Overcoming Disadvantage in Education

Stephen Gorard, Beng See

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135009526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Governments, local authorities, school leaders, and teachers all over the world want to improve the educational attainment and participation of all students, and to minimise any systematic differences in outcomes for social and economic groups. A particular concern is for those students from backgrounds that may objectively disadvantage them at school and beyond. However, considerable effort and money is currently being wasted on policies, practices and interventions that have very little hope of success, and that may indeed endanger the progress that is being made otherwise. The poor quality of much education research evidence, coupled with an unwillingness among users of evidence to discriminate appropriately between what we know and do not know, means that opportunities are being missed. At a time of reduced public spending it is important that proposed interventions are both effective and efficient.

Overcoming Disadvantage in Education is unique in the way that it:

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• Shows where the solutions to underachievement and poverty lie

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• combines primary(new), secondary (official) and published (review) evidence

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• distinguishes between those possible causes of underachievement that are largely fixed for individuals, and those that are modifiable.

There are evidence-informed ways forward in handling under-achievement and increasing social justice in education. This book shows which the more likely approaches are, and where further work could yield further benefits.

This book will be a key text for students, developing academic researchers and supervisors in the social sciences, and for those research users charged with improving educational outcomes.

Chapter 1

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What is disadvantage in education?

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Introduction

This first chapter rehearses some of the evidence showing that educational outcomes and opportunities are heavily stratified by student background, and argues that this can lead to needlessly low achievement for some young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Suggesting practical and policy solutions to overcome such disadvantage necessitates an understanding of the causal influences at play. The next section presents a four-criterion model of causation – association, temporal sequence, controlled testing and explanatory mechanisms – whose elements must be present in order to describe a relationship as ‘causal’. The four elements then become a basis for classifying, judging the relevance of and synthesising different kinds of evidence in the remainder of the book. This chapter also proposes a distinction between those causal factors that are largely beyond the control of anyone, and those that could be modified in a practical way. It is the latter that must be the focus of work that has any chance of improving educational outcomes for those who are currently disadvantaged. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book. The book shows what can, and cannot, be done with limited resources. Some of the things that could be done are so clear and so simple that they should be a rebuke to any society that has not acted on them.

One of the main reasons why developed countries have universal, compulsory, state-funded education for children is so that individuals are not disadvantaged by their family background, parents’ education, ability to pay or educational resources at home (Harris & Gorard 2010). Schooling is intended to reduce the influence of social, familial and economic background, so promoting social mobility and a just and equitable society. The same is true to a certain extent across Europe and more generally across the developed world (EGREES 2005). Any school system is a huge and costly intervention that does not have to be financed by the state, as evidenced by the history of the private sector and of church schools in England. The reason for state responsibility is to try and ensure that all citizens get an equivalent experience. Similarly, one of the main reasons for widening participation in post-compulsory education and training has been to increase equality of opportunity in the system, so reducing the link between social, ethnic or economic origin and the life outcomes for all individuals.

Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that this laudable aim has been achieved in Europe, the US, Pacific Rim or elsewhere, despite huge tax-payer-funded expenditure. In a review of policies and programmes aimed at closing the ethnic gap in school-readiness among young US pre-schoolers, Duncan and Magnuson (2005) found that differences in socio-economic resources account for half of the differences in test scores. Internationally, studies show that attainment at school is still strongly related to student characteristics such as their ethnic origin and first language, whether they or their parents are recent immigrants (Behnke et al. 2010), family structure (Battle & Coates 2004), parents’ occupations (Li & Lerner 2011), parents’ educational level (Magnuson 2007), income (Feinstein et al. 2004), the number of books at home (Mwetundila 2001), the degree of geographical isolation of their home and where they attend school (Fuchs & Wobmann 2004). The key influences on a child’s educational attainment in the early years include parental education, low income, unemployment, early motherhood and low mother qualifications (Mensah & Kiernan 2010). In each of these studies and thousands more like them it is the most disadvantaged students that tend to perform the worst.

In England, children start school with different levels of resource and quickly display strong patterning of their attainment by family origin (Gorard & See 2009). School attainment at every subsequent age and stage reveals these same patterns (Gorard 2000). Table 1.1 shows that young people in England defined as living in poverty (free school meal/FSM-eligible) are much less likely to gain a C grade in either English or maths in their age 16 GCSE assessments. This is also true for all years, subjects, grades and phases of education.

Table 1.2 illustrates the same kind of variation for three ethnic groups. Young people of Gypsy/Romany origin are very unlikely to obtain a C grade or higher in these two key subjects, or indeed any others. In summary, the aggregate scores and qualifications for students from less elevated social classes, those living in poverty, in some deprived areas and for some ethnic minority groups are considerably lower than average. This is despite a system set up purportedly to prevent this.

Table 1.1 Percentage attaining at least grade C or equivalent in GCSE, England, 2005/06, by eligibility for free school meals (FSM)

	Maths	English
FSM-eligible	27	31
Not FSM	55	61

Source: NPD/PLASC

Table 1.2 Percentage attaining at least grade C or equivalent in GCSE, England, 2005/06, by ethnicity

	Maths	English
Gypsy/Romany	7	8
White UK	52	57
Chinese origin	81	67

Source: NPD/PLASC

The same patterns continue into immediate post-compulsory education, and thence into opportunities for higher education (Gorard et al. 2007). Families remain a key determinant of educational performance in later lifelong education and training of all kinds (Gorard et al. 1999a). In the large-scale study by Selwyn et al. (2006), young adults in England and Wales who left education at the earliest opportunity had parents who had themselves left school at the age of 14 (on average). Individuals who stayed on after the compulsory phase, on the other hand, had parents who had continued in school until at least age 16. In the same study, 95 per cent of adults whose parents were in professional ‘service’ occupations had continued on in education or training after leaving school. Over 50 per cent of adults with parents in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, on the other hand, received no education or training after leaving school. These are illustrations of a deeply-rooted pattern of inequality and social reproduction, which is evidence that the education system in any country, far from overcoming such inequalities, may actually assist families in reproducing their relative economic and societal advantages.

There is perhaps no more important issue facing education and society today. Understanding the reasons for the poverty ‘gradient’ is particularly relevant for policy and practice in order to find appropriate approaches and suggested behaviour changes to help reduce it. There is considerable activity being undertaken to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children and thus close the gap, but as this book shows, there is currently little systematic attempt to see if any of this works. The situation demands a better approach, both practically and ethically. Practitioners and policy-makers need to take much more notice of research and development that can help them achieve this simple goal of creating a fair education system. More urgently and crucially, researchers need to change what they do and start providing the kind of evidence that practitioners and policy-makers can use safely. As succeeding chapters show, this means caring more about finding the correct answers to their research questions than about what those answers are. It means the end of absurd divisions and schisms in research, and instead the use of all available evidence to help those facing disadvantage. It means greater concern about the design of research. How to overcome disadvantage in education is a clear causal question. It needs to be treated as such. This calls for a more honest system of reviewing and disseminating research findings that is critical in its evaluation of research quality. This book is part of the answer.

Fixed and malleable causes

To understand disadvantage in education one needs to understand its causes. A claim that something acts as a cause of something else is a very strong one; this is partly because it cannot be observed directly. Gorard (2013) proposes a fourcriteria model for establishing the feasibility of a causal model, building on the prior work of Hume (1962), Mill (1882) and Bradford-Hill (1966).

1 For X (a possible cause) and Y (a possible effect) to be in a causal relationship they must be repeatedly associated. This association must be strong, clearly observable, replicable and it must be specific to X and Y.

2 For X and Y to be in a causal relationship, they must proceed in sequence. X must always precede Y (where both appear), and the appearance of Y must be safely predictable from the appearance of X.

3 For X and Y to be in a causal relationship, it must have been demonstrated repeatedly that an intervention to change the strength or appearance of X then also strongly and clearly changes the strength or appearance of Y.

4 For X and Y to be in a causal relationship, there must be a coherent mechanism to explain the causal link. This mechanism must be the simplest available without which the evidence cannot be explained. Put another way, if the proposed mechanism were not true then there must be no simpler or equally simple way of explaining the evidence for it.

Clearly such a model is not intended to deny the existence of mutual causation, or of one-off events being caused. If each criterion is seen as necessary, though not individually sufficient for a causal model, then any evidence relevant to at least one of these criteria for any model can contribute to the search for a cause. No one study is likely to be able to address all four criteria at once. In order to propose any intervention to overcome disadvantage in education such a robust causal model must be identified first; however, this in itself is still not enough. There are plenty of causal models that might seem convincing but lead to conclusions that are impractical, ludicrously expensive, unethical or have damaging unintended side effects. Therefore, the practical malleability of any proposed causal factor is also crucial.

It is possible to envisage moving public funding from secondary to primary schooling, amending the rules for allocating school places or abolishing homework, for example. These are all malleable factors, and if the evidence is that these changes would improve the situation, then they can be considered. There is a wide range of possible reasons why early disadvantage turns into lower attainment at school. They include factors such as living in high poverty districts, and residential segregation by parental education. They include possible institutional causes such as school, teacher and peer effects, and segregation by poverty between schools. There are family and individual issues such as parental involvement, the early environment for children and student motivation and behaviour. It is these determinants that are the focus of this book – not because they are necessarily the most important scientifically but because they are modifiable and the most appropriate for anyone seeking to overcome disadvantage in education.

On the other hand, there is a further range of possible reasons why disadvantage is related to poor educational outcomes, of a kind that are not always susceptible to change via direct intervention. These include an individual’s birth characteristics and those of their family, such as sex, ethnicity, first language, learning difficulties, long-term health issues, inherited talent and parental education and occupation. Attainment at school is also strongly predicted by an individual’s prior attainment (Noble et al. 2006). This stems from an early age, perhaps even from birth. If taller children, those born in the winter, girls or US immigrants of Chinese origin are more successful at school then there is not a great deal that can be done about these factors envisaged as causes. It may be that being born in winter genuinely causes success at school, but this is an unhelpful finding because it is not about a malleable factor.

Very young children from the highest socio-economic status (SES) families have markedly higher rates of success in problem-solving compared to children from middle and lower SES families (Ginsburg & Pappas 2004). Such a difference in early ability or talent might be innate, or produced partly by a combination of poor early diet, higher stress experienced by lo...