Problems of Public Education (4): The Attainment Gap

Problems of Public Education (4): The Attainment Gap

By Sebastian Egerton-Read

This blog is a part of a series, they can be understood individually, but it might interest you to investigate the others if you haven’t already:

#1 Introduction: http://birminghamstudentbroadleft.blogspot.com/2011/01/problems-of-public-education-1.html

#2 Constrictions on Human Ability: http://birminghamstudentbroadleft.blogspot.com/2011/01/problems-of-public-education-2.html

#3 Subject Hierarchy and Prescriptiveness: http://birminghamstudentbroadleft.blogspot.com/2011/02/problems-of-public-education-3-subject.html

A ministerial report released in July 2010 stated:

‘Over the past decade, the gulf in achievement between the rich and the poor has widened, while the attainment gap between fee-paying schools and state schools has doubled.’

There is undoubtedly a serious recurring issue here and while not all of it is rooted in problems with education, our systems of public education must share at least some of the blame. A supportive family is undoubtedly an important factor in a lot of high attaining students, this doesn’t mean that those students are necessarily able to fulfil their full potential, but a supportive family base does get a lot of children ‘through’ their education. It is often observed that when children don’t have this base, they tend not to do so well in their education. It is also true to say that supportive families are usually families who have benefitted at least in part from education themselves in terms of having gone to university, or having enjoyed some success/reward from their time in education. Less supportive families are often those that have not really benefitted from education and therefore do not particularly believe in the system. These are of course very broad generalisations and there are undoubtedly plenty of exceptions, but they are not unfair and do reveal something about the psyche of people from different social backgrounds. Through this it is also clear exactly why the attainment gap between the rich and poor has continued to increase, and consequently the wealth gap.

Blaming this attainment gap on social problems alone is rather short-sighted though. Undoubtedly a person’s family background plays a huge role in their life. However, by suggesting this theory that a supportive family is the key to achieving in education, surely we are simply admitting that education is something that children need to be helped and supported through? Why should this be the case? Education should be an enjoyable experience; there is nothing inherent in the process of learning that demands it to be arduous. I don’t mean to say that education should be made to be easy. However, it is a lot easier to do something challenging and difficult if it is also stimulating, and the stimulation is something that is all too often missing from the classrooms in our schools.

This brings us nicely to one of the other dominant arguments about education. This commonly held idea that if you work hard, you will achieve. Now, anyone who believes this statement to be true can undoubtedly come up with several good examples of people bettering themselves through working hard, equally people who disagree with this statement can come up with several examples of people who have worked hard, but haven’t been rewarded, or people who have bettered themselves by cheating or backstabbing as opposed to hard work. This debate is rather insignificant since the simple fact as stated in the ministerial report is that the attainment gap continues to widen. It was once suggested to me that this is potentially a sign of a genetically lazy poor population, despite the obvious ludicrousness of this statement since laziness is very much an abstract and subjective thing. It is also worth noting that this can be very strongly likened to the ideas that used to state that black people could not govern themselves and that women were not capable of rational thought. We can now (I hope) dismiss those ridiculous ideas and one day hopefully this notion of poor people being ‘lazy’ will be considered equally ridiculous.

It is also worth interrogating this very idea of ‘working hard’. Anyone will tell you that if you are doing something that is stimulating, or something that you have a genuine passion for, then you can work hard without really noticing it. People can spend hours doing things that they genuinely enjoy and not notice the time at all. What is found at school is something altogether different, because many people will tell you that time during a school day often drags on. This is a phenomenon far more associable with the idea of hard work, which is very different from working hard. That is the reality of our education systems, far from encouraging students to work hard by stimulating and challenging them, school life is actually just hard work for most children and as a rule under these conditions, the ones that have support attain well and the ones that don’t have support, struggle.

It should be noted that there are people who benefit from an education system that perpetuates the wealth gap, but this will be investigated more carefully in the next blog. The other thing that should be noted is that the ‘grades’ and attainment that education policy is judged upon is completely flawed as it only grades an extremely narrow range of human intelligence as has been investigated in the previous three blogs. People who achieve well at school don’t necessarily have the opportunity to fulfil their talents or end up doing the things that they are truly passionate about. However, it is statistically clear that the current education system does nothing but perpetuate the current wealth gap in this country. Michael Gove is right when he suggests that the focus needs to be on this attainment gap, but he is wrong in prescribing a more intense process of target setting and increased attainment focus on people from poorer backgrounds. Dragging people through an education system that they resent will not maximise their potential. To do this the education system must be changed so that it is a stimulating system that emphasises personalisation and becomes a place of enjoyment rather than an institution that people are churned out as if they were on the production line. The education system needs to be something that the population can believe in, as of right now they don’t have any particular reason to.