Diversity, Equality and Achievement in Education

Gianna Knowles, Vini Lander

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849206013, 9781849206006
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Most classrooms contain children from a variety of backgrounds, where home culture, religious beliefs and the family?s economic situation all impact on achievement. This needs to be recognised by teachers in order to establish fair, respectful, trusting and constructive relationships with children and their families, which will allow every child to reach their full potential.

This book looks at real issues that affect teachers in the classroom, and examines a variety of influences affecting child development. It provides you with the theoretical and practical information you need to ensure you understand the complex factors which affect the children in your care, and it encourages good, thoughtful teaching. Dealing with some of the less widely addressed aspects of diversity and inclusion, the book considers:

- children who are asylum seekers

- the notion of ?pupil voice?

- what diversity and equality mean in practice

- gender and achievement

- looked-after children

- social class

- disability

- ethnicity and whiteness

This book is essential reading for any education student looking at diversity and inclusion, and for teachers in role looking for advice on how to meet the professional standards.

1

Diversity, Equality and Educational Achievement

Gianna Knowles

This chapter explores:

• How diversity is part of the inclusion agenda;
• The link between diversity, educational achievement and underachievement;
• How government research shows that children from diverse groups, such as minority ethnic families, deprived communities, Gypsy, Roma or Traveller families or children who are Children in Care, are among those most likely to underachieve;
• How the notion of identity is important for exploring diversity, equality and achievement.

Those of us who work with children, or who intend to work with children, know that when we are in the classroom we need to be aware of the needs of the children we are working with. However, what this chapter begins to discuss is that sometimes, unless we have had the opportunity to reflect on our backgrounds, values, attitudes and beliefs, we can unwittingly take into the classroom values, attitude and beliefs that can act as barriers to achievement for the children we work with, and actually prevent achievement occurring.

For over a decade schools have understood that children bring with them a range of learning needs. Schools have been working hard with the concept of inclusion to meet these needs and provide equal opportunities for children to achieve at school. The concept of inclusion, and the notion of inclusion in schools as it began to develop from 1997 (Knowles, 2010), is now a well embedded aspect of educational practice. All those who work in schools to enable children to enjoy and achieve, whether in their academic learning or in realizing individual potential across a range of skills and attributes, have seen the enormous benefits the inclusion agenda has brought with it (Ofsted, 2006). Schools, their staffs and the children and families who attend them, are all much more aware of the ways in which children can be engaged in enjoying and achieving at school, whatever learning needs they bring to the classroom.

Activity

Think about the range of learning needs you are aware of. These may be learning needs you have direct experience of working with in the classroom, or they may be needs you know about from your reading, talking to colleagues and through your general life experience.

Much of the initial work around the inclusion agenda focused on enabling children with learning needs – those related to cognitive learning needs as well as social and physical needs – to be included in mainstream schools. Almost all schools are far more competent now than they were 10 years ago in providing an environment that meets the needs of all children; including children with particular needs such as dyslexia, autism or a physical or sensory disability of some sort. Indeed, Ofsted in their 2006 report Inclusion: Does it Matter Where Children are Taught? (Ofsted, 2006) found that: ‘the most important factor in determining the best outcomes for pupils with learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD) is not the type but the quality of the provision’ (Ofsted, 2007: 4). They went on to state: ‘there was more good and outstanding provision in resourced mainstream schools than elsewhere’ (Ofsted, 2006: 4), where ‘elsewhere’ included special schools dedicated to catering for children with learning difficulties and disabilities. One of the central aims of the inclusion agenda is to remove the barriers to achievement in learning that some children had been identified as experiencing prior to 1997.

How children are achieving in their learning is tracked and monitored by Ofsted. To help schools improve in terms of their educational provision for children, every year, Ofsted provides information to each school about how their children are achieving against national trends and averages. The information is also broken down to show how different groups of children within the school are achieving. That is, the information records the number of children in the school who have free school meals, special educational needs or who are ‘looked-after’ or are Children in Care (CiC). The information also shows how children are achieving by gender and ethnicity (Ofsted, n.d.; RAISEonline, 2010). The idea being that, through having their children’s achievement reported to them in this way, schools can analyse the data and use it to further improve their educational provision. The current system for reporting this information is called: Reporting and Analysis for Improvement through School Self-Evaluation or RAISE (RAISEonline, 2010). The collecting and reporting of this achievement information has been taking place for over 10 years, it has provided invaluable information for individual schools about how they are enabling their children to achieve and improve that achievement over time.

The data has also allowed Ofsted and the government, to look at national trends with regard to achievement. The data allows comparisons to be made between how different groups of children are achieving, compared to one another. What the data has shown consistently is that some groups of children always achieve more in their learning than others. That is, the data shows there is not equal achievement between diverse groups of children. The way the children are grouped, for purposes of reporting achievement notes for each school the number of children who have a special educational need (SEN), the range of ethnicities in the school, the number of children who have free school meals, how boys and girls are achieving compared to one another and the number of children in the school who are CiC.

Activity

Go back to your list of learning needs that you compiled earlier. Highlight those needs you have itemized that relate to a cognitive learning need, like dyslexia or a motor learning disability (formally known as dyspraxia), or are related to a need such as autism or a sensory or physical disability.

Now, in a different colour highlight those needs that relate to the wider social circumstances of the children. For example, children from economically deprived homes (often measured by the number of children who are eligible for free school meals – FSM), CiC, children who have a disabled parent or children who are black or minority ethnic children.

Did your list cover all the needs listed above?

Depending on your training, professional development and experience, you may find that you are more aware of the needs of some children rather than others. This book focuses on the barriers to learning for children from diverse backgrounds and will help you explore the challenges of providing equality in terms of educational opportunity for these children.

Diversity, achievement and underachievement

Having already discussed the findings that show schools have made a positive difference in terms of achievement for children with certain learning needs, the most recent comprehensive exploration of achievement, as it relates to diversity in terms of ethnicity, shows a far less positive picture. The most recent information published by the then Department for Education and Skills, now the Department for Education (DfES, 2006a), is a document entitled: Ethnicity and Education: The Evidence on Minority Ethnic Pupils aged 5–16. In 2006 the DfES recorded that 21% of the children in state funded or maintained primary schools could be classified as belonging to a minority ethnic group (DfES, 2006a: 5). In this instance they defined the minority ethnic groups they were discussing as being:

White Other, Black Caribbean, Black African, Black Other, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Mixed White & Black Caribbean and Mixed White & Black African and Chinese heritage. Where appropriate children and young people of White Irish, Gypsy/Roma and Traveller of Irish Heritage origin. (DfES, 2006a: 4)

The document also states that children from these groups ‘are more likely to experience deprivation than White British pupils’ (DfES, 2006a: 5). Further to this:

Indian, Chinese, Irish and White & Asian pupils consistently have higher levels of attainment than other ethnic groups across all the Key Stages. In contrast, Gypsy/Roma, Traveller of Irish Heritage, Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils consistently have lower levels of attainment than other ethnic groups across all the Key Stages. (DfES, 2006a: 5)

The report also explores how a range of factors impact on the achievement of the ethnic minority children detailed above. For example, not only is deprivation a barrier to achievement but the report shows that children from certain ethnic groups are more likely to be excluded than others, particularly ‘Gypsy/Roma, Traveller of Irish Heritage, Black Caribbean, White & Black Caribbean and Other Black pupils’ (DfES 2006a: 6). It was also found that, taking other factors into consideration, ‘Black Caribbean and White & Black Caribbean pupils are around 1½ times as likely to be identified as having Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties as White British pupils’ (DfES, 2006a: 6).

Similarly, if we explore the national statistics that report the achievement of CiC or looked-after children it can be seen that these children are not achieving as well at school as their peers. ‘In 2008 only 46% of CiC achieved level 4 in English and 44% achieved level 4 in maths’, whereas the national average showed that ‘81% of all children obtained this level in English and 79% obtained this level in maths’ (DCSF, 2009h: 2).

We have seen above how the DCSF reports show that children from some backgrounds are achieving less well at school than others. On the face of it, in Britain, state education is provided free for all children. All children are taught the skills, knowledge and understanding required by statutory curriculum documentation and therefore this would seem to suggest that education provides an equal opportunity for all children and that each child, therefore, has an equal chance of achieving equally well as another child. That not all groups of children are achieving equally suggests that there are still barriers to learning occurring for some children. Some of these barriers may come from the children themselves, but we also need to consider what barriers we, as the professionals, may also be placing in children’s way. We may need to consider the possibility that we, however unwittingly, may be blocking children’s chances to achieve.

At the beginning of this chapter we introduced the idea that we all have personal values, attitudes and beliefs. For most of us our values, attitudes and beliefs are shaped by our own ethnicities, upbringing and experiences. Some of us may have grown up in an area which is culturally homogeneous (Tierney, 2007: 1). That is, in an area where most people seem to share the same cultural practices and beliefs.

However ‘cultural diversity is an expanding social phenomenon’ (Tierney, 2007: 1) and as professionals who will work in increasingly culturally diverse schools we may find that the values, attitudes and beliefs we have been used to operating with are not the same as those held by the children and families we work with. Therefore, our expectations, about the experiences, knowledge and understanding children bring to the classroom may not actually accord with those of the children and their families that we work with and this, in turn, can act as barriers to children’s learning.

Case study

Aadila and Sally work in parallel Reception classes in a primary school in the south of England. Across their two classes are children from a diversity of social, ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Given that the children are in Reception many of the literacy activities Aadila and Sally do with the children are based on the use of familiar stories and nursery rhymes. Using stories and rhymes for beginning reading and writing activities is recognized as good practice for Reception aged children, as the children already know orally what it is they are now seeing in print. Therefore, children can more easily make the connection between the spoken word and what it looks like written down. If they know orally the story the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Diversity, Equality and Educational Achievement
• 2 Identity
• 3 Diverse Families, Diverse Childhoods
• 4 Ethnicity, Whiteness and Identity
• 5 Class, Equality and Achievement
• 6 Boys, Girls, Gender Issues and Achievement
• 7 Coming from a Traveller Background: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Children – Living on the Margins
• 8 Refugee and Asylum Seeker Children
• 9 Looked-after Children – Children in Care
• 10 Enabling Equality and Achievement for Children with Disability
• Endnote
• Bibliography
• Index