In the first part of this blog, I focused on the importance of understanding inequality before rushing towards intervention or action. Continuing with the medical analogy, my argument is that good practitioners do not reach immediately for treatment before they have taken time to assess and understand what might be happening. The same should be true of strategies designed to tackle educational inequality. Before prescribing another intervention, initiative or programme, schools and other settings need to be much clearer about the problem, the context in which it exists and how it is actually being experienced by children, families and communities.
But it’s important I stress that diagnosis without response is never enough either. Once we understand more, there comes a point when we have to decide what we are going to do differently. It’s easy to just continue ‘weighing’ the problem more too in the hope that at some point the idea or solution will just become really clear, and I’ve been guilty of this in school leadership at times. This is where strategies can become crowded with evaluation and where there is a temptation to equate knowing more with achieving more. A better strategy, I would argue, is not necessarily one with the longest list of interventions or data. It is one that makes better-informed choices about where action is needed, what is within our influence, who needs to be involved and how we will know whether the response is actually helping things to get better.
The medical metaphor still needs handling carefully here (and not just because I’m not a doctor!). Children, families and communities are not people to whom we simply administer chosen treatment, and schools should not position themselves as the sole experts holding the prescription. Just as effective healthcare rarely depends upon one practitioner working alone, tackling inequality requires us to think about the wider team around children and places.
In this second part of the blog, I want to move from understanding towards action. There is no ten-point plan that will eradicate educational inequality. Schools cannot solve poverty independently and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. However, education settings make thousands of decisions that can either reduce the impact of inequality or inadvertently compound it. Having considered five ways to better understand inequality, here are five practical considerations for what leaders might do next and as part of working out whether anything is ‘getting better’
(6) Make surgery everybody’s business
In schools, there is a danger that tackling educational disadvantage becomes the responsibility of the Pupil Premium lead or an isolated senior leader. Usually, this person writes the strategy, monitors the datasets, reports to governors and likely manages or oversees interventions. Meanwhile, everybody else gets on with the other ‘day jobs’ or priorities of school life. In my experience, this is mostly unhelpful.
Some of the most important work to tackle educational inequality and implement strategy happens in classrooms every day. A good parallel is ‘safeguarding’; whilst schools will have a designated safeguarding lead, no school would survive by simply working in the belief that safeguarding is implemented by one person and others do not have a critical role to play in the surgery and treatment of it. Like safeguarding, tackling inequality is found in clear expectations, strong explanations, carefully curated learning for teams, consistent language, responsive assessment and strong relationships between children and adults.
Disadvantage and tackling inequality is not addressed by singular or siloed interventions that are owned by a limited number of leaders or staff. Staff development, internal briefings and communications should continuously remind all colleagues (and external stakeholders where possible) that the school (or organisation) is committed to tackling inequality, what understanding of inequality is in place and the role that each person plays in surgically addressing it.
In Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools we worked with co-authors across education and other settings to help illustrate how poverty-informed practice should never become a deficit model. This is something that every member of staff in an organisation has a role to play in developing. Children experiencing poverty do not need a diluted curriculum, nor should eligibility for Pupil Premium become shorthand for ability. They need the same ambition alongside thoughtful consideration of the barriers that might make accessing that ambition more difficult. Every colleague has a role to play in developing this mental model within the school or organisation.
What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)
Ask five members of staff in very different roles what your organisation is trying to achieve through its approach to disadvantage or tackling inequality.
Do you hear a broadly coherent answer? Or does one person talk about tutoring, another about attendance and somebody else simply point towards the Pupil Premium lead or statement on the website?
Build disadvantage and inequality work/thinking into curriculum conversations and professional development rather than treating it as a standalone strategy.
When reviewing teaching, look not only at what adults are doing but at how different pupils are responding and participating. This is something that all staff can be involved in monitoring and being curious about to a point.
Ask whether a teacher, teaching assistant, receptionist, pastoral colleague and governor could each explain the part they play in reducing inequality.
The best disadvantage strategy should be visible in the culture and practice of the school, not simply downloadable from the website.
(7) Make treatment accessible to all, especially those with less
Schools can be very good at describing what they offer. We offer breakfast clubs, music lessons, residentials, careers opportunities… but it is important to remember that availability is never the same as access. An after-school club might be free but inaccessible to a child reliant on school transport. Meanwhile, a heavily subdised residential may still be unaffordable for some families.
It is also important to be clear about why the activity is being offered. Once problem analysis has been established (see part 1), this should dictate what is being offered, to whom and why. If teams or strategy documents are not clear on this, then it is plausible to assume that there may be mission drift if others pick up the strategy or if it is only understood by a limited number of people.
Three questions can be useful here and may even be built into the strategy to help ensure that leaders habitually ask them:
What are we providing?
Why are we providing it? (What issue is it trying to address?)
Who is not accessing it and why?
This moves us beyond the comforting idea that equality means making the same offer to everybody. Sometimes tackling inequality requires us to make different arrangements so that children and families can access the same opportunities. This isn’t about expecting schools to offer more either, it may be about refining what provision is currently available to ensure that those with less get more access to it.
What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)
Choose three significant opportunities offered by your setting: perhaps a residential, an after-school programme and a cultural or careers experience.
Look at who participates and then look carefully at who repeatedly does not.
Speak to those pupils rather than assuming why.
Audit the hidden conditions for participation. Does somebody need transport? Equipment? A packed lunch? Money in advance?
Set an expectation that leaders monitor access to opportunity with the same curiosity they apply to attainment.
(8) Put poverty on the brain of adults in classrooms
When schools discuss disadvantage strategies, it is imperative that classroom practice is a core part of this dialogue. I have written extensively about the fact that great teaching will not eliminate poverty and I am increasingly concerned about the ways in which the educator sector holds us ‘great teaching’ as the perfect pill by which to cure persistent and complex inequalities. But it does remain one of the most strategic things that schools control.
The issue is what excellent, inclusive teaching actually looks like for pupils who may have different starting points, experiences or access to background knowledge. It is interesting that in recent years we have seen attempts from national organisations and thinkers to define neat toolkits for ‘inclusive’ teaching. But, poverty and disadvantage have been missing from some of these well intentioned attempts. When it comes to understanding and tackling inequality, it can be helpful to ask these questions (even though they don’t demand easy to find answers)
Where does the curriculum presume experiences children may not have had?
Where do we assume pupils understand particular vocabulary?
Which children regularly experience success at a classroom level rather than simply in end of unit or course assessment points?
Who participates confidently in everyday classrooms?
Who has learned to sit quietly while understanding very little?
As noted in Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools, children and young people with more barriers to language, background knowledge or self-regulation may particularly depend upon high-quality explanation, assessment and relationships. I’ve written about the impact that poverty can have on the learning brain in various corners of the internet and in publications. It is a prickly subject perhaps, but every adult in and around a classroom environment needs to understand that these are real issues that demand careful consideration. This is not about lowering expectations but about about making success and ‘better learning’ more accessible.
What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)
During curriculum reviews, identify where pupils are expected to possess knowledge or experiences that have never explicitly been taught.
Examine vocabulary and language carefully. Which words or concepts are essential to understanding a topic? How are these made accessible without reducing intellectual challenge?
Look at intervention timetables. Are pupils who already find learning difficult routinely removed from valuable teacher explanation or curriculum content? Sometimes more intervention is more overload for those already struggling.
When observing learning, pay attention to pupils who are quiet and compliant. Are they genuinely participating and understanding? Passivity is something we should always be cautious of in classrooms.
Ask staff whether poverty-informed practice has genuinely influenced pedagogy or simply influenced pastoral provision.
(9) Shift strategy from interventions to ecosystem
I have reached the inconvenient truth that schools and charities cannot solve poverty. I think we need to be more comfortable saying that because no high dosage of self belief, moral conviction or fancy slogan is going to shift these complex inequalities. They are unable to fix inadequate housing, raise household incomes, redesign transport systems or remove every structural inequality facing children. But nor should we give up and write ourselves off with terminal helplessness.
Schools can completely reduce barriers within their control. Leaders, educators and support staff can notice problems early, build trusted relationships, connect families to support and use their position within communities to bring different organisations together. This is increasingly how and why we think of schools as civic and social anchors within the places they serve. The PLACE approach at Tees Valley Education has taken us much further and deeper in this direction.
Take sleep inequality as an ongoing example across the places that we serve in the Tees Valley. Our response was not to decide that schools should suddenly become experts in beds or sleep science. Instead, we worked closely with organisations such as Zarach and The Sleep Charity that brought expertise we did not have in our classrooms and corridors. Schools also brought trusted relationships, knowledge of families, the ability to identify need and a place where support could be connected. This partnership, and of course strategy, is stronger because nobody pretends to do everything. I also think this requires a shift in mindsets in schools and organisations from asking ‘what programme should we adopt?’ to ‘who should we be working with to co-design a solution’?
What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)
Identify three barriers affecting pupils or families that your school cannot realistically address alone.
For each one, ask: Who already knows more about this than we do?
Map the organisations operating in your community and the relationships your school already holds.
Look for gaps. Are you repeatedly signposting families to services with no idea whether they successfully access them?
Think about what your school brings to a partnership beyond money or resource. It might be physical space, trusted relationships, knowledge of place, convening power or professional networks.
I would also be cautious about too many partnerships that are simply transactional. A one-off assembly or workshop may have value, but deeper challenges often require longer-term relationships.
(10) Repeatedly ask if it is actually getting better
I often think that education has a complicated relationship with evaluation. Sometimes we evaluate because we genuinely want to know whether something is working or getting better. But, sometimes we evaluate because we want to prove that something we have invested heavily in was a good idea, even if the impact cannot be seen. These are not the same thing and I’ve used both as a leader.
Education leader Shaun Allison stressed the need for educators to ensure that we don’t mistake activity for impact. He also notes that educators need to understand the challenges through observation of pupils and their learning experiences in classrooms. This is also key for evaluating the effectiveness of strategies and how well they are being enacted.
Our mission in seeking to tackle inequality should also be to understand inequality, and this means we should be in the business of understanding rather than simply proving (especially to external inspectors!). It is important to separate evaluation from accountability and recognise that activity rarely equals impact. We should also be real about the time that careful implementation and evaluation takes. Relationships take time, forging community partnerships takes time, cultural shifts take time and rarely are these achieved in the neat format of a school development plan or strategy document designed to sit across one full academic year. Children’s experiences of belonging and succeeding in the face of barriers do not necessarily shift because a twelve-month action plan says they should or must. A few years ago, I stopped thinking only in academic years. Of course we need milestones, accountability and opportunities to review progress but we need to be clear that a strategy to understand and tackle inequality will take time. The challenge for leaders is also knowing when to stop something that is not working, when to adapt it and when to give promising work sufficient time to mature. The best advice I can offer here is to remember that evaluation, like implementation, is a process and not an event.
What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)
Take the significant activities in your disadvantage strategy and remember to PACE them. It is important this is not done quickly or in a short space of time after running the activities. I would suggest a termly look at this can be helpful. I also propose these as principles rather than a neat model to apply to all activities.
Pause: There is little evidence that the need exists or that the activity is benefiting pupils at the present time. We may need to pause or come back to this.
Adapt: The need remains important, but the current approach is not working as intended or there is limited evidence. So, we need to adapt it carefully.
Continue: There is promising evidence of impact, but the work needs more time. So we will continue with it and schedule the next review point.
Extend: There is sufficient evidence of benefit to consider extending the approach to more pupils or with additional foci.
Remember to avoid evaluating only the easiest things to count. An intervention that reached 100 pupils did not necessarily improve outcomes for 100 pupils. Therefore, leaders and educators need to build space in the strategy for qualitative evidence alongside quantitative data. Leaders should also be rigorous about whether they are judging an initiative because it has genuinely had sufficient time to mature, or simply because another academic year has ended.
Writing a ‘better’ strategy is not about having more interventions, more activity or more certainty about all aspects of inequality. But, it should be enabling teams and leaders to have a deeper understanding of the problem and a deeper level of response to the issues alongside others. Tackling educational inequality requires ambition, but it also requires the discipline to question our own diagnosis, to change the course of treatment and to recognise that no school, charity or health care provider can do this work alone.
Sir William Osler was a Canadian physician remembered particularly for promoting bedside medicine teaching, careful observation of patients and the idea that good medicine depends not only on scientific knowledge, but also on judgement, humility and attention to the individual person. These seem pretty decent principles of good medicine I think. Osler is cited as claiming that, “medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
Perhaps tackling inequality requires us to become a little more comfortable with this uncertainty in our strategy documents and team meetings. Educators and leaders are often making decisions in imperfect conditions, drawing on evidence, professional judgement and what they know about the children, families and places they serve without pretending that every answer is complete or neatly measurable. We can get better at doing this. But this does mean also getting better at resisting the temptation to let external accountability frameworks, inspection criteria or headline measures become the sole definition of what matters in the places that we serve. Ofsted, government and other stakeholders will inevitably shape the things schools are asked to report on, but a serious strategy for tackling inequality has to be broader than the mandate of those who hold us to account. It should also be shaped by what children and families experience, what local places need and what leaders believe, on the best available evidence, is most likely to make a better difference for those with less.
This is excellent. Sophisticated and nuanced. I particularly like point 9!