Persistently disadvantaged pupils are too often invisible – the government must act
4 min read
As a teacher, I saw first-hand how education can lift children out of incredibly difficult circumstances.
It is why I left the classroom for Parliament: to fight for an education that gives every child the chance to fulfill their potential and for a country that doesn’t write a single child off. However, reading the Education Policy Institute’s new research for Teach First, the organisation I trained with to become a teacher, I now fear we risk writing off more children without even noticing.
Alan Milburn recently warned of a “national crisis of opportunity”, with Britain carrying one of Europe’s highest rates of young people not in education, employment or training. New research from Teach First shows where that crisis bites hardest. One in four pupils in England who have spent most of their school lives on free school meals falls out of education or training by age 17, more than twice the rate of their better-off classmates, where the figure is closer to one in eleven.
Crucially, poverty does not manifest in the same way everywhere
Beneath this stark national picture lies a cruel postcode lottery. There is a hyper-local element to disadvantage that means the circumstances of persistently disadvantaged children vary significantly across regional and local divides. The opportunities facing young people are shaped by economic disadvantages, and then they are shaped again by geography.
I saw the human cost of this regional disadvantage while teaching in Leeds. Almost one in three of our most disadvantaged young people fall out of formal education or training before Year 12. Crucially, poverty does not manifest in the same way everywhere. An identical proportion of children in Leeds and Wandsworth are persistently disadvantaged (13.5 per cent), yet the young people in my home city are twice as likely to drop out after age 16 (32 per cent compared to 16.2 per cent). This double inequality of economics and geography means a national response designed for the ‘average’ child will fail to sufficiently address the challenge.
Part of the reason the crisis persists is that these children are too often invisible in our politics and data. We have no standard definition of persistent disadvantage, no annual count of these pupils, and no regional breakdown of where they are. You cannot close a gap you refuse to measure.
The remedies the report sets out are practical and within the government’s gift. The Department for Education should adopt a clear definition of persistent disadvantage and track this group through to their post-16 destinations. Ministers should consider a top-up to the pupil premium, the funding targeted at those most in need, for those children who are persistently disadvantaged. This could be funded by savings from falling pupil numbers. We should also consider incentives to keep good teachers and headteachers in the schools that need them most in every part of the country, building on the work organisations like Teach First have been doing for years.
Despite the challenges, the research also offers hope. It found 88 schools where persistently disadvantaged pupils outperform their wealthier classmates – proof that not only are poor outcomes not set in stone but the government, working with school leaders, teachers, and families, has the power to change them. The tragedy is how unevenly that success is spread, with over half of those schools in London. Many of the solutions are already known; what is missing is the will and the funding to spread them.
As a teacher, I saw the way that education could transform the life chances of even the most disadvantaged children in our communities, and I had the privilege of helping make that possible. Now, as an MP, I want to see the government give every child counted in this research that same chance, and the first step towards giving it to them is finally agreeing to count them at all.
Mark Sewards is Labour MP for Leeds South West and Morley
