Can the education gap be bridged?

By Mike Baker
BBC News education correspondent

As the last few schools closed their doors for the summer holidays this week, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly set herself some homework.

Her self-imposed summer task is to work out how the education system can deliver greater social mobility.

She will present her ideas in the education White Paper due after Parliament returns.

Yet what is social mobility? Some disparage attempts to influence social class as "social engineering".

Shaping societies

These critics argue that education is about teaching children skills and knowledge, not about changing people's social class.

This, of course, ignores the fact that school systems have always been designed to shape societies.

After all, the beginnings of mass education in England were rooted in the church's desire, born from fear of godlessness in the burgeoning cities, to teach children to read the Bible.

The education secretary has her work cut out

So Ruth Kelly is working within a long tradition of wanting schools to be an agent of social change. Yet what exactly did she mean by talking about improving social mobility in her speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research?

Does social mobility mean the poor becoming wealthier? Does it mean their getting better jobs? Is it about exchanging one social class for another?

Or is it simply about raising the educational achievement of pupils from the poorest homes in the belief that the rest - jobs, income, and social class - will then follow.

The education secretary was honest enough to admit that after seven years in power the Labour government has failed to close the educational achievement gap between rich and poor.

Indeed, according to new government research, the gap is widening slightly.

This comes as quite a shock in view of the priority that the Labour government has given to tackling disadvantage over the past seven years.

Labour's manifesto in 1997 promised to "attack under-achievement in urban areas".

It was a similar message in 2001: Labour would set up Sure Start Centres in "disadvantaged areas to support children's early development".

Closing gap?

There has been a raft of measures designed specifically to raise standards in the most deprived schools and neighbourhoods, from Education Action Zones to city academies.

It has not been cheap. Yet according to Ruth Kelly, while it has raised absolute standards, it has not closed the gap.

In primary schools, pupils from poorer homes are not improving as quickly as those from wealthier families.

The government tried to seek some consolation in figures which suggested that the gap was being closed at school level, with primary schools in more deprived areas improving slightly faster than others.

Yet this was the least convincing evidence in the government's report.

The statistics did suggest that the more deprived schools were improving faster in terms of getting more children to Level 4 in the English tests at age 11. Yet at Level 5 that picture was reversed.

A more accurate picture is gained from children's average point scores. Again, though, the evidence is not as conclusive as Ruth Kelly suggested.

In fact, it amounts to the less affluent schools improving their pupils' performance by the equivalent of about one-tenth of one term's worth of educational progress.

Is this really about mobility in the traditional sense of social class? Or is it much more to do with the effects of poverty, which is not the same thing?

In other words, they have caught up by about five days' worth of teaching. So much for the marked improvement of schools serving deprived populations.

Somewhat more convincing were the figures for the improvement in pupils' aggregate scores, irrespective of the school they were at.

These showed that the poorest pupils (as measured by eligibility for free school meals) were not improving as quickly as pupils from better-off homes.

In English, for example, the poorer pupils raised their average points score by 1.0 points, compared with 1.3 points for the other pupils. This difference equates to the equivalent of about one third of one whole term's worth of educational progress.

So Ruth Kelly was right to highlight this issue. Yet is this really about mobility in the traditional sense of social class? Or is it much more to do with the effects of poverty, which is not the same thing?

Eligibility for free school meals is not about social class in the traditional sense of working-, middle- and upper-class, or even in the more modern parlance of socio-economic groups.

'Becoming muddled'

It is far more likely to be the dividing line between families in employment or on benefits, between two-parent families and single-income families, or between long-settled families and recently arrived families such as refugees and asylum seekers.

And this is where the whole thing becomes muddled: this is much more about the effect of poverty than about social class.

That may also be why those who have argued this week that the real route to social mobility is to bring back selective grammar schools may have got it wrong, at least in terms of this particular agenda.

In the past, grammar schools were certainly a ladder of opportunity for a relatively small proportion of intelligent working-class children.

But how often were these 11-plus successes the children of bright but poorly educated parents?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the parents of school-age children had themselves been at school before World War II.

Social mobility

However bright they were, most did not have the opportunities to use education as a route to social mobility.

The generation at school in the 1950s and 1960s did have that opportunity. They took it. They were encouraged by bright but often poorly educated parents. They became today's middle-class parents.

So it is perhaps not so surprising that, as a recent report showed, the social mobility of the generation born in the late 1950s was greater than that of those born in 1970.

In over-simple terms, for the more recent generation there just was not the same scope for upward movement because so many of them had already moved up a social class. It is always easier to improve from a low base.

So Ruth Kelly's problem is different: it is how to raise the early educational disadvantages of those born into poverty.

Grammar schools at age 11 would not help most of them because, as the government's figures show, the absolute gap between poor children and the rest is already large by the end of primary schools.

In the English tests at age 11, the absolute gap is now 3.0 points or the equivalent of one whole year's educational progress.

In short, very few of the pupils from the poorest homes would ever win a place at grammar school as they have already fallen behind.

Ruth Kelly has already indicated that she intends to focus on giving the poorest children more help early in their life. Starting with the youngest children is surely the right strategy.

Middle-class worries

Her background in the Treasury with Gordon Brown suggests tackling poverty is a key aim.

Her repositioning of policy direction may also prefigure a Brown premiership from, say, 2007.

She has been brutally frank about Labour's failure to close the achievement gap between poor children and the rest.

The test she has set herself - of not only raising absolute attainment but also of ensuring that disadvantaged children improve faster than others - is certainly ambitious.

Book schemes, reading recovery and targeted phonics schemes may well achieve some vital catch-up for some children.

But to achieve her own target, Ruth Kelly will have to put even more disproportionate resources into disadvantaged areas, target more and better teaching at pupils from poorer homes, and skew the choice of the best schools in favour of families who are least able to gain that competitive edge for themselves.

The middle classes may not like it if they think their own children are being disadvantaged.

Just look at the row that erupted after Gordon Brown attacked Oxford for failing to admit the state-school pupil, Laura Spence, thus raising the prospect of the middle classes being put at a disadvantage in university admissions.

A Blair-led Labour government has taken care not to alienate the middle classes.

Is Ruth Kelly prepared to change that in anticipation of Gordon Brown moving into Downing Street?

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