Figure 1: Absenteeism by level of deprivation, England, 2004
The Guardian today reports that Britain’s top 50 state-funded comprehensive schools and academies have become more unequal over recent years, and are not reflective of the social composition of their surrounding areas, or of the remainder of the schools in England. Those of us from more equal societies might think this is not a big deal but the research is quite stark in showing very large differences between the schools and their surrounding communities. Of course, inequality in educational outcomes in the UK is stark and scary compared to other OECD nations, and to help digest this I’ve provided two figures. Figure 1 above shows rates of authorized (i.e. with parental request) and total absenteeism (i.e. including truancy) for small areas in the UK, by the level of poverty of the area; the further left you go, the poorer the community becomes. Figure 2 below shows GCSE achievement on the same scale. In this case, “deprivation” is measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which I think is the scale for measuring poverty that is favoured by the UK Office of National Statistics.
Figure 2: GCSE Scores by level of deprivation, England, 2004
School outcomes in the UK are obviously heavily determined by wealth. The Guardian report suggests that amongst state-funded schools this effect is most obvious in the elite schools, the comprehensives and academies. This, it suggests, is due to increasing income inequality in the UK, and because of the power of house prices. Basically, middle class families in the UK are able to buy houses in the catchment areas of the best schools, ensuring their children can access those schools. This in turn has the effect of pushing up property prices in those areas, forcing out poorer people and preserving the schools for the wealthier incomers. It appears that some of these schools have a policy of guaranteeing access not just on the basis of catchment area but on distance from the school, which guarantees that people with better purchasing power can push out poorer people.
The statistics about differences between school socioeconomics and that of the surrounding communities are pretty stark. They report that
uptake of free school meals – which is most often linked to parents receiving low-income benefits – was lower than half the national average: 7.6% in the 500 leading schools compared with 16.5% in almost 3,000 state secondary schools in England.
Just putting aside the fact that this suggests 16.5% of British families are too poor to provide their children with lunch, we can see that the communities served by these schools are, on average, wealthier than the rest of the country. They are also wealthier than the communities they are embedded in. Measured in terms of whether the schools enrol equal or higher numbers of students on free school meals as are present in the local community, the report found
only 25 also exceeded their local average, and they were well outnumbered by the 106 schools that had fewer than 3% of their pupils eligible.
Most of these elite state-funded schools were somehow managing to recruit on income, even though they are ostensibly open for all. This isn’t inevitable, and some schools have shown that it is possible both to recruit above-average numbers of poorer children and to have good academic results. For example, Chesterton community sports college in Staffordshire:
Chesterton college in Newcastle-under-Lyme has 22% of its pupils on free school meals, compared with its local authority average of just 9.8%. In 2012, 72% of its pupils achieved five good grades at GCSE, well above the national and Staffordshire local authority average of 59%.
This shows that in a good school, poverty is neither a barrier to access nor to success. So what’s going on? This Guardian article is citing a report by the Sutton Trust, which recommends some interesting solutions to the problem, including the use of lotteries or banding (basically, stratified random sampling) to ensure equal access (or, at least, better access). These are interesting ideas for short term solutions, but they don’t address the basic problem: massive inequality in British society somehow ensures that even with free-to-access services (like health and education), those with the assets manage to seize the advantage. The report makes this clear through one simple stark claim: some proportion of this elitism in state-funded schools is only possible because some parents are willing and able to move houses to be in the catchment area (and to push others out of that catchment area). People are required and willing to move homes just to get these superior education services. Should a good high school education be worth that much? Why are people moving homes to secure education outcomes? And should they have to?
I think this problem is driven by two factors: 1) investment in the majority of British state-funded education is so poor that people are willing to move homes to ensure their kids don’t have to go to some schools; and 2) the middle class in Britain now see their situation as so precarious that they are willing to make major asset purchase decisions (home purchase) simply to guarantee their children continued membership of the class they grew up in. It seems to me that neither of these things should be necessary, and that there are alternative ways to manage society that would prevent these two situations – in my opinion, in a way that benefits everyone.
Increase investment in the worst schools
Looking at the two charts above, and considering the success reported by some of these elite academies, it’s pretty obvious that there must be some terrible schools in the UK, and some schools in serious need of extra investment. This won’t work by itself, since a lot of these areas need major cultural and economic change of their own, but better schools, and better teachers in those schools, supported in their work and properly able to deal with challenging students, will make a difference to the outcomes at those schools. It won’t completely change the phenomenon of rich and middle class parents fleeing to the state-funded comprehensives, but it will reduce the incentive as parents realize that attending a completely ordinary local school won’t kill their child’s future. I’m willing to bet as well that part of the reason poor schools in poor areas do so badly is a lack of educational diversity – no high achieving children, no historic record of achievement to inspire subsequent generations of students, and no reward for teachers to encourage them. If all these teachers have to look forward to is another year full of future criminals and children whose parents make no effort, then they will soon give up. And parents with any desire for their children to achieve will see that and move on. I’m also suspicious that the worst schools in Britain aren’t just educationally tatty: their facilities are, I’m willing to bet, also terrible, and the entire community lack pride in them. That can be fixed.
Increase attention on negative outcomes
Figure 1 shows rates of absenteeism in the poorest schools, but unauthorized absenteeism is something that police and social services can intervene in. Why don’t they? Because they’re dealing with other pressing problems. I think a lot of people in politics in the UK don’t realize just how pressing those problems are, or how much they degrade poor communities and depress the people living in them. Better attention on those problems, and greater efforts to ensure that the community in which children live is supportive of the learning needs of children, will in time lead to reductions in inequalities in behavior related to childhood delinquency – less absenteeism, less casual violence, less malicious fires, less vandalism. But there is no easy way to achieve this except through more funding: more funding for social services, police, teachers, council beautification programs, and activities for children. I don’t think any political party in the UK sees these things as essential state services anymore, and instead of funding these services they’re squeezing them, at the same time as they squeeze the general education budget and the welfare budget. While that happens, sensible people will take their children out of poor areas, making those areas more intense areas of community dislocation, reducing the likelihood that the existing social services will be successful in fighting the problems, and creating a vicious circle of social exclusion. I don’t see this vicious circle being stopped without concerted community effort.
Reduce the social mobility hard scrabble
Why is an education in Britain so crucial that parents will buy a new house in a new area just to ensure it? I think it’s because the middle class in the UK and US has become precarious, and a lot of people in that class are aware that their children risk falling out of it. Securing a position in that class is becoming a desperate struggle, with increasing numbers of losers who are falling out the bottom end of the class and into the increasing pool of poor and socially excluded. This is Ed Milliband’s “squeezed middle,” the middle class who in America and the UK have increasingly turned to debt and the housing “ladder” ponzi scheme to stay ahead of the Joneses. This race has to end, and there is a very simple way to end it: shift from a society focused on social mobility to one focused on social sustainability. I’ve written about this on my blog before: social mobility is a false promise of wealth and advancement, and a better alternative is to find ways to ensure that all jobs are socially sustainable. That is, find ways to ensure that even people at the “bottom” of the ladder can raise a family and live a halfway decent life, rather than having to scrabble up. In such a society education is still important, but because there is less urgency to achieve a ticket to success – because all careers are sufficient to support a happy life – education is not commoditized. Such societies exist, in Northern Europe and Japan, and to a certain extent Australia and Canada; and in these societies, people do not have to fight their neighbours to push them out of a precious school place. And if they do, the people pushed out will still grow up to a functioning life. The UK needs to move away from its competitive, inequalitarian social model towards these models.
Engage corporate power
A society built on social sustainability can only be built in two ways[3]: through a powerful system of taxes and transfers, or through a system in which corporations agree to some kind of social contract. Of course, in reality most such societies see a little of both, but I think a lot of thinkers in the anglosphere see social sustainability as only possible through the former, and I think they see it this way because they think corporations will not give up their wealth for a greater good, but need to be coerced into it. This is, I think, fundamentally defeatist. An alternative to a punitive system of taxes and transfers is a Japanese style system of shared corporate responsibility, in which companies pay their lowest staff a living wage, and don’t pay their highest staff stellar wages. Just because corporations won’t do these things of their own volition doesn’t mean they have to be forced to at gunpoint, but I think the natural assumption in the UK is that no one will give up anything without being forced to. That needs to change. In this respect I think Britain could learn a huge amount from Japan, which has a very strong social contract based around individual and corporate responsibility – something which I think a lot of British people don’t believe is possible.
I think Britain’s inequality is heading into a very bad place, and it’s not going to be an option to ignore it for much longer. It’s cruel, counter-productive and embarrassing. The huge inequalities developing in education can’t be solved just by throwing money at the poorest schools, though this is an essential minimum: changes need to be made in the way that the government tackles social disunity in poor areas, and also in the way that British society views “upward mobility,” competition and social sustainability. But with proper attention on improving schools in the short term, and a shift in social and economic priorities in the long term, Britain can reverse its inexorable slide into a failed state. Can they do it? I’m not hopeful, but I think it can be done.
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fn3: that I can see. I think a third option is colonialism and theft of other nations resources, but let’s put that side for now.
Compromise and Conceit 
June 4, 2013 at 11:07 am
To start, I have to say that your overall argument isn’t too disagreeable, so rather than tear at the whole thing, I’ll pick at elements of it which I’d suggest lead to issues actually trying to solve it.
Firstly, I agree with your comments on cultural issues being the real problem and that those cannot be easily addressed. In light of that I can understand your focus on the changes you do suggest.
On the detail of the proposals you outline:
”Increase investment in the worst schools”
Your data shows a link between material deprivation of attendees’ families and poor educational outcomes. But your investment suggestion assumes a link between school investment and educational outcomes.
This should be easy to test for. Gordon Brown repeatedly boasted about school spending under the Labour government and I have some memory that the increase was significant and sustained in material terms. This should be reflected by a variety of factors, including test results, international rankings and feedback on university entrants.
”This won’t work by itself, since a lot of these areas need major cultural and economic change of their own, but better schools, and better teachers in those schools, supported in their work and properly able to deal with challenging students, will make a difference to the outcomes at those schools.”
I agree this is a problem, but I’m not sure you’ve considered the relevance of money towards solving the problem. The evidence we have suggests that increased funding by itself is correlated to higher teacher salaries and more/better school halls. We don’t have strong evidence suggesting that putting cash in in the absence of a broader framework results in significant changes to educational outcomes. It’s still the same teachers, teaching in the same way and avoiding the sinkhole schools cause those places are a great way of getting threatened with a knife.
Targeted money could address this, by saying “Salaries are only going up in the shit schools”, but surely we can agree that unions are going to actively work against that? And without the power to sack the crap teachers all that happens is crap teachers in crap schools get paid more and happier because there is no easy way to force them out.
”I’m willing to bet as well that part of the reason poor schools in poor areas do so badly is a lack of educational diversity – no high achieving children, no historic record of achievement to inspire subsequent generations of students, and no reward for teachers to encourage them.”
There is another central thesis driven through your post that you haven’t examined the assumptions fully. Specifically, you say that middle and upper class children should attend schools with a mixed populace as it increases the average results in that school. Then you assume that this is something that is fair to require of those kids.
The flaw in this is it’s a social engineers approach to something that is an individual choice. Boiled down for a parent it becomes “Your kid should have worse educational outcomes so that several other children can have better ones.” This is the antithesis of anything you’ll get any parent to sign up for. They’re always going to choose “Get my kid to hang out with other high achieving kids and do the best they can”.
Interestingly, in many other areas of life this approach that the average is all that matters is actively ignored. Sport is an obvious example that promotes elitism and is celebrated for it. But to give a less obvious one I don’t hear you calling for Guardian readers to join the EDL and share their views there. Sure, some Guardian readers would be beaten to a pulp but a number of EDL members would be exposed to enlightened views and become less racist. They probably wouldn’t become “not racist at all”, but at maybe they’d be less inclined to violent marches and surely that’s worth a little bit of negative outcomes for some of the upper class people who read the Guardian, right?
”Increase attention on negative outcomes”
I’m more inclined to agree with you in this section [1], but I’d raise the point that your desire to highlight the problems and solutions risks highlighting the problems and then making them worse due to the other factors you’ve already identified.
[1] Or at least less inclined to disagree, which is near enough.
June 5, 2013 at 9:07 pm
“The flaw in this is it’s a social engineers approach to something that is an individual choice. Boiled down for a parent it becomes “Your kid should have worse educational outcomes so that several other children can have better ones.””
But there are emergent outcomes. If the middle and upper classes have no idea of how the lower classes see things, they are unlikely to make the best choices either in their lives (interacting with those people) or in their politics. Something abundantly evident. Higher class kids GAIN from mixing with the proles.
And there are ways to spread the good teachers around – one used to be that teaching at the best locations was earned by teaching for some years at the worst – so enterprising young teachers put their hands up for bad schools. Plus there was professional cachet in being part of a team that fixed a problem.
But the English class system has been embedded in Englsih life for a couple of centuries. It’s not going to go away any time soon.
June 5, 2013 at 9:59 pm
I think Peter’s right, that there are other long-term outcomes that emerge from having good mixing in schools. However, I think you’re misinterpreting my suggestion here. I’m not saying that because a lack of educational diversity hinders poor children we should therefore require rich kids be forced to stay at those schools; I’m suggesting that by making these schools more attractive than they currently are, we will encourage wealthier parents not to move. i.e. give them reasons to make a different choice. This probably will start slowly, with parents on a knife edge deciding to stay because “it’s not so bad after all,” or parents who initially try the school deciding it’s not so bad they want to move house at great cost and effort; slowly this effect trickles up the chain. I’m not suggesting any form of restrictions[1], but proactive methods to improve diversity.
Peter T makes the point that the class system won’t go away, but historically one of the most powerful forces weakening the class system has been compulsory, publicly-funded education. The fact that the UK is now experiencing high inequality within its state schools is something that, fatalism aside, should be fought. The fact that this arose under Labour’s watch is to me an absolutely reprehensible phenomenon. Which brings me to …
I think you’re right, and I think marks have increased across the board. However, from the conservative commentariat there have been repeated complaints of grade inflation, and I have no idea whether inequality has reduced. The charts I presented show inequality based on 2004 data (I think) but they don’t indicate whether the inequality has changed over time. This Sutton Trust report suggests that inequality has increased in state schools, which suggests that the Brown funding reforms weren’t enough. But Brown also presided over the housing market boom that made it possible for some people with assets to seize the best school places – something that I think wasn’t happening 20 years ago. I think the former wouldn’t have happened without the latter. But it is worth noting that even if inequality has increased, if school achievement at the bottom improved this is a good thing (though not the best possible thing).
I’m not convinced that the problem is bad teachers, and I have a suspicion that in the modern education system even bad teachers are actually better than good teachers were 30 years ago. I think it’s definitely the case that “putting cash in in the absence of a broader framework” isn’t a particularly good idea, except where it can be shown that the cash is really desperately needed … but I’m willing to bet you that the cash is really, really desperately needed at the bottom. Anyone who has lived in England has seen the kind of urban decay going on in poor areas, and the huge inequality in public facilities between the wealthiest parts of London and the most degenerate parts. I’m wiling to bet a groat that this is true of schools too, and that good teachers in those schools are severely hampered by lack of facilities and poor quality facilities. As a simple example: when I went to school in rural Australia in 1989, I had to choose between French and Physics. That’s an investment issue right there, and if my parents had had a cent to rub together I’m sure they would have loved to have moved me to a school where I could study French and Physics. The kinds of schools where you can’t choose key subjects are also the kinds of schools with poor facilities, poor teacher-student ratios, etc. [My school also had the infamous “transportables” without aircon, a sure sign that it is underfunded, and also lacked a properly qualified Maths 1 teacher]. If it’s like that in the socialist paradise of 1980s Australia, you can imagine what some of the schools are like in the poorest parts of the UK.
I have a strong suspicion that achieving good educational outcomes is not rocket science – many countries manage to do it without suffering huge inequalities, and no doubt regardless of the fact that many of the teachers doing it are terrible. So I think it can be achieved in the UK, and I’m willing to bet that a significant proportion of the poor outcomes are due to low investment in the worst areas. So, targeted investment combined with broader social goals can turn this around.
Incidentally, I have changed the title of this post because despite taking great care to say “state-funded” all through the text, I managed to slip up and write “public” in the title. We all know that “public school” in the UK actually means private, not state-funded, so I’ve edited the title.
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fn1: actually I was wondering if an alternative to teh Sutton Trust’s recommended banded selection process would be to remove all zoning restrictions on the best schools and allow selection only on merit. Then moving closer won’t help a kid get into the school.
June 6, 2013 at 8:17 pm
”But there are emergent outcomes. If the middle and upper classes have no idea of how the lower classes see things, they are unlikely to make the best choices either in their lives (interacting with those people) or in their politics. Something abundantly evident. Higher class kids GAIN from mixing with the proles.”
Even assuming that these are good things, you haven’t provided any evidence that the trade off is worth it.
Seriously, you just suggested that ”mak[ing] the best choices … in their politics” is worth trading off better educational outcomes (and the material and social rewards we all know are associated with them). So voting the way you want them to vote is worth getting less money? And parents should want it for their kids?
That’s pretty much the antithesis of every parents dream. Even left wing parents prefer to embed left wing values in their kids via other means. Look at Diane Abbott.
June 6, 2013 at 8:26 pm
Think of society as a very big social machine, which can, among other things, make lots of wealth. Politics is largely about how to operate the machine. if the various players have little real idea of what makes the other players tick, or can’t understand them, then the machine starts to run rough, and eventually breaks down. Our total wealth production is not arrived at by summing our individual contributions, but by our cooperative efforts.
Want a long list of societies where growing class or other cleavages lead (often quite quickly) to bad or disastrous outcomes? Easy to provide.
June 6, 2013 at 8:43 pm
”I’m not saying that because a lack of educational diversity hinders poor children we should therefore require rich kids be forced to stay at those schools”
OK. Sorry. Then that objection wouldn’t apply to your post.
”I think you’re right, and I think marks have increased across the board. However, from the conservative commentariat there have been repeated complaints of grade inflation…”
Yeah, that’s why I’d suggest a true test would require multiple measures, including the university entrant feedback. There’s probably some element of “Things were better in the old days” applying, but without better data than just general marks I think we struggle to actually comment on relative education across the years. It’s all too subjective to form a robust data set without having some comparison across the years to ensure that the test results are equivalent. [1]
”except where it can be shown that the cash is really desperately needed”
Yeah. I can understand and agree that some schools need additional funding. That’s part of what made the Australian education funding from the GFC a disappointment. Taking the same funds and just rebuilding the crappiest X% of schools would have arguable be better spending, better outcomes and also have injected the funds into the economy [2].
” Anyone who has lived in England has seen the kind of urban decay going on in poor areas, and the huge inequality in public facilities between the wealthiest parts of London and the most degenerate parts.”
OK. I am mostly disagreeing based on Australian circumstances. But the different approaches that apply for Australia are driven by different circumstances between the countries.
”when I went to school in rural Australia in 1989, I had to choose between French and Physics. That’s an investment issue right there, and if my parents had had a cent to rub together I’m sure they would have loved to have moved me to a school where I could study French and Physics.”
What? Why is this a (capital) funding issue? If the school had facilities for both, then it sounds like a time constraint issue more than anything and maybe a recurrent spending issue (though that’d require more information to support the statement).
”I was wondering if an alternative to teh Sutton Trust’s recommended banded selection process would be to remove all zoning restrictions on the best schools and allow selection only on merit.”
But then they wouldn’t be able to field good rugby teams!
Nah, seriously, it’d an alternative. 🙂
[1] A cryogenically frozen sample of school children from 1970 who are thawed and given a 2010 test should be the gold standard for this.
[2] And targeting the most run down schools would probably have put the funding into the neediest communities.
June 7, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Actually, I’ve met people, I think, who see this as an important reason why they chose state vs. private schools. Again though, I don’t think Peter T is arguing that such decisions should be forced on parents – just that this element of school diversity is important, and worth encouraging. Encouragement != forcing…
I am generally in favour of targeted funding over untargeted funding, so I think your suggestion for how the BER program could have worked is a good one. How important it is in the Australian context, I have no clue…
You’re right, my french/physics problem wasn’t a capital issue, I guess. But it arose from some kind of constraint, on rooms or class sizes or timetabling options. Replacing the “transportables” with proper classrooms and enlarging the teaching capacity would probably have solved that problem … I don’t think it could have been about class sizes (my physics class was pretty small). Who knows? But there were only 3 schools in the town – maybe they should have worked out a way to share teachers better, which would no doubt have required more resources (buses, shared facilities, etc). Ideally they probably should have knocked down both public schools and built one good modern state school in the middle of town, with good school buses, and then shared its facilities with the (small) private school. Maybe then I could have learnt latin!
(ugh!)
Anyway, to improve diversity in state schools, prevent elitism in the top schools, and enable state schools to achieve their goal of guaranteeing a high quality education for all, I think it’s not a good idea to have a system where ability to buy an expensive house determines your educational options. And that’s going to arise through a mixture of investment, widening the appeal of the crappest schools, giving parents more options, and reducing inequality outside of schools. Chances of any (let alone all!) of those things happening in Britain …?