Blog by Sonia Blandford
Over the last seven years I’ve been involved in a programme that has reached nearly four million children and young people, their families and teaching professionals in a bid to support not only what they do but also change the way we think about education and its outcomes. Crucially I’ve learned from that work how important it is that we focus on core strength, building social mobility from the inside.
When the Prime Minister Teresa May addressed social mobility in 2016 Britain, her great meritocracy speech, she rightly talked about the need to think differently about what disadvantage means and the complex nature of disadvantage. But behind the desire for a so-called meritocracy ‘where talent and hard work’ matter, there needs to be more debate about how we help children realise their talents in the first place. Beyond the need for the ‘successful policies such as a renewed focus on learning the basics of reading in primary schools’ and ‘initiatives to help young people pursue a strong academic core of subjects at secondary level’ to ensure ‘every child has the opportunity to develop the core knowledge that underpins everything else’ there is a need, first, to develop core strength.
Core strength in this context is the confidence and ability to learn, develop and participate in society and it has to be understood and built in to the earliest years, and be nourished as children grow. It’s clear that children and young people experiencing disadvantage and underachievement lack confidence. They find learning challenging, they develop differently and they may ultimately have limited participation in society. Underlying factors or needs may be cognitive, physical, emotional or social, and each are manifest in a fundamental lack of progress of the child or young person when compared to their peers.
While initiatives and interventions can be bespoke, there is a danger that we focus entirely on one group when we talk about social mobility in schools. Of course, studies have rightly highlighted that there are groups which demand our attention. We know, for example, that white working class boys’ poor performance at GCSE level (only 24 per cent gain five A*– Cs) makes them the lowest or second-lowest achieving ethnic group over the past decade. We also know that low-income families start off behind other families in our communities and risk never catching up. In the latter example, this starts with early years development – problems with speech, language, play, and therefore learning. And then the gap actually increases, so by the time they get to Key Stage 2, at least one in four of those children born into low-income families has difficulty learning, particularly around literacy and numeracy. The gap increases as they go onwards to Key Stage 4.
But to make a difference to any group (age, class or ethnic group) we should – I believe – focus on everyone, and at every age. Not second-guessing the problems they may face, judging or classifying in a negligent manner, or assuming those same problems are confined to one group of children. Meaningful change in society will only occur if we invest in all children and young people, find what is great inside them, dig it out and share it with the world.
This is an exciting time to be in education, albeit a sometimes stressful one. But we need to find the will inside ourselves to drive a change based on mutuality so we enrich the lives of the children who most need help in a way that enriches the life of every child in the school, and the communities where they live. I am not naive about the challenges we face and the needs of the children coming into schools. Analysis by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found that children defined as ‘persistently disadvantaged’ (those who are entitled to free school meals for 80 per cent of their time at secondary school) are, on average, more than two years behind their peers in terms of academic achievement by the end of secondary school. The study also found that while progress has been made in narrowing the attainment gap for ‘disadvantaged’ pupils (defined as those who are entitled to Pupil Premium funding), it warns that this gap is closing ‘slowly and inconsistently’ – despite considerable investment and targeted intervention programmes by the Government.