Why don’t enough bright disadvantaged students reach their potential ?
And what are we going to do about it?
This a blog write-up of my presentation for ResearchED Milton Keynes on 26th October.
I have written more here about the disadvantaged gap: what teachers need to know and educators might consider when creating policy in their own settings. For this post though, I am focusing on the challenges with supporting bright disadvantaged students. This mainly concentrates on the secondary and FE sectors, but many of the key elements can be applied to primary and HE.
The factors that affect attainment for disadvantaged students are present whether a child is bright or not. The problem is, though, that it’s harder to identify these students because most identification relies on past attainment, rather than potential. And the ways in which we assess at and between each key stage can be - at best - unreliable and - at worst - potentially harmful for disadvantaged students.
Rather than repeat myself, please visit this post for the facts and figures surrounding the disadvantage gap if you’re interested. I will continue here on the impact for bright disadvantaged students.
What are the added issues if you’re bright and disadvantaged?
There is a little bit of positivity when we look at the number of students going on to higher education in the UK, if we use this marker as a success. Ten years ago only 1 in 10 disadvantaged students went to university, whereas now, 1 in 4 students entering higher education in England are from disadvantaged backgrounds. This widens a little if we look at the Russell group universities, where disadvantaged students represent 1 in 5 (DfE figures 2023). It’s true that universities have been doing much more in the last 10 years to narrow the gaps: more pro-active outreach into state schools; specific programmes trying to mitigate against the reasons for gaps with pastoral and financial support, and even quotas given to the universities that they are obliged to meet.
BUT… we only have to look more closely at the DfE figures and then at this chart by TASO (Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education) to see the problem.
If we remind ourselves of many of the reasons why disadvantaged students attain less, it’s clear that academically able students living with disadvantage are no different. Perhaps most significant though is the lack of opportunities: the ‘wider picture’ of what life can be like in higher education and what it might lead to; a lack of cultural and life experiences; the low expectations students have of themselves - and those the adults around them might have if they make certain assumptions about how a bright student presents, compared with what we expect from a disadvantaged student. This one of the reasons setting or streaming can be so very damaging for disadvantaged students.
As the UCL’s Institute of Education (IOE) noted in its 2022 report ‘Best Practice in Mixed Attainment’ found: “It is well established that setting or streaming students are not an effective way of raising attainment for most pupils, and low attainment groups are disadvantaged compared to mixed attainment classes. And yet, UK government policy and Ofsted recommendations continue to support ‘sets’ and ‘streams’.
Research from IOE, led by Professor Jeremy Hodgen, confirms that attainment groupings promote educational inequality – even when schools attempt to implement it ‘fairly’. “
Unfortunately, another of the key reasons bright disadvantaged students don’t meet their potential comes down to our own unconscious bias. If a department is discussing who to promote and demote at the end of an assessment cycle, who is more likely to go up and who will go down? What are the criteria?
Working well above standards expected?
Higher Prior Attainment (HPA)? Key stage results?
High literacy / oracy levels?
Great engagement in class: consistent contributions; hand always up; compliant, polite, eager; gets on well with adults and peers?
Books / folders beautifully presented?
Home learning completed to a high standard and handed in on time?
It’s easy - natural - to get defensive when challenged on the pointers above. Why should certain students stay in top set when they don’t do their homework? When they disrupt an otherwise calm and industrious class? I hear you! And it’s these students who are likely to not perform as well as their peers over time. They might have worse attendance; they have gaps in their learning and don’t catch up: their attainment goes down. So what can be done?
Getting the right students in the right classes is obviously the first thing. As the IOE report above also states: “Findings indicated that pupils in lower sets received poorer teaching and expectations of them were lower; almost a third of pupils were misallocated to sets; pupils in low sets demonstrated less self-confidence than their higher-set counterparts and this got worse over time; and that the gap in attainment widened over time.”
Disadvantaged students’ parents and carers are much less likely to protest or question their child’s ‘demotion’ to lower sets too, so decisions do not have to be justified outside of the department/school.
A useful piece of advice comes from the charitable organisation Potential Plus UK, who support children with what they call Higher Learning Potential (HLP). This covers pupils and students not only with a track record of academic attainment but also those who perform well in assessments that focus on innate ability and also those who excel in particular subject areas. They recommend that assessments of a child’s ability should be triangulated, and not just reliant on one set of results that might be skewed or atypical. They are big fans of Cognitive Ability Tests (and I freely admit I am too). A quick overview of CATs taken from two of my presentation slides:
If you’re interested, This page is from a tutoring site for parents, but has a handy summary of the CATs in more detail.
In one of my previous roles as HLP coordinator, I placed students with verbal and/or average of the 4 test scores of 119+ on our HLP register. But I also looked at disadvantaged (and EAL) students with verbal/average scores of 113+ on the register, to allow for lower levels of vocab acquisition, if they performed well in the other tests.
CATs can be taken online, in the first few weeks of starting (secondary) school; they are marked really quickly (externally) and can be used immediately with a school’s data system. At my previous school, CATs, KS2 SATs, Reading and Spelling ages all went onto the system within the first half term of year 7. The tests were also given to students starting in the middle of a year. There is a good correlation between CAT scores and GCSE results in most GCSE subjects.
But CATs cost money and schools may not have the resources to invest in them.
A very interesting suggestion for alternatives to ‘traditional’ methods for setting came from the Headteacher of Milton Keynes Academy, Gordon Farquhar, who I spoke to at ResearchED after delivering my session. At MKA, their Pupil Premium population made up 46% of their cohort 2023-24 (twice the national average). He told me that they commit to mirror this percentage as a minimum in all classes, whatever the ability set wherever setting is applied. This approach certainly puts the assumptions and unconscious biases under the spotlight and ensures a fair deal for any student that is both bright and disadvantaged. Could this work in other schools who have a lower percentage of PP students? It’s a worthwhile focus, particularly in areas where numbers of disadvantage students are less and biases may be more influential (2 PP students in a class of 28 could be very much easier to overlook than 14 PP students, which is why ‘Shire’ counties tend to have bigger gaps.)
So what else can be done?
By no means an exhaustive list, but one that might be the start in closing gaps in your own settings for your bright disadvantaged students:
A commitment to metacognitive strategies in teaching and learning across the board. Read the EEF’s report here about why it is so important, particularly for disadvantaged students, especially bright ones who may not recognise the importance of all stages of learning and might want to rush to the end of a task.
Enrichment and cultural capital opportunities (money should not be an issue if the trip of event is connected to the curriculum as the PP fund should be paying for it, but what can you do for those other experiences? They can be just as important and even tranformative for some students).
Try to get parents and carers on board (even those families that are more reluctant to engage might come in when invited to talk about the potential you have identified in their child).
Significant adults: those teachers (and non-teachers) in school that individual students gravitate to; adults that ‘get’ them; that ask after them; that chat to them, and who might be the first step in encouraging a student to think bigger and see themselves worthy of trying for more (see also the video at the end of this post).
Extra and super-curricular opportunities: clubs, societies, productions and performances, leadership opportunities, etc.
A rewards and awards system that actively promotes effort and progress, not only attainment.
If set/streamed, a commitment to (almost) never demote disadvantaged students: all set changes to be passed through a ‘PP filter’ either at department/faculty or SLT level to ensure assumptions are not made.
Great careers advice and post-school awareness.
High expectations!
Higher expectations!!
Even higher expectations!!! (You get the picture)
In conclusion…
Two videos to watch: The first is a new on from the EEF about metacognition:
And this one here, which is probably shown to every cohort of trainee and early career teachers at some point in their initiation - I think it’s actually been passed into law these days - by Rita Pierson (who has sadly passed away now) about every child needing a champion. This links well with the suggestion above about children needing a ‘significant adult’ in their lives. For most children, this is a parent or other close family member, who encourages them, who has their best interests at heart and wants them to reach the potential in life. For some students, though, they need to look outside of the family for this. You might well be this person.
