For years schools have struggled to raise the attainment of a particular group of pupils – white children from low-income backgrounds, particularly boys. The statistics show that they do worse than all other groups except children from Gypsy Roma or Traveller heritage, in all phases of education.
It is these children I have written about in my new book, ‘Reaching the unseen children: closing stubborn attainment gaps in disadvantaged groups’. Here, I want to describe the key themes in that book: what the issues are, and – more importantly – what we can do to address them.
Left behind communities
I spent much of my early career as a teacher and then an educational psychologist working in ‘left behind’ communities with high concentrations of disadvantaged white children. Now, when I speak at conferences across the country I often find myself in those same areas: former coal fields in rural Somerset and Gloucestershire, bleak coastal towns in the north of England where shipbuilding has dwindled to nothing, big council estates in large cities where the dominant industry (like the tobacco factories in Bristol) is in decline.
Children growing up in communities like these face many challenges. Their school lives often follow a predictable pattern. In their early years they struggle particularly with communication and language. Their limited spoken language skills don’t go away, but may not be noticed as they move up the school and literacy difficulties take over as the focus of concern.
Early on, the children find themselves on the ‘bottom table’, supported by a teaching assistant. Soon they are identified as having SEND. Behaviour difficulties kick in, which worsen when they move on to secondary school, unable to access a curriculum dependent on understanding complex texts. They may truant, or be excluded, or simply sit in a bottom set waiting it out till they can leave school – with few if any qualifications.
The key issues
There are many theories about the low attainment of white children eligible for FSM, ranging from lack of cultural capital to lack of parental support, lack of aspiration in whole communities, and
the harsh effects of poverty on the developing brain. I explore all these in my book.
Poverty undoubtedly damages lives and leads to underachievement. There are many things that poor children need and often do not have in our society, whatever their ethnicity. They need shoes, a washing machine that works, a table to do homework on, the bus fare to travel beyond the estate where they live to see the wider world. Unless we address poverty directly, we will never wholly close the gap.
These issues are difficult for schools to address, however (although many, like the ones described in my book for their outstanding work with parents, try very hard). So I have chosen to focus instead on practical strategies schools can use to close the gap through everyday teaching and learning.
The word gap
There seems to be particular language problems for poorer children in our country that are not linked to low general ability, and not found to the same extent elsewhere in the world. At the age of five we have in the UK a gap of 16 months between the vocabulary of children brought up in poverty and the vocabulary of better-off children (Waldfogel and Washbrook, 2010). The gap in non-verbal cognitive skills is only half that size, and the vocabulary gap in the UK much larger than in other developed countries.
An average gap of 16 months at an average age of 60 months is a very big gap indeed. And these early language skills in Reception go on to predict attainment right through school – and beyond.
Language also predicts other difficulties that lead some white disadvantaged children to struggle in the school system – notably behaviour. At the end of children’s first year at school, lower language proficiency is associated with an increased risk of social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties, much more so for children with English as their first language than English as an Additional Language (Whiteside et al., 2016).
Boys seem to be particularly at risk of language-related low attainment. Research shows they are more likely than girls to experience language difficulties and delays. They are also more vulnerable to the wider impacts of language delays when they do occur. For boys, below-expected language in the early years is strongly linked to weaker later self-regulation skills, to the detriment of their conduct (Vallotton and Ayoub, 2011).
What can we do?
In the early years, schools can increase the number of conversation ‘hotspots’ in the environment, train staff in the types of interaction that promote language development, and increase the number of books shared with children with limited language skills
In all age groups it is important to systematically teach, apply and revisit carefully chosen, generically useful vocabulary, perhaps using models like the ’Word Aware’ approach devised by speech and language therapists Stephen Parsons and Anna Branagan, or for secondary Alex Quigley’s ‘SEEC’ model.
Learning word lists alone is unlikely to be effective, however. Children also need scaffolded opportunities for collaborative groupwork, role play and drama, debate and open-ended class discussion. Working with the fantastic organisation Voice 21 can be a good way of embedding these within a whole-school approach to oracy.
Finally, short-term, small group language intervention programmes like the NELI programme and ICAN’s all-age suite of ‘Talk Boosts’ can have a significant impact on closing the word gap.
Getting early reading right
We should never, ever underestimate how difficult it is for some children to learn to read. Year on year, around one in ten boys leave primary school with the reading skills of an average seven-year -old, unable to read the simplest secondary school texts.
The majority (though not all) of these children are disadvantaged, and are male.
The literacy gap starts early. At the age of six, the percentage of white boys eligible for free school meals failing the national phonics test is over twice that of other children. At resits when they were seven, one in five such boys still had not met the expected standard
Reading difficulties are often familial; several studies have found a high incidence in children whose parents themselves found it hard to learn to read (Snowling and Melby-Lervag, 2016). I link this with the ‘cycle of disadvantage’, in which disadvantaged children who struggle with reading go on to have children who experience the same difficulties, so that educational failure is often transmitted through the generations for one clear reason – poor early reading.
We know from research that it is possible to predict which children are at risk of later reading difficulties on the basis of two key factors: whether they had language delay or difficulties in their early years, and whether there is a family history of reading and/or spelling difficulties.
On this basis, we can include these factors in information gathered from parents when their child starts school or nursery. It is possible to do this tactfully, by asking for example, ‘Did anyone in your family struggle with reading or spelling when they were at school?’ and explaining why you are asking: ‘We’re asking this because scientists have found that reading problems can be inherited, and we try to give extra help to any child who might need it, as early as we can.’
If children are at risk, you can plan specific and intensive work on phonological awareness and spoken language.
Another essential is to check the child’s hearing. Research on eight- to ten-year olds (Carroll and Breadmore, 2017) has found that around a third of the children who had a history of repeated early ear infections had problems with reading and writing.
As soon as children are showing signs of struggling with print, it is vital to give them extra help using an evidence-based one-to-one or group intervention with a TA or (preferably) a teacher. I my book I list currently available interventions and the evidence for them.
Helping children feel less helpless
With the best of intentions, we often fall into bear traps when working with disadvantaged children:
- Over-supporting them in class, inadvertently reducing their sense of capability and independence
- Further reducing their sense of control by using only external reward systems to manage behaviour, rather than teaching them strategies to self-regulate
- Identifying them as having special educational needs, and in so doing placing them outside their teachers’ perceived sphere of responsibility and control
There is nothing that strips children of their sense of capability and agency more than leading them to believe they cannot function in classrooms without adult support. We can learn from the story told by HMI Charlie Henry, about a classroom where while the teacher was giving instructions he overheard one boy say to ‘his’ TA ‘You’d better listen to this, Miss, because you’re going to have to tell me in a minute.’
According to the latest figures, schools employ almost one TA to every two teachers. Yet the impact of TA support on attainment is clear only when they are delivering structured, time-limited interventions for which they have had good training (Sharples et al., 2019), and research (Giangreco, 2010) shows that when a TA is nearby, children were more likely to seek help and less likely to work independently.
Children can learn to manage on their own if we show them how. The teacher might, for example, set up a space in the classroom where pupils can go to find resources to scaffold their learning – a laptop with a PowerPoint of the lesson loaded up so they can review it, key vocabulary lists, sentence starters and writing frames, a digital pen that scans words and reads them aloud,. One primary teacher I met set up such an area which she called the ‘Enable Table’.
Where TAs are working with an individual or group, they can be trained to promote independence by using a ‘model and retreat’ strategy, in which they first demonstrate the task, then tell the children that they are going to work with another group and will be back later to see how they are getting on.
It goes without saying that all teachers need to make clear to TAs that their role is to stimulate and scaffold children’s independent thinking, rather than help them complete tasks. TAs may benefit from professional development to develop questioning techniques and the type of adult feedback that makes children feel powerful in their own learning – noticing and praising any successful strategies a child has used, avoiding ‘comfort words’ when children make mistakes or struggle, and instead learning to say ‘So it didn’t work that way. What might work, do you think?’, or ‘What helped you last time you got stuck?’
And finally…
Let me finish with a shocking statistic. In one not untypical northern coastal town, with little ethnic diversity, recent standardised tests show that 12% of children are essentially non-readers at age eight. In one of the town‘s secondary academies, where 70% of pupils are eligible for pupil premium funding, a third of pupils achieved a standardised score of below 69 on a baseline reading test, representing a reading age of 5– 6 years.
Something isn’t working in communities like this. Yet there is little policy attention paid to these issues. Much of the discussion about disadvantaged pupils focuses on the disengagement from learning, disaffection and truancy that researchers and teachers often see in disadvantaged white children of secondary age.
But these are consequences not causes.The real causes lie in a journey that starts with under-developed spoken language, followed by persistent literacy difficulties, and a progressive loss of the sense of agency and control.
It is this journey that we need to interrupt. The case study schools decribed in my book – both primary and secondary – show that it is not impossible. It is from them that we can learn.
Jean Gross CBE is an independent consultant and author of many best-selling books and articles about children ‘s issues. You can find out more about Reaching the Unseen Children: practical strategies for closing stubborn gaps in disadvantaged groups at www.routledge.pub/ReachingTheUnseenChildren
Jean will be speaking the our upcoming Inclusion Conference on March 23rd – Get your tickets here
@JeanGrossCBE
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