Society
Poorer children should do better
Published 06 September 2007
Schools will have to change more radically
Have you noticed how the working class has almost disappeared from political and media discourse? Even "the underclass" and the "socially excluded" have gone. Instead, everyone talks of welfare dependants, yobs and feral kids - a scrounging, amoral section of the population that is beyond the law and hopelessly mired in drugs, crime, family breakdown, bad parenting, guns and knives. The underlying message is that we are dealing with people beyond help, redemption, or even sympathy. They are outside society and, therefore, outside the class system. The best we can do is contain them. The poverty and inequality agenda can be conveniently set aside.
Yet more than ten million Britons still work in manual jobs. And as a report published this month reminds us (Reducing Inequalities by Leon Feinstein et al, from the National Children's Bureau), many of their children still suffer inferior opportunities compared to their peers from professional families. The hopelessness of the gun-carrying youths on Liverpool estates represents the extreme end of a continuum that includes the sons and daughters of bus drivers, shop assistants and plumbers. The children of skilled manual workers may not do as badly at school as the children of "welfare dependants" or unskilled workers, but they still underachieve, and there are many more of them.
The government has two big answers: school improvement and early intervention. Both have a role, but perhaps not as big as the priority given to them suggests. As another report published this month points out (Experiences of Poverty and Educational Disadvantage by Donald Hirsch for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), only 14 per cent of the variation in children's performance can be accounted for by school quality. As Feinstein shows, the rest is not necessarily set in stone by early home environment.
Politicians now frequently quote research showing that, by 22 months, it is too late for many children because their development has already fallen far behind that of their peers in middle-class homes. This finding, shocking as it is, misses the bigger picture. As Feinstein reports, even those children from the lowest socio-economic groups who are doing well at 22 months then tend to fall back relative to other children. The process continues throughout childhood, and it operates both ways: the initially low-achieving middle-class children improve their position, while the position of the high-achieving working-class children declines.
Take the children whose scores in reading and maths tests come in the top quarter at age seven. Of those from unskilled working-class homes, as many as three in four will fall from those heights by 11. Crucially, of those from skilled non-manual and skilled manual homes (who account for 45 per cent of the child population), more than half will fall out of the top quarter by age 11. By contrast, if a child from a professional home is in the top quarter at seven years, he or she is highly likely still to be there four years later.
In other words, during their school years, children's performance, far from being equalised, is aligned more closely with their social origins. This might seem a depressing conclusion, but Feinstein argues it needn't be. As he puts it, children's educational development is "malleable", and if everyone were more aware of that, we might make more progress in equalising opportunities.
But the answers, Hirsch suggests, probably don't lie entirely, or even mainly, in educational quality as conventionally measured. The nub of the problem for the disadvantaged, he argues, lies not only within classrooms but "in what happens across children's lives". Drawing on a large body of Rowntree research, he suggests that many deprived children "feel powerless as learners" and experience school as a coercive and controlling institution. It's not that they don't think education matters. Rather, they lack faith in their ability to cope with it. They get little parental help with homework, lack good, quiet study conditions, and rarely come to see learning as a partnership with adults.
If we are to give less advantaged children a chance, Hirsch argues, we need to rethink educational relationships. He favours, for example, extended school days but says these shouldn't be more of the same classroom-based, compulsory learning. So we are not just talking about the "high expectations" and "curriculum entitlements" which, politicians insist, are key to improving performance.
Working-class children fall behind because their homes - however loving and well-intentioned - don't and often can't provide the same support for formal learning as more affluent homes. Given there's a limit to how much we can change the homes, we may have to consider changing schools, and the way they treat children and parents, more radically than we have done so far.
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