Carl Parsons

Ethnicity, gender, deprivation and low educational attainment in England: Political arithmetic, ideological stances and the deficient society

Attainment data on England’s school pupils are more extensive in coverage, detail, quantity, accessibility and of higher quality than monitoring statistics routinely available in other European countries. These data facilitate investigation of low attainment in England’s schools and its relationship to ethnicity, gender and poverty. This article reviews longitudinal sample studies and extends this with simpler presentations of England’s national attainment statistics for education over 5 years up to 2014. The analyses show recurrent correlations of low attainment with specific ethnic minority groups, with gender and most strongly with low-income sections of society. There is a strong case, from these data and other research, that these inequalities are rooted in social and economic factors outside the school, created and sustained by neoliberal economic practices and elitist structures. It is argued that reducing the proportion of children growing up in poverty will have a bigger impact on raising average attainment levels than focusing on in-school factors.

Schooling the Estate Kids

Schooling the Estate Kids chronicles the trajectory of one Kent secondary school which was twice dubbed ‘the worst school in England’ in the national press. Serving a high poverty neighbourhood, The Ramsgate School was challenged by national targets, low levels of attainment of the school intake at 11 and difficulties of recruitment and retention of quality staff. The local housing estates were amongst the most deprived in the country and shared the school’s negative reputation. The school became The Marlowe Academy in 2005 with new leadership and a new building (in 2006). Student numbers increased, attendance and attainment came close to the national average and the atmosphere in the school was transformed, though the characteristics of the pupils in terms of special needs (twice the national average) and deprivation (more than twice the national average entitled to free school meals) remained unchanged. This book questions the notion that school improvement and school leadership are key areas to focus on when the socio-economic circumstances of pupils, poverty, dwarf all the other factors which are related to the educational progress of students.

Ethnicity, Disadvantage and Other Variables in the Analysis of Birmingham Longitudinal School Attainment Datasets.

Abstract Explaining and responding to inequalities in attainment are significant educational policy challenges in England as elsewhere. Data on four cohorts of Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) pupils, each approximately 13,000, were analysed by ethnicity, deprivation, gender and other relevant individual pupil variables. For the four successive cohorts of children, aged five in 1997–2001, analysis shows the attainment trajectory of each ethnic group from Baseline/Foundation Stage Profile (age 5) to GCSE (age 16). The relative constancy over time, the changes from one key stage to the next and the differences within broad ethnic categories argue against simplistic explanations. The ethnicity variable accounts for a relatively small amount of variance in pupil achievement, with the same ethnic subgroups recurrently low attainers. Considering explanatory perspectives on educational inequalities and ethnicity in the light of these data, we conclude that a structuralist perspective offers the best explanation recognising economic exploitation, dominance and oppression at the national and local levels. Notions of institutional racism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) are considered to be inadequate and counter-productive, in part shown by their inability to accommodate the range of attainment levels and educational experience of different ethnic groups. More tellingly, they lack causal explanations relevant to the United Kingdom and deflect attention from the need for sustained effort to reduce poverty and disadvantage as it affects children.

Challenged school – challenged society: stacking the odds against the poor

Using a micro-focus on one School Facing Exceptionally Challenging Circumstances (SFECC), the argument is developed using local, national and international data to show that areas of poverty are made and sustained. The challenged school is a product of a challenged society. With the condition of poverty come a range of difficulties in making educational provision for the children in the neighbourhood and limits to attainment levels reasonably achievable with currently allocated resources. The National Challenge strategy is counter-productive in its ambition to “drive up” standards and politicians and academics are practising a sad dishonesty in scrabbling round the edges with school improvement strategies that marginally affect individual schools. Such foci fail to acknowledge the simple poverty-attainment link. They fail also to note the cumulative experience from birth to school leaving and beyond and the potential multiple intervention points during the early life cycle to make a difference – if there were the will. Reducing levels of poverty in the local population and The Newington Children’s Zone as a form of Total Place project are components of a model which, with sustained, integrated investment across the whole childhood phase, might yield more in terms of social mobility and diminished harm.

Looking for Strategic Alternatives to School Exclusion

An education system will function best in serving all pupils without recourse to school exclusions. In England, the outcomes for excluded pupils are poor, and some social and ethnic groups recurrently are over-represented in permanent and fixed-period exclusion statistics: Black Caribbean and Gypsy/Roma children and those living in more deprived circumstances. As well as the formal exclusion procedures, there is a worrying set of other means of removing an ‘unwanted’ pupil. There is a range of alternatives and, under the banner of community-based inclusion, children and young people can be supported and sustained in the school system. Alternatives include diverse, multilevel provision within schools, managed moves, a range of alternative provision, and multi-agency working. There are sites of success and low numbers of exclusion and these may disseminate.

A School to Serve

Young people want to learn. They learn from birth onwards and even elderly adults can attest to the new learning that takes place into later life. Schooling is a particular sort of learning and school a very particular place for it to happen. There is also a particular set of materials and methods of learning there and relationships which can take many different forms.

The Worst School in England – Whose Fault?

This chapter documents the way the school descended into the bottom category of schools. It reports attainment results, pupil numbers, pupil and staff turnover, national and local press comment, and the views of teachers and local people as The Ramsgate School went through a turbulent time as a school in extremely challenging circumstances 9.

Making a Working Class School Work

This book has focused on one secondary school and its neighbourhood and the school’s efforts to raise achievement as well as give a full, rounded developmental experience to its students. It is a school/academy in a poor area engaged in a struggle many will recognise. The struggle is emblematic of how we fund the education of poor people.

School Improvement Measures – Academic Research, Practical Interventions, Failing, Succeeding

The Ramsgate School was a struggling school for a long time. Once local financial management of schools and publicising results in league table form were introduced then the inequalities between schools increased. This was the situation The Ramsgate School faced from 1994. Always classed as a difficult school, it became more so once the marketisation of schools became more explicitly established, though it was always there in Thanet’s eleven secondary schools.

An Estate of Mind

The Marlowe Academy, which is the focus of this book, is in Thanet, tucked away in the north east corner of Kent, its coast washed by the Thames in the north and the Channel on the East. It is isolated, with its own variety of ‘Estuary English’. The local population fondly refers to the place as ‘Planet Fannit’.