more than fifteen years ago. These changes are impossible to imagine in the current climate, if ever. And even if they occurred the effects would take a generation to come to fruition. And in the meantime another large proportion of our greatest asset will potentially be lost; their children taking their place in the schoolyard, even more difficult to reach. I agree that our focus must be on teacher quality first and foremost. While the jury is still very much out on Teach First, and will remain out for much longer still on School Direct, where it does succeed is in evidencing the need for academic rigour and intellect in the classrooms – any classrooms. I would advocate a more (not less) rigorous study of pedagogy within a University setting, whether as part of a longer PG course, or as an UG degree in its own right. Movement away from University based study, in many instances, leads merely to elongated exposure to mediocre teaching, and the pedagogical input from Lead schools is in many cases poor. Many will argue. Arguments concerning redistributing resources from the more successful to the less so will I fear never get beyond politicians’ fear of the lower middle classes who would shake their fists at the ballot box. And perhaps rightly so. What is clear is that until society’s esteem and respect for the profession increases, and politicians’ need only to be seen to do something, quickly, changes, those who need help and action the most will become even more of an underclass.