Increasing the social mix in schools is the way to close performance gaps
|
Version 0 of 1. Nick Clegg is reported to be planning to set targets for schools to narrow the performance gap between disadvantaged children and other pupils as a way of promoting social mobility. He is right to identify this as a yawning gap that urgently needs tackling but setting targets for schools will not get to the root of the problem because new research shows that in the UK it is the socio-economic background of a school's pupils that determines performance. The results from the latest of the influential surveys in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) makes this abundantly clear and is chilling reading. A special report on the UK says that in Britain "both the within and between-school impact of socio-economic background on educational attainment are well above the OECD average". In fact more of the variation between the performance of different schools is related to their socio-economic intake in the UK than in any of 33 other OECD countries except Luxembourg, though the US runs us close, the report finds. Tables accompanying the report show that in the UK more than three-quarters of variations in schools' performance is explained by differences in socio-economic background of its students. This compares with less than a quarter in Finland and well under a half in Canada – to take two countries with among the best results overall in Pisa. This indicates that achieving turnarounds in poor performance will be particularly difficult in the UK where policy-makers imply that most of the variation in performance is down to the competence of the school staff and the school's "effectiveness". The significance of these findings are therefore enormous. In disadvantaged areas a "no excuses" culture is required. This assumption underlies the panoply of accountability instruments, including performance tables, inspection and so on, which are much more onerous than in most other countries. Yet it turns out that the individual school effect is much less here in the UK than in many other, often more successful and equitable countries which make lighter demands in terms of accountability. Clegg's target-setting plan will only intensify the culture of blame, diverting attention from the social and systemic causes of inequality. If politicians were serious about their oft-stated concern for the poor – and their claim to want to match the world's best – they would do more to ensure that there is a better mix of pupils within schools, which the OECD has consistently urged. It has found that increasing the social mix within schools boosts the performance of disadvantaged students without any apparent negative effect on overall performance. Yet education policies aimed at undermining comprehensive education, blaming too much and supporting too little have gone in the opposite direction – exactly the reverse of what the international evidence suggests is needed for equity and excellence. The model aspired to by our privately educated politicians is the English fee-paying independent school and everything is aimed at mimicking its features as far as possible in our publicly funded system. This ignores the huge resources lavished on pupils in our private sector – far greater than those generally allocated to pupils abroad whether they are in state or private schools. This infatuation with our private schools and their vaunted autonomy could also be misplaced suggests another finding in the Pisa UK document. It reports that, when account has been taken of the socio-economic background of pupils, state schools in the UK outperform private schools by a considerable margin. In fact the gap here is much greater than across the OECD as a whole where state schools have only a slight performance advantage over private schools. Reducing our massive inequities will require jettisoning the notion that each school is expected to pull itself up by its own bootstraps whatever its circumstances and create proper structures for professional development, peer support and succession planning, together with strong social policies promoting equity. Can Clegg deliver on this agenda? • If you are a teacher and would like to share your knowledge and insight by contributing to the debate on issues shaping education, visit the Guardian's Teacher Network. You can also find thousands of free teaching resources and share your own |