Executive Summary
In the UK, demography too often shapes destiny. Being born poor too often leads to a lifetime of poverty. Both advantage and disadvantage cascade down the generations. Social mobility in Britain is low and is stalling.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in education. Gaps in cognitive development between better-off and disadvantaged children open up early on, with those from the poorest fifth of families on average more than eleven months behind children from middle income families in vocabulary tests when they start school.
Over the years that follow, these gaps widen rather than narrow. The overall result is that nearly six out of ten disadvantaged children in England do not achieve a basic set of qualifications compared to only one in three children from more advantaged backgrounds. The story is broadly similar in Scotland and Wales. The consequence for these children is a lifelong struggle to gain basic skills, avoid unemployment and to find and hold down a good job.
Though qualifications are the most important dimension of educational disadvantage, the challenge goes beyond exams. The chances of doing well in a job are not determined solely by academic success – the possession of character skills like persistence and ‘grit’ also matter. So too do wider opportunities including work experience, extra-curricular activities and careers advice. But, from the earliest ages, social background strongly influences who has these other predictors of later success, meaning that the better-off are multiply advantaged when it comes to winning the race for good jobs.
These inequalities matter – and not just to the individual children whose futures are scarred by low attainment and poor skills. They exact a high economic price for the country in lost growth as well as in wasted talent.
There is nothing pre-ordained to make the UK a low social mobility society where children’s starting point in life determines where they end up. International evidence has long suggested that the link between social background and outcomes is stronger in the UK than in many other countries. Now there is growing evidence from the English schools system that deprivation need not be destiny. There is an emerging wealth of data, stories and individual experiences demonstrating that some schools are bucking the trend, enabling their disadvantaged students to far exceed what would have been predicted for them based on experience nationally.
For example, in the last decade or so London schools have leapt ahead of schools elsewhere in the country when it comes to raising the attainment levels of their poorest pupils. But in every part of the country there are schools where children from disadvantaged backgrounds outperform the national average for all children. In fact this is the case in around one in nine secondary schools and in many primaries.
Some schools seem to have learnt the secret of how to alleviate the impact of background on life chances. They have found a way of overcoming the barriers that impede social mobility. At a time when social mobility is stalling and child poverty is rising, there is an urgent need to share the lessons so that every school can crack that code.
Of course schools cannot do it alone. As the UK’s official monitor of these issues, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has consistently argued that improved social mobility is not in the gift of any one part of society. Instead it needs a collective effort from government, parents, employers and educators among others. It would not be reasonable to expect schools to be able to wholly compensate for failures on the part of the other players on the pitch. Equally, schools have a key role to play and can make a difference. In this report we examine what they are currently doing and what they could be doing. The focus here is different from our previous work on schools, which has mainly examined the impact of central government education policy on social mobility. In this report, we focus on a much less scrutinised question: given the policy context, what can schools themselves do to address social mobility?
This report is one of a series of reports we are publishing that seeks to define what different parts of society can do to improve social mobility (previously we have looked at the role of universities and of employers). It is informed by a literature review, new analysis, consultation with experts, a large survey of teachers, two focus groups with high achieving disadvantaged young people and a programme of visits to some of England’s schools that are achieving great outcomes for disadvantaged students.
Although our data analysis exploring schools’ potential to make a difference is largely based on GCSE results, the steps towards social mobility that we set out in this report are aimed at both primary and secondary schools. Both have a key role to play in unlocking more social mobility.
The report:
- Sets out the case that schools can make a difference, presenting evidence which
is beginning to challenge the decades-old assumption that wealthier children will
naturally excel while poorer children lag behind. - Quantifies the scale of the gap between those schools that seem to have learned
how to weaken the link between background and attainment and the rest. - Sheds new light on the barriers to schools adopting these steps, including new
polling results on teacher attitudes and incentives to teach in the most
challenging schools. - Proposes five key steps that all schools can take to close the gap in attainment
and in life chances and boost social mobility.