Education Inequalities widen, new research finds

New research on inequalities, carried out for the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Deaton Review of Inequalities and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, finds that disadvantaged pupils start school behind their better-off peers, and the education system is not succeeding in closing these gaps.

Educational inequalities result in substantial differences in life chances, leaving millions disadvantaged throughout their lifetime. The authors find that those who have not been successful at school are left behind by an education system which does not offer the right opportunities for further education. It finds inequalities, such as the disadvantage gap at GCSE, have barely changed over the last 20 years and are likely to increase following the COVID-19 pandemic, which looks to have hit the attainment of poorer primary school children twice as hard as their peers’.

Key findings from the report show that today’s education inequalities are tomorrow’s income inequalities:  

• Inequalities by family background emerge well before school starts. Just 57% of English pupils eligible for free school meals reached a good level of development at the end of Reception in 2019, compared with 74% of their better-off peers. These inequalities persist throughout primary school.
• Children from disadvantaged backgrounds also make slower progress through secondary school. Fewer than half of disadvantaged children reach expected levels of attainment at the end of primary school, versus nearly 70% of their better-off peers. And of those who do achieve at the expected level, just 40% of disadvantaged pupils go on to earn good GCSEs in English and maths versus 60% of the better-off students.
• The relationship between family background and attainment is not limited to the poorest pupils: at every step up the family income distribution, educational performance improves. For example, while just over 10% of young people in middle-earning families (and fewer than 5% of those in the poorest families) earned at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, over a third of pupils from the richest tenth of families earned at least one top grade. 
• Ten years after GCSEs, over 70% of those who went to private school have graduated from university compared with just under half of those from the richest fifth of families at state schools and fewer than 20% of those from the poorest fifth of families.
• Educational inequalities translate into large future earnings differences. By the age of 40, the average UK employee with a degree earns twice as much as someone qualified to GCSE level or below. In part this reflects very slow earnings growth for the low-educated: the most common annual salary for 45- to 50-year-olds with at most GCSEs is between £15,000 and £20,000, which is exactly the same as for 25- to 30-year-olds with these qualifications. 

Imran Tahir, a Research Economist at IFS and an author of the report, said: ‘We can’t expect the education system to overcome all the differences between children from different family backgrounds. But the English system could do a lot better. School funding has become less progressive over time, and the resource gap between the state sector and independent schools is widening. Among pupils who are behind expectations at the end of primary school, fewer than one in ten goes on to earn good GCSEs in English and maths – meaning that we bake in failure from an early age. And the fall-out from the COVID-19 pandemic has moved us in the wrong direction, lowering attainment and widening inequalities. If the government is to meet its mission to have 90% of pupils attaining the expected level at the end of primary school, it needs to prioritise the education system and especially the disadvantaged pupils within it.’

The report goes on to recommend a series of measures, some of which are:

• Early intervention is important – but it must be followed up. Intervening in the early years can be an effective and efficient way of supporting a more equal education system: preventing inequalities from opening up in the first place is often cheaper than trying to close gaps later on. But early interventions work best when they are followed up by investments at subsequent stages of education.
• Education is not just about test scores. In our view, the overall role of an education system is to support children, young people and adults to develop their own talents and to reach their full potential. Imparting knowledge and skills is a fundamental part of this. But other outcomes from the education system matter too – children’s broader ‘soft skills’, their mental health and resilience, their physical health, their social and emotional development, and their ability to successfully navigate the challenges they will face in the workforce and in their lives are all important and deserve to be considered alongside knowledge and skills when making major decisions about the education system.
• Educational inequalities cannot be solved by the education system alone. Family background has an extraordinarily strong influence on educational attainment. Educational inequalities are a consequence as well as a cause of wider economic inequality. In an economy where the financial returns to ‘making it’ in education are so high, there will always be pressure on parents to invest in helping their children to succeed. And in a society where the resources parents have to invest are so different, the education system will never be able to fully compensate for the vastly different experiences children have outside the school gates.

One of the recommendations was around having smaller class sizes though this is a vastly expensive way of improving education attainment and with the current crisis in teacher retention, would seem a difficult one to attain.