REPORT EXCELLENCE AND EOUITY Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools Contributions by Brett Wigdortz \ Jonathan Clifton \ Will Cook Rebecca Allen \ Simon Burgess \ Dylan Wiliam James Toop \ Tim Brighouse \ Christine Harrison David Price \ Alan Dyson \ Kirstin Kerr Chris Wellings \ Ann Hodgson \ Ken Spours Edited by Jonathan Clifton June 2013 © IPPR 2013 Institute for Public Policy Research EXCELLENCE AND EQUITY Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools Edited by Jonathan Clifton 2013 IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools i ABOUT THE EDITOR Jonathan Clifton is a senior research fellow at IPPR. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editor would like to thank the seven teachers who helped to review earlier drafts of the chapters, as well as Graeme Cooke, Nick Pearce and Rick Muir at IPPR for their advice and comments. This project was generously funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. ABOUT IPPR IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, is the UK’s leading progressive thinktank. We are an independent charitable organisation with more than 40 staff members, paid interns and visiting fellows. Our main office is in London, with IPPR North, IPPR’s dedicated thinktank for the North of England, operating out of offices in Newcastle and Manchester. The purpose of our work is to assist all those who want to create a society where every citizen lives a decent and fulfilled life, in reciprocal relationships with the people they care about. We believe that a society of this sort cannot be legislated for or guaranteed by the state. And it certainly won’t be achieved by markets alone. It requires people to act together and take responsibility for themselves and each other. IPPR 4th Floor 14 Buckingham Street London WC2N 6DF T: +44 (0)20 7470 6100 E: [email protected] www.ippr.org Registered charity no. 800065 This paper was first published in June 2013. © 2013 The contents and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors only. ii IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools CONTENTS Foreword: Brett Wigdortz How will we know whether we have succeeded in tackling educational disadvantage? ...................................................................1 About the authors .................................................................................4 Practitioner panel ..................................................................................5 Jonathan Clifton Introduction ..........................................................................................6 1. Jonathan Clifton and Will Cook The achievement gap in context .........................................................17 2. Rebecca Allen Fair access: Making school choice and admissions work for all ...........29 3. Simon Burgess School accountability, performance and pupil attainment ....................37 4. Jonathan Clifton Getting the most out of the pupil premium ..........................................43 5. Dylan Wiliam The importance of teaching ................................................................50 6. James Toop Reducing within-school variation and the role of middle leadership ......58 7. Tim Brighouse The importance of collaboration: Creating ‘families of schools’ ............65 8. Christine Harrison Testing times: Reforming classroom teaching through assessment ......71 9. David Price Tackling pupil disengagement: Making the curriculum more engaging ............................................................................................78 10. Alan Dyson, Kirstin Kerr and Chris Wellings Beyond the school gates: Developing children’s zones for England .........................................................................................85 11. Ann Hodgson and Ken Spours After school: Promoting opportunities for all young people in a locality ..........................................................................................94 IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools iii iv IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools FOREWORD HOW WILL WE KNOW WHETHER WE HAVE SUCCEEDED IN TACKLING EDUCATIONAL DISADVANTAGE? BRETT WIGDORTZ This book is based on an important premise: that there is an urgent moral, social and economic imperative to address educational disadvantage – one of the UK’s most destructive and pervasive problems. There have been some general improvements in education over the last decade and there are countless exceptional teachers up and down the country working tirelessly to help their pupils to succeed, but debate about how to narrow the attainment gap between wealthier and poorer children rages on. The situation across England highlights the level of educational disadvantage: nearly 50 per cent of children claiming free school meals achieve no GCSE passes above a D grade (Cassen and Kingdon 2007); the reading skills of children from disadvantaged families are, on average, more than two years behind those of pupils from wealthier backgrounds, a gap twice as wide as in some other developed countries (Jerrim 2012); and in 2011, a quarter of English universities failed to meet their targets to admit more students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds (OFFA and HEFCE 2011). These are shocking statistics when you consider that educational inequalities have an impact throughout a child’s life. Education is linked with happiness and wellbeing, mental and physical health and, ultimately, life expectancy. The more you learn, the more you earn, and you are more at risk of spending time ‘not in education, employment or training’ if you have no qualifications. Clearly, focusing at the school level is vital. However, many great colleagues have been doing that for more than a decade and, while there have been dramatic improvements in many schools benefiting many pupils, it is still not enough. I fundamentally believe that the scale of change needed will only be achieved through the sustained collective effort of leaders in classrooms, in schools and throughout society. Each must challenge and change the status quo child by child, class by class and school by school, in order to address educational disadvantage for every single one of them. IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools Foreword: Wigdortz 1 This book sets out some ways to tackle educational disadvantage. But how will we know when we have succeeded in this mission? In order to help answer this question, Teach First has developed a set of National Impact Goals for 2022 – the result of consultation with thousands of teachers, school leaders, and other colleagues in Britain and around the world. These start with the important goal of raising school attainment, but this alone will not be enough. We must also support young people to realise their aspirations and enable them to access good jobs or continue their education. These three things combined will help us to improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged in society. Ultimately what this ambition reflects is the crucial need for a culture of high expectations for all young people. When it comes to the education of our children we, as a nation, must support and expect them all to achieve, regardless of background. The first objective should be to raise school attainment, especially among schools that take in a high proportion of children from low-income backgrounds. To this end, Teach First uses a broad measure that looks at a pupil’s best eight GCSE results, not counting equivalences. In primary school, we are looking to ensure a much higher proportion of children from low-income families achieve at least a minimum level of literacy and numeracy before moving on to secondary schools. Attainment in exams is important because it demonstrates that a pupil has acquired key skills and knowledge, and helps to unlock the door to further education and employment. But in order to ensure that every child succeeds, we think there is a need to look at solving the problem ‘in the round’. This led us to our second area of focus: ‘getting the grades’ needs to be part of a broader well-rounded education that takes into account how important it is to develop non-academic attributes. In 2012, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation observed that while there isn’t a proven poverty of aspirations among children from poorer backgrounds, there may be a lower likelihood of those young people reaching their aspirations (Carter-Wall and Whitfield 2012). This is an essential distinction. We believe that young people at schools in challenging circumstances may need to be even better equipped with the skills and characteristics necessary to see them succeed in life than their wealthier peers. They need to be leaving compulsory education with the resilience and emotional strength necessary to support them to meet their aspirations, whatever they may be. This links to Teach First’s third point of focus – we want to see pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds accessing the same high-quality opportunities following compulsory education as those from wealthier backgrounds. To monitor progress towards this we will track the percentage of young people who are not in employment, education 2 IPPR | Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England’s secondary schools or training one year after leaving school. We will also track graduation rates from