Reaching the Unseen Children

Practical Strategies for Closing Stubborn Attainment Gaps in Disadvantaged Groups

Jean Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032009315
• eBook ISBN: 9781000465631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reaching the Unseen Children provides a powerful and accessible resource for schools working to raise the attainment of all disadvantaged pupils, with particular emphasis on white children from low-income backgrounds.

This group – especially boys – consistently on average underperform in the education system, and the effects of COVID-19 will only have widened the gap. Drawing on her long experience of working with disadvantaged and left-behind communities, Jean Gross describes the path that many children take, from early language delays to persistent literacy and numeracy difficulties, which lead to progressive disengagement from learning. She argues that progress will only be made through early intervention and building pupils' sense of capability, and sets out low-cost, low-effort ways in which teachers can transform outcomes for their students – through the everyday language they use, the expectations they convey, and the relationships they build with pupils and their parents.

Providing practical, evidence-based strategies and case studies of schools with outstanding practice, this an essential guide for anyone working in education who is seeking equity for all their pupils.

1 We need to talk about Jason

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176442-2

I first met Jason when I was a young educational psychologist. He was referred because he was six and showing no signs of learning to read. Jason’s small village school, which sat in the shadow of a spoil heap, served a former mining area on the Somerset coalfields.

Jason’s parents, both out of work, were suspicious of school but were persuaded to meet me. They were not sure why he was struggling but did tell me he was very late talking. I also learned that Jason’s dad had not learned to read when he was at school.

Jason had started school full of excitement, like most four-year-olds. All had gone reasonably well in Reception, though he didn’t always do as he was told and found it hard to share. When I met him at the end of Year 1, however, he had begun to notice that other children could read and he couldn’t. He sat next to a little girl with neat handwriting and could see the difference between her work and his big messy writing, with lots of rubbings-out and torn pages.

When I talked to Jason I was struck by his limited vocabulary and lack of life experience. He had never been to the seaside, nor even played in a park. His horizons stretched not much further than the small council estate where he lived, the village shop and the school.

I gave the school some advice about how to teach him phonics and went away. He was placed in a small group made up of other children the teacher described as ‘low ability’, and had help in class from a teaching assistant (TA) allocated to the group.

A year later he had made little progress in literacy and was now well behind in maths. When the teacher asked a question, he was still struggling to process it while other children had their hands up. Again, he noticed that he wasn’t doing well. I felt that by now he had concluded that trying hard didn’t help – nothing he did seemed to make a difference.

At some point in KS2 the school referred him again, in the hope of obtaining what was then called a Statement of Special Educational Needs. He still couldn’t read. By now he had begun to have friendship and behaviour problems, increasing as he moved into Y6. He had a few fixed term exclusions, but his very caring school managed him well and generally contained his behaviour.

I next caught up with him in secondary school. He had a Statement by now, for TA support in lessons. It made little difference. He still struggled with reading and at this point had begun to truant. When he was in school he often got into fights. He was permanently excluded while we were reviewing his Statement to try to get him into a special school. After months out of education he went to a very good Pupil Referral Unit. But it was too late for him to catch up academically and he left with no qualifications.

The saddest thing was not just that he now had almost no chance of getting a job and a high probability of getting into crime, but that if he followed a pattern I had seen many times in his community he would before long get into serial relationships, and in all likelihood have several children who would follow a similar path when they went to school. The cycle of disadvantage would repeat itself.

Jason’s story is one of waste. His failure is also my failure, and his story is in a sense my story too. Later in my career, motivated by what I saw happen to Jason, and to so many boys who lived on the huge council estates of South Bristol – another area of high unemployment, where people used to work in the tobacco factories that have now closed, and hope is in short supply – I searched out the best evidence about what worked in tackling early reading failure and early social and emotional needs. As Head of Children’s Services I was able to access funds from the Council’s sale of its airport to introduce Reading Recovery to the city, along with the Incredible Years parenting programme, family learning on early language devised by speech and language therapists, and a universal social and emotional learning curriculum. I saw schools making a real difference as a result of these initiatives; I became even more convinced that we need not have failed Jason and others like him. It is these experiences that have led me to write this book.

Jason is just one child. There is of course no one stereotypical disadvantaged white boy, nor one life history. Every child is different, and labels can be dangerous and lead to self-fulfilling prophesies. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Jason’s story that I met repeatedly in the children I worked with. We can learn, I think, from these commonalities.

The barriers to learning that these children shared were:

• Limited oral language skills
• A sense of powerlessness
• Difficulties in regulating emotions
• Early educational failure, particularly in reading, leading to low academic self-concept, disengagement from learning, truancy and exclusion

In the chapters that follow I will explore each of these barriers and the strategies we can use to overcome them. But as a school you will need to consider each individual child in turn, and ask ‘Is this a barrier for this child?’ And if so, what can we do about it? The generalities I present are no substitute for knowing each child and understanding their unique needs. Those needs should be assessed in partnership with the child and their family, with evidence gathered through diagnostic assessment, conversations with the pupil and their parents, information from teachers and a deep understanding of the community. And in all cases we should be looking for strengths as well the challenges faced by the child and their family.

We also may need to reflect on whether, with the best of intentions, we might be falling into the same bear traps I saw in Jason’s case:

• Over-supporting children 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 spheres of responsibility and control

Who are the underachieving children?

Jason was not alone in his struggles at school. As we will see in Chapter 2, white boys eligible for free school meals tend to perform poorly in the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile at age five, in the phonics check at six, in KS2 SATs and in GCSEs – with attainment well behind that of all other ethnic groups except for the very much smaller group of pupils of Gypsy Roma and Traveller heritage.

Only pupils of White Irish, Gypsy Roma and Traveller heritage make less progress over their years in secondary school than do disadvantaged white boys. These boys make up a high proportion of the ‘forgotten third’ (Blatchford, 2020): the pupils who reach the age of 16 without any meaningful qualifications. The gap for them starts early – in spoken language, as early as 18 months – and widens over time.

The challenges faced by boys

A question posed by the data is why boys seem particularly vulnerable to the effects of disadvantage. It is not that disadvantaged white girls do not also underachieve; as a group, they do. But the extent of their underachievement is less.

The reason may be that being born female is a protective factor against many of life’s early vicissitudes. Girls, whether rich or poor, are simply less vulnerable to all sorts of developmental difficulties than boys, and particularly those that impact on school achievement.

Boys are:

• At higher risk than girls of prematurity, birth complications and perinatal brain damage (Kraemer, 2000).
• More affected by maternal pre- and post-natal depression and anxiety than girls, the effect extending into nursery school years, long after the depression has lifted (Sinclair and Murray, 1998; Braithwaite et al., 2020). One of the most notable effects is inattentiveness and hyperactivity, especially in boys from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• At greater risk of a whole range of developmental disorders in childhood, including specific reading delay, hyperactivity, clumsiness and articulation problems (Kraemer, 2000).
• More likely than girls to show disadvantage-linked weaknesses in ‘executive functions’ such as concentration, working memory and self-control (Ellefson et al., 2020).

The gender differences in language and literacy are particularly striking. Boys make up more than 70% of late talkers and just 30% of early talkers (Adani and Cepanec, 2019). At five they are nearly twice as likely as girls to be behind in early language and communication (Moss and Washbrook, 2016), and the differences in verbal performance persist right through the school years (Etchell et al., 2018).

Boys are more likely than girls to experience reading difficulties – overall around 1.83 times more likely than females, but with the ratio varying according to the age of the pupils and the type of reading skill assessed (Wheldall and Limbrick, 2010; Quinn and Wagner, 2013). The gender imbalance is particularly pronounced amongst children with the most severe reading difficulty (Hawke et al., 2007).

Even if they succeed in learning to read, boys are less likely to read for pleasure than girls, and this compounds their relative educational disadvantage (National Literacy Trust, 2020).

Finally, boys are later than girls to develop the fine motor skills they need for handwriting (Kokštejn et al., 2017), and this can have lasting effects on their willingness to put pen to paper.

Starting early

Another question posed by Jason’s story, and that of others like him, is whether we have tended to pitch interventions to close the disadvantage gap too late in pupils’ school careers. Whilst giving glancing acknowledgement to the importance of early years, commentators almost uniformly give most airtime to events and experiences in pupils’ secondary years and the transition to post-16 education or employment. The 2014 House of Commons report on disadvantaged white pupils, for example, devotes just 182 words to its early years section, compared to 652 for vocational education and work-related learning.

Disengagement from learning, disaffection and truancy are what observers, researchers and teachers often see in disadvantaged white boys of secondary age. This can lead to an assumption that these are the prime causes of low attainment for this group of pupils. Jason’s story, however, suggests a model in which disaffection is a consequence of much earlier events.

Perhaps because they remember their secondary years rather better than what went before, policy makers often fail to recognise this. There is remarkably little recognition of the statistics which show how hard it is to enable disadvantaged pupils to catch up once they reach secondary school. In 2019, only 1.9% of pupils with low prior attainment at the end of KS2 (below the former Level 4 age-related expectation) achieved a strong pass in English and maths results at GCSE (DfE, 2020).

But even the later years of primary school can be too late to intervene. The die may be cast much earlier. Fewer than one in six children from low-income families who have fallen behind by the age of seven will go on to achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths (Save the Children, 2013). If we really want to close the gap, we need to start before the end of KS1.

The very earliest years, before children are four or indeed two, are of course where we should be putting the greatest effort and investment, as any primary headteacher will tell you. But that’s another book, not this one. This one is about what schools can do, given the disparities that already exist in their intake. It suggests we need to base our strategies on an understanding of the trail of early oral language gaps leading to severe early reading difficulties (and to a lesser extent maths difficulties) which progressively deny the child access to learning, and increasingly lead to disaffection – particularly in the secondary years, when to be unable to read is to be unable to participate.

This argument implies that we should weight our efforts to close some disadvantage gaps towards children under seven. This is not i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 We need to talk about Jason
• 2 Understanding the gaps: data, theories and research
• 3 Myths and wrong turnings
• 4 The word gap
• 5 The literacy gap
• 6 The maths gap
• 7 The seven secrets of self-efficacy
• 8 No excuse for no excuses?
• 9 The importance of social and emotional learning
• 10 Secrets of successfully engaging all parents
• Conclusion
• References
• Index