Ministers urged to tackle inequality at its roots

The new president of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), Professor Ian Menter, will issue the warning to the Government in his keynote speech at the organisaton’s annual conference.

The University of Oxford professor believes it is “fatalistic” to focus only on schools tackling the low achievement of disadvantaged pupils because it assumes nothing can be done about the poverty itself. He will say that without serious attention to social and income inequalities, it is unlikely the Government’s efforts to close educational attainment gaps in the classroom will succeed.

Prof Menter will also urge Ministers to pay more attention to understanding the effects of its own wider policies, including welfare reform, on poorer children’s school life.

Giving his inaugural presidential address to BERA, Prof Menter will quote from the foreword of the 2010 schools White Paper – The Importance of Teaching – which set out the coalition’s reform plans in England.

In it, Mr Gove wrote that schools should be engines of social mobility. It says children from poorer homes start behind their wealthier contemporaries and then fall further and further behind, in terms of their average test and exam results, as they progressed through school.

Mr Gove wrote: “This injustice has inspired a grim fatalism in some, who believe that deprivation must be destiny. But for this Government the scale of this tragedy demands action. Urgent, 
focused, radical action.”

But Professor Menter will say: “Surely the obvious conclusion to draw from this analysis is to close the income gap between rich and poor. If there is a grim fatalism here it is the fatalism that ignores that possibility and places the entire responsibility on the schools.

“Of course, we do know that schools and teachers do have an impact on attainment and achievement but to ignore the root cause of educational inequality is, to put it politely, misleading.”

The conference will also be presented with research today which shows that most poor children in England do not suffer from a “poverty of aspiration” which limits their ambitions.

Researchers who analysed the views of thousands of young people have found youngsters from all social backgrounds generally harbour high hopes for their futures.

They found the differences in their ability to realise those goals were mainly a product of the greater resources better-off families can call on to help their children succeed.

The findings are contained in two papers being presented by researchers from the University of Oxford and King’s College, London, to the BERA conference. It challenges the view that work needs to be done to raise the aspirations of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Another study presented at the conference will show that many children are being subjected to “boring” language lessons in which they are repeatedly taught the basics such as how to count to 10 or say “bonjour”.

Youngsters in the first year of secondary school say they are made to go over topics that they have already studied earlier in their school career because they are being taught with classmates who are starting from scratch, according to new research.

And primary school children complain of repetition in lessons, saying they are taught to say the same words and phrases more than once.

The study, by Katherine Richardson from Nottingham University, is based on the views and experiences of 335 pupils who were in their final term of primary school or their first year of secondary school.

It comes amid major changes to foreign languages in England’s state schools, with the subject due to be made compulsory for seven to 11-year-olds from next year.