The Tail

How England's schools fail one child in five - and what can be done

Paul Marshall

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781781251676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847659880
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

At the heart of the debate about state-provided education in the UK lies a shocking fact: one child in five leaves school in England without basic skills in literacy and numeracy. Despite the best efforts of reformers and rapidly improving results in academies and elsewhere, even some of the best schools are struggling to help the 'tail' - the lowest-achieving twenty or thirty per cent of pupils. Throughout Britain, other schools, local authorities and even regions are trapped in a rut of low ambition and poor performance and seem unable to address the problem.

The young people in the tail will find it hard to progress to the qualifications they need to get good jobs, and are unlikely to find secure employment. Their blighted lives are a personal tragedy, and one that imposes a wider economic and social cost that increases with every generation.
In this book, eighteen of Britain's leading educational practitioners and specialists examine why our education system is persistently failing so many young people, and they propose a range of practical and achievable solutions. This urgently needed and powerfully argued manifesto demands the closest attention and will galvanise public debate on education.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The contributors
• List of tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Low educational attainment in England: an audit
• Chapter 3: TOWIE: the answer to regional inequality
• Chapter 4: An East End tale
• Chapter 5: Targeting intervention early
• Chapter 6: Taking it as read: primary school literacy and the pupil premium
• Chapter 7: School structure, school autonomy and the tail
• Chapter 8: What does good upper secondary education for the tail – and maybe everyone – look like?
• Chapter 9: SEN and the tail
• Chapter 10: Teaching and the tail: getting secondary school teachers in the right places doing the right things
• Chapter 11: Talent and the tail: getting the highest-quality teaching and leadership into our most challenging schools
• Chapter 12: Incentives for educating the tail
• Chapter 13: Behaviour and the tail
• Chapter 14: Crime and the tail
• Manifesto for the tail
• Notes