Education Committee

Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727
Wednesday 4 December 2013

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 December 2013.

Written evidence from witnesses:

–         Centre for Research in Race and Education (Professor David Gillborn) (WWC 015)

–         Dr John Jerrim (WWC 032)

–         Impetus – The Private Equity Foundation (WWC 007)

–         Joseph Rowntree Foundation (WWC 009)

–         Professor Becky Francis (WWC 030)

–         Professor Robert Plomin (WWC 031)

Watch the meeting

Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair); Alex Cunningham; Pat Glass; Siobhain McDonagh; Ian Mearns; Mr Dominic Raab; Mr David Ward; Craig Whittaker

Questions 1-85

Witnesses: Dr Feyisa Demie, Head of Research and Statistics, Lambeth Borough Council, Julian King-Harris, Head of School Improvement and Standards, Slough Borough Council, Professor David Gillborn, Professor of Critical Race Studies, Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education, University of Birmingham, and Dr John Jerrim, Lecturer in Economics and Social Statistics, Institute of Education, gave evidence.

Q1   Chair: Good morning.  Welcome to this session of the Education Select Committee inquiry into the underperformance in education of white working­class children.  We have just about an hour, and a full panel of experts and a lot to get through, so I will ask my colleagues to keep their questions short.  If you could make your answers as succinct as possible, that would be extremely helpful as well.  Would a focus on white working-class underperformance—we will go into detail on the definition of each of the terms, every one of which is contentious—be helpful in addressing our, at best, mediocre performance in the PISA tables released yesterday?

Dr Demie: Thank you very much for inviting me.  I think some of my presentation will be based on one of the pieces of research I have done in Lambeth schools.  We purposefully asked head teachers, governors and parents who we interviewed what they mean by the term “working class”.  Interestingly, we actually found it very difficult to come up with a clear terminology for what working class actually means.  Everyone we talked to had a different interpretation of what working class is.  Really, everybody talked in general about what white working class actually is.  We could not get a very clear definition from the focus group we had done.  We really ended up using a terminology of “white British who are on free school meals”, which, nationally, is also used by the DfE and a number of researchers.  I am afraid that that is really the terminology I am using in terms of whatever interpretation I do.

Julian King-Harris: I suppose the brief answer is, “Yes, it would”.  It is something that has been going on in this country for a considerable amount of time—the performance of that particular group of people—and it would make a very significant difference in a whole range of issues in this country if we could raise the aspirations and the attainment of that group.

Q2   Chair: Picking up on Feyisa’s point about his finding the most useful way of looking at those brought up in poverty being those entitled to free school meals, do you think that is the most helpful area to focus on?

Julian King-Harris: It is the easiest identifiable group.  In terms of schools, that is how we can identify them easily, and the paperwork you sent out beforehand refers to them frequently in that particular category.

Q3   Chair: David?

Professor Gillborn: Addressing that group, however it is defined, would make a significant contribution to improving the position in the international tables, but that focus needs to be done intelligently.  It is not about just focusing on one group, however it is defined.  You can focus on any underachieving group, but you should do it with an awareness of how different levels of inequality and different identities intersect.  It is not just about one ethnic group or one social class group.  Gender is important, disability is hugely important, and these things interact. 

One of the key concerns with the way in which the public debate about so-called white working-class underachievement has taken place is that, actually, the statistics refer to a very small group on free school meals—about 14%—but about 60% of the population hear “working class” and think of themselves.  That starts to feed into wider debates about ethnicity and about a sense of belonging.  The debate about education can become lost amid a wider debate about participation in public processes.

Q4   Chair: The share of the white population that is entitled to free school meals is a relatively small percentage of the whole.  Is there some risk of distortion there?  Effectively, if you have a small percentage who are poor, may be disabled, and have other issues, then you could be reading in cultural and aspirational issues that are not really there.  You are simply looking at a small percentage of people who have difficulties.

Professor Gillborn: There are problems of two sorts, really.  One is that it is easy to fall into a kind of deficit analysis: an assumption that, if a group is underachieving, there must be a problem with the group, whereas we have an awful lot of research showing that schools tend to treat different groups in systematically different ways.  Stereotypes about children who live in poverty or are in care often close down the opportunities that they have, despite having good aspirations.  The other good point is around the fact that, in the white group, I think it is about 12% who qualify for free school meals; overall, it is 14% of the school population.  Free-school-meal data are reported as relating to the working class; the last British Social Attitudes Survey suggested that 60% of adults consider themselves working class.  Then you have headlines that suggest to 60% of the population that their children are underachieving significantly, and so the debates about poverty get lost amid a wider question of whether white people are suffering because of multiculturalism, which I think is hugely dangerous.

Q5   Chair: John?

Dr Jerrim: We need to be clear what the PISA data show, and what other international comparisons actually show us.  The OECD report yesterday, and my own work on social class differences, suggest that, actually, the UK, and England within the UK, are unspectacular compared with other nations in this respect.  The gap between rich and poor in this country in PISA test scores is no bigger here, really, than the OECD average. 

Of course, yes, there are some countries where the gap is narrower, such as Finland, but compared to the broad group of industrialised nations, we are pretty much unspectacular.  Obviously, one of the bigger pictures around this is social mobility, and we also need to be clear about international comparisons of social mobility.  It is often said that we are at the bottom of the international rankings in those terms.  That evidence is weak, and there is actually very little evidence that we are at the bottom of that league table, also.  We need to be clear on the international evidence and what it actually shows us, and to get that right before we start jumping in to say, “Does this explain our low performance?”

Q6   Chair: Could you say a little bit more about that, around what the evidence is in the European context that there is an unusual correlation in this country between being born poor and staying poor, compared to other nations?

Dr Jerrim: In Europe in particular, I have done some recent work on this myself, and what the broad ranking of countries seems to show is that the Scandinavian countries seem to be the most mobile, and that is clear.  They are more socially mobile than us, in terms of income, at least.  There is another group of countries where there is a little bit of evidence that they seem to be more mobile than us: that is Austria and Germany and, I believe, Belgium.  Then there is a group of countries in the middle—us, France, Italy, amongst others, who are kind of in the middle of the ranking—and there is a group of countries that seem to be less mobile than us, which are mainly from Eastern Europe.  That is broadly how it works.

              Chair: We have often heard in this Committee that we do have that particularly wide gap and correlation.

Dr Jerrim: I would say that that evidence needs to be caveated strongly.  If you go back to that evidence and look at what the figures show you, the only consistent finding where there is a statistically significant difference between the UK and other countries is between us and Scandinavia—between us and Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and those kinds of countries.  With the other countries, the order of the ranking simply is not clear.  More work needs to be done, and I have tried to take that on in what I have been doing recently.

Q7   Craig Whittaker: I am just a bit concerned about the definition of white working class.  Can we just touch base on that a little bit?  If we are talking about different studies using different definitions—and I understand this is a very generalistic point—free school meals tends to be the proxy.  Does that mean we are talking about the same thing, or because we are using different measures, does that mean there are differences?

Dr Demie: I am really a practitioner, and am really very interested in the extent to which I can use that evidence in challenging schools and governors in terms of raising achievement.  We could talk a lot about defining what the terminology is, but what we clearly need is to find out what the evidence we have is that some groups are underachieving in schools.  If free school meals tells me some element of low achievement at school, I can really serve a very big purpose in terms of raising achievement in a school and addressing the issue at school level.  Frankly, if you really compare low achievement—if you take low achievement data—

Q8   Craig Whittaker: Sorry to interrupt: I absolutely get where you are going with this, but in regards to the academic definition of white working class and the issues associated with that, how does what you experience on the front line in Lambeth relate to the definitions that the academics use?

Dr Demie: I do not think head teachers or governors are really more interested in very complicated academic debate about what white working class actually means.  What they really are very interested in is why white British, as a group, are underachieving, and what needs to be done to address and to target them in terms of intervention to support that.  It would be very, very difficult to come up with a refined terminology that is very clear that can be used in schools at a national or local level.  There has been a debate since 1960 about what working class is.  As a practitioner, really, my focus is that free school meals tell me which group are underachieving.  I generally know in terms of evidence, if I compare white British who are on or who are not on free school meals, it is 32% at national level—big gap in between the two.  The real, serious underachievement is with white British.  If you take Africans, for example, there is a very, very small gap—roughly, in Lambeth, around 1%—and those evidences are really powerful in any early targeting, in terms of intervention.  Heads and governors listen very carefully to those issues.

Professor Gillborn: In terms of the definitions, it is really easy to get lost in a library full of statistics and arguments about definitions.  To put it simply, free school meals is a strong indicator that a kid comes from a family where no one is in employment.

Q9   Craig Whittaker: That is not what Ofsted said.  In fact, Ofsted were very clear that they feel uncomfortable about using free school meals as the proxy for this group of people.

Professor Gillborn: I am saying it is not a good proxy for working class.  More than half the population think they are working class; nowhere near that qualify for free school meals.  If you imagine that free school meals means what most people on the street imagine by working class, there is a huge mismatch.  Free school meals as an indicator of working class would mean that about 85% of people are middle class, which does not make sense.  Free school meals is a crude proxy for family poverty.  It is an important measure of family poverty, but there are so many other aspects.  If the debate focuses only on that group, we lose sight of lots of wider inequalities within the system as well.

Dr Jerrim: For me, “working class” has a formal definition based around parental occupation.  The NS-SEC classifications, developed by John Goldthorpe, amongst others, has a formal definition of “working class”.  Whenever “free school meals” is used, it is used because it is there.  It is used for a proxy for deprivation or poor background, and it is what researchers have turned to because there is no better information available.

Q10   Craig Whittaker: On that basis, then, is there sufficient, robust data to make statements about working class?

Dr Jerrim: There used to be.  It depends what data you use.  In our National Pupil Database, which a lot of researchers use, I do not think there is.

Dr Demie: I do not think there is any data that the Department have that can be used for that purpose.  One of the problems we have—which I have argued, in fact, in our recommendations—is that there is a need to collect at a national level social-class-related data as part of the school census.

              Chair: There is occupation, and there is educational attainment of parents.  Other countries use one or both of those.

Professor Gillborn: Income is also one.

Q11   Chair: Free school meals does, at least, the low income, but we do not have data on the educational attainment of parents, typically, whereas, I think, in Denmark, when we visited there, they do.

Professor Gillborn: We used to have a regular, nationally representative survey done about every two or three years called the Youth Cohort Study, and that used to give a meaningful understanding of social class in relation to the Goldthorpe measures.  That no longer takes place; it has been replaced by the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England.  The last time that had data on kids at GCSE level was 2006.  We will not have another cohort at GCSE until 2015.  Because it is very expensive to gather that data, the Government, in its wisdom, decided to move away from that.  There is basically a decade gap in that kind of robust, reliable measure of social class and educational experience and achievement.

Dr Jerrim: There are pockets of data where we do have information on social class.  We have things like the LSYP, and also the Millennium Cohort Study, where we do have parental education and parental occupation, and the PISA data also have parental education and parental occupation.  There is information out there where we can get at these kinds of social‑class measures.  I think one of the key points is that when you are talking about working class, to certain people that means using a certain measure, which means focusing on parental occupations.  When you are talking about parental education or income, that moves away from this formal definition of “working class”.  Is “working class” the appropriate term for what you are interested in, or is it broader social disadvantage?

Q12   Ian Mearns: I must admit that I am sitting listening to this and becoming increasingly uneasy, because it is almost like we are not even able to define the problem that we are trying to solve.  From my experience, working in a borough like Gateshead in the north-east of England, what I do know is that where you have schools that have a higher concentration of youngsters who take free school meals, living and being educated next to them are also many youngsters who are not entitled to free school meals but whose families are just above the threshold for the benefits that would entitle them to free school meals.  Now, all of those people would be bracketed probably in some sort of broader working-class definition, and it seems to me that we have got to get rid of the “free school meals”, because it is such an easy, broad-brush thing, but it is a lazy broad-brush thing that does not actually take in an awful lot of people who would come within that bracket.  We have got to do something about that.

              Chair: A short, sharp response to that.

Professor Gillborn: One of the problems is that people have to use whatever measures are available.

Q13   Chair: What would you like to have available?  That is one thing I would like to get from you.  What data should we collect that we do not collect?  Make the case to us now.

Professor Gillborn: You need better information about the discrete groups and their levels of achievement, whether it is related to things like income and the different disadvantage measures, or ethnicity or gender disadvantage.  “Free school meals” has kind of swamped the whole debate over the last few years, and there are lots of groups—like the ones you mentioned—just above the threshold, who seem to slip off the agenda.

Dr Jerrim: In a nutshell, parental education, parental occupation and income would be ideal, and ideally, you would be able to get this information cheaply if you could just link the NPD—the National Pupil Database—to their parents’ tax records, or other national sources.  It is cheap and it is quick; it should be done.

              Chair: The business end of what we do is that we conduct our inquiries, we write a report, and we make recommendations to Government; they are obliged to respond.  Please do make sure, if you have got any recommendations that we should have in our report that you have not already provided, that you feel free to email us with some bullet points.

Dr Jerrim: That is a recommendation now. 

              Julian King-Harris: Could I just comment very quickly on the data?  It is not really held by schools; it is held in different formats.  It would be very simple.  Schools hold free‑school‑meals data, they hold census data—it appears on the fronts of Ofsted covers—and then there is deprivation index data for the authorities.  There is no link between those three.  If I am a head teacher of a school, I can find out the census data relating to my free school meals by manually going and checking what the postcode is for those children, but if I had an automatic data that told me exactly which ward those children fell in, which gives the indications of parental education, linked into the deprivation index, I would get far more information about how I provide wrap-around services for those children in that particular ward that my school serves.

Dr Demie: Can I just add a summary?  I think we need to be really careful.  It is really important to gather information that can be gathered.  It is very difficult to collect certain information.  I would really like parental occupation to be collected.  Until that has really happened, free school meals is the best indicator you have, which is very easy to use and can be widely used in schools.

Q14   Craig Whittaker: Can I just ask you all: in terms of white underachievement, are we best using social class or poverty as the benchmark?

Professor Gillborn: I think you would be better using the best information that is available, and for me, that would be, where it is available, a proper measure of social class, rather than relying just on free school meals.  Social class, interpreted in a more complex way.

Craig Whittaker: Social class is a better measure than poverty, is what you are saying.

Professor Gillborn: Yes.

Craig Whittaker: John, I think you said social class earlier.

Dr Jerrim: It is difficult.  If you could get income information, then I would want that as well, ideally, but I appreciate that income is often a difficult thing to get.  Therefore, I might pick social class for practical reasons.

Craig Whittaker: Okay.  Julian?

Julian King-Harris: Yes.

Dr Demie: I really think social class is good to collect, but it is probably not practical to collect it, and free school meals probably remains the best indicator.

Craig Whittaker: But if we had the information, would you measure poverty or social class?

Dr Demie: If I had the information, I would prefer social class.

Q15   Mr Ward: The interesting thing is that, when I think of the people I know, it is diet; it is social activities; it is the politics; and it is the dress.  For the people that I know, that is how I define and differentiate between middle class and other classes.  I find this all quite difficult.  I do not know the occupations or anything.  I do not know all that for the people that I mix with who are working class. 

Professor Gillborn: The manuals that researchers use stack about this high, but in essence, they are trying to routinise and operationalise for research exactly what you have said.  Those kinds of things often match very well against the technical descriptions of social class.  Social class is one of the most powerful predictors or indicators of life chances, of inequality, and all kinds of aspects of society, but it is not the only one.  I would absolutely emphasise that, while social class is of enormous importance, it does not explain away gender inequalities, disability inequalities, and race inequalities.  Class is much more complex than is often assumed.  The tools are available, if there is a willingness to do the research, but it always has to have an awareness of those intersecting inequalities.  One of the key problems, as several of the published evidence statements say, with the current debate about white working-class as it is described in relation to free school meals is that it ignores huge inequalities in other parts of the system by focusing on this very particular area.

Dr Jerrim: This was one of the reasons I was greedy, and asked for education, occupation and income, because they do have separate influences on children’s attainment.

Q16   Pat Glass: When we were in Denmark, where they measure parental qualifications, we asked “How do you get that?” and they said, “We simply ask”.  Can I ask you about the achievement that we measure?  We have come up with these figures of level 4 at the end of Key Stage 2 and five A* to Cs, including English and maths, at the end of Key Stage 4.  Where did they come from?  Is this based on any kind of science or evidence, or were the politicians just plucking these out of the ether, and are there other things that we should be measuring?  Would it be more sensible to measure English, maths and physics, rather than five GCSEs including general science, or NEETs, or what percentage go on to higher education?

Professor Gillborn: It is really important to try to measure different aspects of experience and achievement throughout the system.  One of the things that you find, looking at how policy and practice relate to each other, is that whatever you enshrine as your major measure will then change behaviour in schools.  The publication of school league tables is probably one of the most important education reforms since the post-war period, and in lots of ways that I think were not initially anticipated. 

The English Baccalaureate, for example—the statement that you must have the core subjects and a humanity—overnight actually enlarges the gaps between free school meal and non-free school meal, black Caribbean and white British, and kids with special educational needs and without.  Access to those high-status subjects is differentially distributed across those groups.  Any measure will be a choice between different possibilities, but every measure will have real consequences in terms of which groups can achieve and, if the measure is then used as a selection device, for which groups access is made even more difficult.  That is one of the reasons why proper impact assessments of policies before they are enacted would really make a difference, in terms of avoiding things getting worse before they get better.

Q17   Pat Glass: We are with you on that one, but if we could clear all of that and start again, what would be good measures of achievement?

Professor Gillborn: You call us experts, but everybody is an expert on education, because we have all gone through it.  The first thing to do would be to talk to people in different parts of the sector—not just folks from the education world, and not just politicians.  You need to talk to parents, students and teachers, and they will often cut through a lot of the confusion that arises from the different perspectives.  There is a lot of agreement about what matters in education, and a really powerful way of identifying meaningful measures would be to harness that kind of concept.

Julian King-Harris: I am not going to answer your question, because it is far too big for me to answer, but it is absolutely true that the measures you set can either make a school on Ofsted requirements “good” or “requires improvement”.  If you change that measure tomorrow, you would have a whole group of schools that would go from “requires improvement” to “good” on the measures of academic achievement and attainment.  That is fact, on the current Ofsted criteria that were brought out in 2013.  You mentioned whether the five A* to Cs was the right one; I think schools clearly respond.  I absolutely agree that it has had a very significant effect.  They clearly respond to what they are told by the DfE is going to be measured at the end of the year.

Q18   Pat Glass: Schools, we know, are full of clever people and head teachers.  They are like satellites; no matter what we come up with, they will simply move.  They will.  Whether we call it gaming or not, that is what will happen.  I do talk to head teachers—I have got a background in education—and what they tell me is however you measure GCSEs, measure four.  Measure English, maths, science, and a humanity, and that would make more sense if you were looking at who was average, who was above average, and who was below average.

Dr Demie: The way I see it, we have a big debate where all these national assessments have been developed, whether it is level 4 and above, level 2 and above for Key Stage1, or five A* to Cs.  I strongly believe we need to have a standard of indicators that you can really measure over a period of time.  You cannot really change those indicators from one year to another.  It is really important to have a fixed set of indicators.  Those indicators you mentioned have been well-developed after they have been debated by educationists and head teachers in the past.

Q19   Chair: So you are happy with the ones we have got, are you?  There is the new “best eight” at GCSE.

Dr Demie: I am a bit worried about EBacc, particularly, but I am really very happy with five A*s to C, including English and maths.

Q20   Chair: Why are you worried about EBacc?  What David just said before was that it has widened the gaps, but it has highlighted the fact that the high-value subjects are not being taken by the children about whom we are most worried.  Surely, that is precisely the kind of spotlight we need to ensure we do not just allow the school to tick its box of success while, actually, the children are doing subjects that lead them nowhere.  Discuss.

Dr Demie: We need to be a bit inclusive in what we do.  There are a number, including white working class, who will be a bit disadvantaged by taking a number of subjects that they really cannot do.

Q21   Chair: So you are saying they should not do the more difficult, rigorous and valuable subjects because they are incapable passing them.

Dr Demie: I would not say that.  What I am really saying is that the subjects they are taking really need to motivate them.  They need to be motivating, in terms of learning in the classroom.  We need to be open enough to allow them to take the subjects they like.  We cannot dictate to everybody that they should take Latin or Greek, which is something that is probably very useful for people who are very interested in taking an academic route.  We need to be a bit inclusive.  EBacc is not really an inclusive thing.

Q22   Pat Glass: We focus a lot on the children at the top and the differentiations.  What about the 50% of children who are not going to get five A* to Cs?  Are local authorities or academy chains—or whoever it is who is managing school improvement now—doing enough, given that we are the most data-rich country in the world and we know the children who, predictably, are not going to achieve five A* to Cs?  Are they doing enough to target those low-attaining groups and those combinations of race, gender and deprivation?

Dr Demie: Yes, I believe it can be done.  I will take one example in one of my schools, where every kid is achieving level 4 and above.  The way to do it, in that case, was targeting resources.  One of the problems we have is that the schools do not have enough money to target a number of areas.  If you actually support pupils through targeted intervention, including teaching assistants, assisted learning assistants and learning mentors, a lot of work can be done in terms of improving the level of passes.  The issue is money.  I do not think there is enough money floating there to support targeted support in schools.

Q23   Pat Glass: You are head of school improvement.  What do you think?  Who are school improvement services continuing to target, or are they looking at this kind of data?

Julian King-Harris: There is a problem.  The problem is that schools are working ever so hard in my area to address all of the issues that you talked about, but they are being pushed down.  The curriculum is widening in 2014.  It is like a bit of a rugby ball: they come in at Key Stage 2, it is going to widen right out, and it is going to narrow back down at the end.  It pushes the schools towards those success criteria, because they know Ofsted are coming and they know they are going to be judged, and we all know what the effect on a school is if it goes into “requires improvement” or special measures.  I am not suggesting we remove Ofsted, because it has its merits, but remove part of that, and you could ask schools then to provide a wider curriculum and maintain that wider curriculum, which is the very group that this Committee is discussing.  We know that the current curriculum in the format that it is in does not engage white FSM pupils.

Professor Gillborn: You can address these things by being imaginative and having high-quality teachers, and taking seriously different learners.  One of the problems underlying the discussion that we are having about trying to identify different measures is that one of the things that education is for is to sort kids.  It is selection.  It is not one of the things that we celebrate, but that is how it is used, and historically that is how education has always been used.  If we are interested in making it more meritocratic, rather than merely rubber-stamping people who come from the right kinds of backgrounds, there has to be a challenge against the assumption that one-third will excel, one-third will be in the middle, and one-third will be at the bottom.  Schools seem to be funded and run along those lines.  Kids are selected along those lines.  It simply is not possible, in most schools, for 100% of kids to get the EBacc, because the schools cannot possibly teach all of their students the EBacc subjects.  It is not just the question about identifying appropriate measures; it is also about making it a realistic possibility for everyone to achieve them.

Q24   Pat Glass: So, David, you are a former head.

Professor Gillborn: No.

Pat Glass: Sorry.  Who was the former head? 

Professor Gillborn: Julian is. 

Pat Glass: Right, so you are to blame for this.  Are you saying that the system that we have is so geared towards Ofsted, five A* to Cs, etc, that for heads there is nothing to be gained from trying to tackle this issue of white working-class underperformance?

Julian King-Harris: No, there is something to be gained from heads doing that, because head teachers want to do that.  I agree completely that there are a whole range of other underperforming groups that we have in our schools as well, so this is just one of them.  But in our area, for example, as a head teacher—I was a head teacher for 15 years—I was always aware of the underperformance of white boys in the schools, both in my school and in schools in the area.  I absolutely want to tackle it, and all my colleagues would say the same thing.  The problem is that sometimes we are tackling it with one hand tied behind our back, because our performance measures are very restricted to a certain area that does not include the counting-in of a wider group of pupils who we are trying to do a very good job with, possibly going down the vocational route.  You said earlier about, “Should we measure needs?”  We should measure needs a lot more, I think, because that is the critical part.  Where do those children go after they finish school?  You are still going to blame me, are you? 

Q25   Pat Glass: If I can, if you will indulge me.  So, do we need to get something in the system and in Ofsted that says ,“Not only have you got to get this percentage of five A* to Cs, etc, but unless you shift these children at the bottom, you will fail”?

Julian King-Harris: Ofsted has done that in relation to free school meals.

              Pat Glass: They are not sacking heads.  If they get 60% A* to Cs, even if their kids at the bottom do not make progress, head teachers are not getting sacked.

Julian King-Harris: They are not getting the “outstanding” grade with Ofsted any longer unless free‑school‑meals children have made a certain percentage of progress.  It says it very clearly in it: “If you have not made that progress, you cannot be an outstanding school”, and it grades it down.  Now, that of course has an effect on the schools.  In my area, it takes a while for free‑school‑meals funding to feed through and actually have some benefit.

Q26   Chair: Do you think best eight will help as well?  You have got the Pupil Premium, you have got that Ofsted framework, and then you have got best eight.  Instead of obsessing about the C-D borderline and effectively warehousing children at the bottom and ignoring those at the top, hopefully, everyone is at least seen as contributing to the school’s success.  Is that going to help?

Julian King-Harris: No, because the paper that you sent out beforehand shows that as soon as you introduce the Wolf Curriculum, white FSM boys will drop on their five A* to Cs on the best eight, because we have not engaged those children early enough in their schooling in that curriculum.

Chair: Sorry; could you just explain that again?  I did not follow.

Julian King-Harris: We need to engage the white FSM boys much earlier in their stage in education.  You could argue two, three, four or five, but once they get into the secondary sector, I think one of my colleagues here has written a paper saying that the gap between our children at age 10 is great.  We have got to get them earlier, and then when we get them into the secondary sector, we have got to be able to offer them a curriculum that is applicable to them and that is measured, and counts as the same measure, as the best eight, in terms of Ofsted gradings.

Dr Jerrim: I was going to point out that a lot of this conversation at the moment is about secondary schools and the GCSE years, but when we are talking about what measures we should be using, surely the liveliest debate at the moment is in primary-school years, where there are issues around changing the Key Stage 2 test and the idea of potentially baselining when kids enter school.

              Chair: Preschool, as well.  I mean, you have got a combination of the two-year-old offer as well, expanding out the hours for three and four year olds, plus bringing in a wholly new provision for two year olds. 

Mr Ward: Do you think that class politics, which is out of fashion and has been for a while, ought to have a bit of a comeback?

              Chair: I am not sure that that is a question that this particular panel is necessarily equipped to answer, David, but I think we know your answer.

Q27   Mr Ward: In the ’60s and ’70s, there was an increasing number of young people who were able to say, “I am the first in my family to ever go to university”.  The current generation cannot say that now, because their mums or dads tended to, and that is the case within the teaching profession.  David, you have talked about the problem of focusing on a group being that the group becomes the problem, as opposed to looking at their experiences.  Do you think that possibly, within schools, the changing nature of the workforce in schools—which is predominantly now becoming middle-class—has an impact at all upon the experiences of working-class children? 

Professor Gillborn: It does.  To your initial question, I think an intelligent debate around class is long overdue, and again, one that avoids that kind of deficit analysis.  There is a kind of common-sense assumption that if a particular group is doing less well, it is their fault.  The other extreme is to automatically seek to blame teachers or head teachers, or blame Ofsted.  Actually, schools are really complicated institutions, and a lot of the things that we take for granted within those institutions do not help us achieve the goals that we want.  If we want more kids from families like the ones you described—I was the first in my family to stay in education beyond the legal minimum—then not only do we need more information to understand where the blocks are, we need to actually try to find other ways of educating kids outside of selecting them. 

In primary schools, there is selection between different desks.  Even kids sitting in the same room are covering less of the curriculum, because that table is judged to have more ability than this table, and we know that ability is a complex, multi-faceted thing that changes over time.  Yet our society treats ability as if it is something that you are stamped with internally, and if you have more ability at five, you are going to have more ability throughout.  The clues that schools and teachers use to identify the kids that will achieve and that will tick the boxes, are shaped by prejudices around class, around gender, around ethnicity and around disability.  The way in which we organise education makes it increasingly unlikely that kids from non-traditional backgrounds will excel, because the system is set against them.

Q28   Siobhain McDonagh: Except that is not exactly true, is it?  I want it to be true, but it is not true.  Part of the reason I wanted this as an investigation of the Education Select Committee was that I come from a suburban south London constituency, which I have always lived in, and I see different ethnic groups doing differentially in school.  I can show you groups who have absolutely nothing, who are on free school meals; their kids will end up in the medical schools of London.  I can show you indigenous families who may have twice the amount of money who will not get on.  I think part of your experience in Lambeth will be the London Challenge and how successful, in a way, education has been at targeting particular ethnic groups that previously had little chance and now have a chance.  For me, I am not sure we have done the same.

Professor Gillborn: There is that model, that kind of stereotype, of the migrant family with little economic resource, but absolutely valuing education and pushing through.  There is strong support for education amongst many minority ethnic groups, but similarly, I can show you well-qualified middle-class black Caribbean parents who go into school for meetings with their teachers and are treated like they are idiots, as if they know nothing about the system.  Class is not that simple, one-dimensional thing, and the inequalities in the system work around those different forces.  It is absolutely vital to have a debate about how we can raise achievement for this particular underachieving group, but it must not close down those other areas. 

Q29   Mr Ward: This is a very, very large group that we are talking about, which are underachieving.  If all of those, or a vast majority of those, were, for instance, BME, then we would not accept that.  We would see that as clear evidence of racism within the system, and we would immediately do something about that.  Yet, if it is white working class, we are clearly not responding to that, because this is going on generation after generation.  It is the politics of that.

Dr Jerrim: I am not completely certain what the question is to answer.

Professor Gillborn: I do not think that is the case.  There is a belief in this society that white people are treated more harshly in many respects than minority ethnic groups.  The facts do not back that up.  If you look at the statistics on educational attainment, black Caribbean communities are some of the most highly aspirant parents and communities that have set up their own schools for decades, and yet, in terms of achievement, are one of the lowest-achieving groups.  They are much more likely to be permanently expelled from school.

Q30   Chair: So why do Chinese children appear, regardless of the income background, to do pretty well?  Compare and contrast the fates of Chinese children and black Caribbean children.

Professor Gillborn: Professor Francis, who is going to speak later, has done some of the key work on the Chinese groups.  I will leave that to her, but one of the things I would point out in terms of the research on how different minority groups are treated is that there is a huge difference in teachers’ expectations between a Chinese student and a black student.  They are both minority ethnic, but the expectations are totally different.  If you had a Chinese and a black Caribbean student predicted to achieve a C grade in science, most white teachers will say to the Chinese student, “You are underachieving; you are capable of excelling,” whereas they would tend to talk to a black Caribbean student on the same grade and say. “You are doing really well; you are going to get a C.”  Those differences work through the whole system, and are incredibly powerful.

Q31   Mr Ward: The point I am trying to get at is that if we identify that there is a problem with black Caribbean children, that is accepted as being something we must address.  It is simply unacceptable, and we must do what we can to address that.  If there is this large group of white working class—and we have seen the evidence in terms of that—there is not that same, “This is simply not acceptable”.

Professor Gillborn: There should be for both, but I do not think there is—

Dr Demie: Can I come in on this?  Yes, we have made an error nationally in never having a strategy focusing on this group.  It needs to be recognised that the white working class are really underachieving.  There is no doubt, in terms of statistics.  What you have said is quite right.  In the past, a number of national strategies were very effective in addressing a number of these issues, including black Caribbean and ethnic minority underachievement.  There was the London Challenge, which has already been mentioned, some of the focus work that has been done, and some of the focus work that a lot of local authorities are doing.  What we really need to do is think differently now.  There are a number of other groups—not only white working-class groups; other groups who come from eastern Europe—who are really underachieving in the British educational system.  We need to have a very clear national strategy that actually focuses on this group, in terms of raising achievement and narrowing the achievement gap.  We have the Pupil Premium now, which is really a lot of use for disadvantaged people, but unless you have ring-fenced funding that focuses on particular groups and ensures that we are narrowing the achievement gap, I do not think you will achieve whatever you want in terms of raising achievement in these groups.  I really feel there should be ring-fenced funding for a number of groups at the national level.

Q32   Siobhain McDonagh: Why do children classed as “any other white” tend to perform better than white British children?  What is known about children in this category?  Are they Irish?

Professor Gillborn: In those census categories, the “any other” is an indication that it is just mopping up the people who do not tick the boxes that have been created above.  So, although you can actually find books written about the “any others”, the real answer is that it is such a disparate group, and usually they are relatively small in relation to the other groups above them, that it is difficult to say anything sensible about them as if they were a homogeneous unit.

Q33   Chair: Do you agree, John?

Dr Jerrim: Yes, they are not really a group as I would think of a group.  They are almost the odds-and-ends that did not fit into any other group.

Julian King-Harris: If you took Slough, a third of the white boys fit into the category you have just mentioned.  They are a disparate group from different countries and different ethnicities.

Chair: Are a lot of them recent eastern European immigrants?

Julian King-Harris: In Slough, a huge number.  There is a huge number of Polish, and there has been a big influx into Slough in the past five years.

Q34   Chair: Are recent immigrant communities more aspirational?  Do they tend to perform better than the poorest indigenous white communities?  Is that an explanation why “any other” might do better, or are you sticking to your point that there is nothing sensible to be understood by it?

Professor Gillborn: The circumstances between the different migrant groups, the different regions, the amount of infrastructure, whether there is a sizable community that can offer support for them in existence—all of those factors are hugely important.  I do not think you would simply expect students from eastern Europe to perform in a certain way.  You really need to look at those infrastructure questions.

Dr Jerrim: Having more de-categorised information about those groups would actually be one way to start teasing out some of these things.

Dr Demie: If I may point out, I did some work on “white other”, which really means eastern European, using the DfE National Pupil Database information.  You would be very surprised to see that a number of groups we are talking about are actually underachieving at the national level.  I can tell you, for example, that only about 40% of Portuguese achieve five A* to Cs.  For the Polish, about 39% achieve five A* to Cs, and also Hungarians, Latvians, Slovaks and Czechs all are really underachieving, once you start digging the data out in a different form.  It is really wrong to say, actually, some of those groups are really doing well in British schools.  We have a lot of challenges to address. 

The problem we have is the way we analyse the data.  I really do not think we should continue doing “white British” as one group.  It is really important, whatever the statistics we bring out, to at least sub-divide those who are free school meals and not free school meals.  The same applies with other groups.  We need to also avoid this “white other” or “black African” group, which actually gets really complicated in terms of getting an insight into what the information actually tells us.

Q35   Siobhain McDonagh: Is there a need for policies to be focused in particular on the performance of white working-class boys, or on girls?

Dr Jerrim: I can tell you some information that I have looked at recently, thinking about maths.  I guess there is always an undertone in speeches that the problem is with white working-class boys, more so than girls, but if you look at PISA and you look at the maths test scores there, it is actually the girls who do worse than the boys.  There might, obviously, be separate policies that are differentially effective for boys versus girls, but I certainly would not overplay any gender aspect to this.  I do not think you need to separate “white working class” as a group into white working-class boys versus white working-class girls.

Q36   Chair: Does anyone disagree with that?

Professor Gillborn: In terms of gender, overall, girls in each ethnic group—including the majority—often do better than boys, but when you compare girls in different ethnic groups and social-class groups, there are the predictable inequalities.  It would be very dangerous to slip into a situation where we are only looking at one gender and one ethnicity.

Q37   Siobhain McDonagh: Is gender a relevant consideration when targeting interventions to improve performance of white working-class children?

              Julian King-Harris: I understand the question.  The interventions that you introduce, whether the child is boy or girl, are going to be very dependent on the needs of that particular individual.  I would not as a head teacher, or as someone in charge of school improvement, say, “We can apply that to a group of girls and this to a group of boys”.  Yes, we know there are curriculum issues that are more friendly to girls at some point during the course of their education than they are to boys, but I would tend to make sure that when we put something in place to intervene, it is about that individual person.

Dr Jerrim: I would say yes, but it often depends on what the intervention or the policy is.  What is going through my head is possible role-model effects, where you have got broken families, and so a working-class boy may never have a male role-model, for instance.  There is that gender dimension there.

Q38   Chair: Is there any evidence that that has a negative impact?

Dr Jerrim: It is like any piece of research.  There is some evidence that says yes, and some evidence that says no.

Q39   Chair: Previously, we have not yet heard of evidence.  When you look at the quarter of primary schools with no male teachers at all, and you think of children with no male at home, you would think there would be a negative impact, but so far, whenever we have made inquiries, we have always been told that actually, there is no evidence to suggest that does have a measurable negative impact, despite one’s intuitive sense of the opposite.

Dr Jerrim: I would not say I am a particular expert in this area.  I would need to go back and look up more details, but you could certainly see how it could potentially have an influence.

Professor Gillborn: If you look at role model research in other areas, the work that moves beneath the surface tends to suggest that what matters is not necessarily ticking a box in terms of gender or even ethnicity, but linking people with folks who can make a connection with them.  That, really, is the thing that makes the difference.

Q40   Mr Raab: There appears to be this gap, based on the evidence, between white pupils on free school meals and pupils on free school meals from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds.  Just based on the data that you are aware of, what do you think are the reasons that explain this group difference? 

Professor Gillborn: You have a group, in terms of white free‑school‑meals students, who are often living in pronounced economic disadvantage.  There are very powerful stereotypes at work in the system, in terms of the kinds of expectations that can be made of those groups.  One of the ways, interestingly, that sometimes racialised stereotypes can work in unexpected ways is the assumption that education will be more prized in certain minority households than in white free-school-meal ones.  Sometimes, you can actually find yourself slipping again into the kind of deficit assumptions, as we mentioned earlier, around all­white housing estates.

Q41   Mr Raab: You said this before, and it is interesting.  I can imagine that there is a reinforced element through stereotypes, but are you saying that there are no causal underpinnings within the communities themselves that are driving this, and are later reflected in the stereotypes coming back?

Professor Gillborn: If you look at the available evidence, you cannot simply say the fault lies on one side or the other.  You have communities where, historically, there is not a lot of success in school; where relationships with schools for the parents have been strained when they were young; where, when the parents go into school, they are often treated as a kind of dangerous presence, rather than being welcomed in and seen as a resource.  They are often seen as quite a scary presence.

Q42   Mr Raab: I understand all that, and you have made your point very cogently, but, for example, you can look at the performance of Bangladeshi pupils; we have heard already about Chinese pupils who have also come through from very poor backgrounds.  Folklore in this country is that the Indian Ugandans that came over here did incredibly well.  A lot of this people intuitively feel is about parental expectation.  It may be a mixture of the two, but what, based on the evidence—before we get to the stereotypes reinforcing it—do you think counts?

Professor Gillborn: If you look at the Bangladeshi community, they used to be seen as one of the most underachieving groups.  Overall, they have now overtaken white British kids.  A sizable proportion of Bangladeshi kids in the statistics are educated not just in London but in Tower Hamlets.  If you look at Tower Hamlets, you have an authority there that really takes seriously the different position and needs of Bangladeshi students, and Tower Hamlets has almost been a model in terms of how to plan for and support Bangladeshi students.

Q43   Mr Raab: What are those differences?

Professor Gillborn: It is about taking seriously where students are starting from and where they are coming from.  It is not a one-size-fits-all.  If parents need school communications in a community language, that can be tremendously helpful, and does not cost a fortune.  But where those things have been withdrawn in other parts of the country, it just reinforces the gap between schools.

Q44   Mr Raab: So a linguistic level playing field is one thing.  Any others?  I can totally understand you saying, “Well, actually, do you know what?  The group is not itself the issue; it is the individuals and the families, taking the economic and social factors at a granular level.”  But you were not saying that.  You were saying that Tower Hamlets had focused quite cleverly and astutely on the Bangladeshi issues, and apart from a linguistic level playing field, I wondered what they were.

Professor Gillborn: It is about making solid links with the community.  Schools in Tower Hamlets do not view themselves as islands; they work very closely with their home communities.  There was a large piece of work a few years ago called New Deal for Communities, and the education strand of that looked at how you could raise achievement in often what were predominantly-white disadvantaged estates.  Some of the more effective work was about going out, building links with communities, and helping communities to feel comfortable about coming into schools and expressing what they wanted from education.

Q45   Mr Raab: That is very useful.  Is there anyone else who would like to comment on this specific issue, looking at the group difference between white pupils on free school meals and the others that have done better?  You have got the tendency of the local authority or the education system to reinforce stereotypes—we have heard that very clearly—and then there is this other issue around, whether it is parental expectations or language, the problems that lie within the community itself that white working families or policy-makers ought to be learning from.  Does anyone have anything to say on the community side of that debate?

Dr Demie: It is a very difficult thing.  I do feel that the immigrant community has really a migrant mentality, with very high aspirations in terms of education.  Particularly, I will take the African group here.  They all want to achieve very high when they come here, despite their poverty.  I would really like to see a lot of aspiration-raising among parents within the United Kingdom, particularly for those groups.  It starts with the parents, really; the extent to which the parents help their children is a bit different when you compare with white British as a group.

Q46   Chair: But ethnic minorities, where they have been here for a long time, have seen an improvement in the performance of their children; the white population lags behind.  Dominic’s question is whether there is anything we could learn about what has gone on.  Something must have changed, assuming the people fundamentally, culturally and aspirationally—unless you have got reason to think otherwise—have not changed.  What has changed in the system that has met their needs, and is there anything we can learn to apply to white children?

              Pat Glass: I know in Tower Hamlets, they did some stuff around language and communication, but also around culture.  They provided halal food, so kids were not going all day without eating.  They changed the toilets.  The toilets were a big thing, so kids were not going home at lunchtime and not coming back, or holding it all day—just simple, practical things.

              Siobhain McDonagh: Possibly they were identifying it as an issue.  The community itself thought, “Oh, my God.  We do not want to be the bottom of anybody’s list.”

              Chair: I am going to stop this becoming a seminar, interesting though it is.

Julian King-Harris: Can we ask you?

              Chair: No, you cannot ask us any questions, and I am also going to keep order.  Would any of the witnesses that we are here to listen to like to comment?

Julian King-Harris: I am not sure this directly answers your question, but in Slough, we have a large number of ethnic minority children, and schools pay particular attention to those because they are coming into the country, very often, and providing the language support and issues like that.  We have not done that, or focused on it in the same way, for white FSM boys.  It does start, as you mentioned earlier, at about the age of two.  There is free childcare at two, three, and then the children come in to children’s centres, and there needs to be far better co-ordinated work between children’s centres and schools.  They are very often separate institutions, because the best schools provide those kind of parenting skills as well as language courses, as well as issues around the families to do with anger and conflict.  They have those inside their schools, as you were describing.  The worst examples are where schools never engage with their local community at all, but they need to do more with white FSM pupils.

Q47   Mr Ward: On the Bangladeshi community, I could go and say, “This is happening in Tower Hamlets; I am going to go to the local authority and make sure we are doing that.”  Where would I go to say to my white working-class community, “I am going to find where these people are doing it really, really well, and we are going to look to do that in Bradford?”

Julian King-Harris: There are lots of examples.  Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire are the pioneers of community schools where the schools are the centre of the community, and where everything in that community operates within that organisation: childcare, and all sorts of things.  There are examples to show people where that is going on in the country.

Mr Ward: With the white working class?

Julian King-Harris: Yes, in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire.

Q48   Ian Mearns: Obviously, coming from a remote part of England, like I do, I am interested in regional variations.  I know we have got representatives here from Slough and Lambeth who have been working intensively in those communities, where there have been quite different outcomes over a period for youngsters.  How has the performance of white working-class children changed over time in Slough and in Lambeth? 

Dr Demie: In Lambeth, everything has been transformed over a period of time.  In 1997, when I joined the local authority, it was far below the national average.  Now, in every area, including white British, we are performing, in terms of the five-A*-to-Cs indicator, above the national average.  What made the difference?  Sometimes you have to have very innovative school improvement services, which are supported by data.  We are in partnership with schools that have been initiating a lot of work on good practice research, where we bring them, share what worked in our schools, and where head teachers come together to share those good practices.  The same happens with white working class.  In 2010 and 2009, we were really very worried that some groups were underachieving.  Today, the performance has gone up above national average.  What made a big difference was partnership between heads and the regional local authority, and that has narrowed the performance gap; the performance has continued to improve there.  It applies to almost all groups in Lambeth, whether white British or African, really.

Julian King-Harris: I have seen the figures you printed in the report about Slough, and the gap between white FSM and the rest.  That is a very distorted picture, I have to say, because Slough has the highest proportion of grammar schools in the country per population, and that distorts the five A*-to-Cs figure. 

Ian Mearns: So do all the kids go across the river to Eton?

Julian King-Harris: In Slough, there are as many children who go out as come in.  I think the Pupil Premium is making a significant impact.  This year, in Slough, among white FSM boys there is an increase of 10% at Key Stage 2 and 6.7% at GCSE, and that will continue to have an effect as long as the policies that people put in place remain, and give schools the consistency to make that change take place.  The problem we have had—and it applies to things like the one-to-one tuition, which proved to be very successful—is that when schools get something and it works, it needs a period of time to embed into the system.  Change is inevitable, I am not denying that, but constant change on some of those things that work is going to prove to be difficult.  The Pupil Premium has concentrated head teachers’ and teachers’ minds on the very group of people you would like, and we are seeing the benefit of that across the country, and will continue to do so.

Q49   Pat Glass: Can I just clarify here: are you talking about that improvement in Slough schools, or do you measure the attainment of Slough children who do not pass the 11-plus and go to grammar schools, and therefore go to secondary modern schools outside?

Julian King-Harris: No, that was in Slough schools.

Q50   Pat Glass: Do you have concerns about Slough children who are going outside?  Do you measure their attainment?

Julian King-Harris: Thank you—that is a question we have been asking other schools in the local authorities to provide us with.  We do not have that detail, and we rely on them to provide us with how well our children who are leaving Slough and are educated in Windsor, Maidenhead and South Bucks are doing.  Some schools co-operate with us; some schools are not that keen to release some of the data by postcode of the Slough children.

Q51   Ian Mearns: There are variations in Slough, Thames Valley, and Lambeth.  I have got a flat in Kennington, so I am very lucky; I have got good schools around me if I wanted to live there all the time.  It is a very different playing field, and you are talking about school improvement services.  Outside of London, have local authorities got the capacity to provide those school improvement services any more, because of the fragmentation of the school estate and with the academisation of free schools?

Dr Demie: Local authorities are changing as much as, nationally, a lot is changing.  One way of working with a school is trading with a school.  If you have a school improvement team that a school are very happy to use, they are ready to pay for that service.  That is why I really emphasise partnership between the local authority and the schools.  The way it works is trading, and those teams are still there; they were there before, and they are supporting the schools.  We are very successful in working with Lambeth schools.

Q52   Ian Mearns: I am just wondering about the factors in terms of regional variations.  Has anybody done any work on, for instance, the long-term employment market in an area having a depressing impact on aspiration, for instance?  Has anybody had a look at that?  Because, for instance, in the north-east of England, we were getting a steady increase in school aspiration and school results, but now it seems to be falling back to a certain extent in some areas, based on youngsters feeling, “What am I doing this for, because there is nothing at the end of it?”  Has anybody done any work on that?

Professor Gillborn: I am not aware of particular work on that, but I do know that there has been some really good work around ex-coal fields and addressing the knock-on effects there of significant changes in the removal of what, historically, has been the major employer.  That would probably address some of those issues.

              Chair: Thank you very much indeed for giving evidence to us today.  If you have any further thoughts, particularly in terms of recommendations you would like to see in our report, then please do be in contact.  Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Becky Francis, Professor of Education and Social Justice, King’s College London, Loic Menzies, Director, LKMco, Jenny North, Director of Policy and Strategy, Impetus – The Private Equity Foundation, and Professor Robert Plomin, Professor of Behavioural Genetics, King’s College London, gave evidence.

Q53   Chair: Welcome.  Thank you for joining us, and I am glad you had the opportunity to listen to the first panel.  I will just warm you up; we have got a lot to cover in a limited time.  Are there reflections, differences of opinion, or nuances that need to be added to what you have just heard?  Anybody want to take issue?  Becky, I saw you.  You were waving at the back; I think you were hoping to be brought in.  I may not be able to control my Committee, but I am determined to at least control the audience in the back. 

Professor Francis: Quite rightly so.  There are a couple of points I wanted to come in on, really.  One was around the performance indicators question that Pat asked.  I personally feel that the newly proposed indicators for 2016 will make a real difference here.  It is a good balance of focusing on the basics, the maths and English, and prioritising that; also, keeping options open for elite and appreciated career paths, access to higher education and so on through the little basket of EBacc qualifications; but also, fundamentally, allowing more flexibility in recognition for high-quality vocational and also arts and so on, which I think will be really important for maintaining engagement and interest.  We have heard there is a risk of kids zoning out of their education if they are having to study lots of qualifications that they cannot succeed in.  I think it is a good balance that will incentivise schools to keep options open for as long as possible, which we know is incredibly important for working-class kids, but also to give value to kids’ own interests.  I think it is a good balance.

I also wanted to come back on the male teachers thing, which has been a key element of my own research in the past on gender and teaching, and just really put that one to bed.  Kids care about teachers that are high-quality and care about them.  They are not very interested in the gender of the teacher.  Actually, some of the quantitative research in this area tends to suggest that, actually, there is no statistically significant difference in terms of outcomes when you match gender, and sometimes there seems to be some indication that boys do better with a female teacher.  Really, there is no evidence to support that thesis.

Jenny North: I wanted to make the point—I think everyone is aware of this, but it does bear bringing out—that there is no golden age of white working-class male educational attainment that we should be looking back to. 

              Chair: You just said “male.”

Jenny North: We have been focusing on white working-class boys.  Again, we are not sure, really, if there is a golden age of female white working-class attainment, but we can be sure that there was not one for boys.  Grammar schools are a bit of a canard here, because it was such a small proportion of white working-class kids who went to grammar schools; we cannot say that was a golden age of attainment.  This is a long tale of educational failure for the working classes, or poor attainment for the working classes in this country, and that is a huge barrier in trying to raise attainment now, because you are looking at children who are coming from families that have a multi-generational experience of school not being great for them. 

One of the respondents in our consultation of the charities that we work with felt, having worked with kids from immigrant backgrounds and from indigenous backgrounds in this country, that having a parent who had failed themselves at school was a far greater barrier than English as a second language, because they were coming from a family not necessarily of low aspirations but of low evidence-based expectations of what school would deliver for them.  It is really important to remember that the league tables that came in, I think, in the 1980s and 1990s only exposed the gap between working-class boys and the rest.  They did not contribute to it.  Girls’ acceleration and ethnic minority acceleration of performance has not pushed white working-class boys’ attainment down.  It has simply exposed what was already there.

Loic Menzies: Ian’s point about regional differences in location is really important.  We know there is a big issue here, so we need to really track the story behind this, and that means thinking about the location; it means thinking about the trajectory these kids are on; and it means thinking about what has caused that and where they have started from.  We know that there is a huge difference between somewhere like London and the north-east.  Here we have got about 42% of kids in London schools who are white; it is about 92% in the north­east.  If we then compare what kind of schools we have got, we know that if you look at the schools serving the most disadvantaged communities in London, about three-quarters of those have good or outstanding teaching.  That figure is about a third in the north-east.  It is not really that much of a surprise that there is then a huge difference in the attainment of those kids in the different regions.  The picture is even worse when you compare leadership in those schools. 

Q54   Chair: There is also the issue of rural and coastal, which includes parts of the north-east, but London housing is phenomenally expensive.  There is London weighting, but nonetheless, relatively speaking a teacher is probably a lot poorer relative to the rest of the community in London than they are in the north-east, so why would it be that London can attract high-quality teachers and other parts of the country find it more difficult?

Loic Menzies: That is a mystery, and that is one of the things that we need to be looking at: how we mobilise that knowledge and skill from London to other areas, and how we share that.  There are some great examples now of heads from other parts of the country coming to visit in London, trying to share some of our information, but the location is not just about the teaching.  We have also got to think about what kind of opportunities are available to those communities, as Ian said.  It is very different to be a kid in Tower Hamlets or Newham who wants to go into the professions or whatever and has that at their door—who does not have to leave their community—and to be someone who, if they wanted to do that, would need to leave their community and make quite a big jump.  What we need to think about is how we manage that, as well.  There is a real issue of people’s sense of their own loyalty to their community in that kind of situation, as well.

Q55   Chair: Are you making a separate point from the educational one about where they end up, or are you saying that the fact that they do not have opportunities on their doorstep affects their motivation, and thus achievement at school?

Loic Menzies: I am saying that, when you then take the trajectory they are on—because they may well start off wanting to do those things—when they are struggling in school and when they realise just how difficult it is to achieve those ends that they want to get to, they seem to fall off in their aspirations.

Professor Plomin: It might be too pedantic, but I think it is important for the Committee to make sure they understand the difference between variance and means.  So much of this discussion about regional differences, boys and girls, and PISA is countries, average differences.  People like averages.  You can say, “We are better than them, and we are worse than them”, but it is variance that matters when you talk about effect size.  The thing you ought to ask all the witnesses is, “What is the effect size?”  What is the effect size of PISA?  How much is the variance?  You take all the kids’ scores on PISA and you get a normal distribution.  That means half of them are below average—the Lake Wobegon effect—and some of them are going to be in Boris Johnson’s standard deviation below the mean; it follows from this normal distribution.

The thing you want to ask is, “How much of the variance?  What is the effect size of these various factors?”  How much of the variance of PISA results can be explained by country?  I asked John Jerrim about it before this; he does not know.  It is the fundamental question.  How big are these differences?  They are not absolute difference, so how much of the variance is explained by that?  How much of the variance is explained by gender?  It is negligible.  How much of the variance in national curriculum scores is explained by schools, and everything that goes with schools?  You have got the total scores of kids on, say, GCSEs; they are normally distributed.  Now, you ask about those differences in the kids.  How much of those differences can be explained by which school they went to?  It is about 20%.

Q56   Alex Cunningham: We see huge difference in a class.  Is that down to the child that arrives at school?  Is it the working-class thing?  Is it the lack of aspiration?

Professor Plomin: That is my point.  Schools do not account for a lot of the variance, because within a classroom or within a school, you have almost the full range of differences.  When schools only explain 20% of the variance, it means there are a lot of kids at the worst schools who outperform a lot of the kids at the best schools.  It is the effect size that is important.  Variance is tough for people to get their heads around.

Q57   Chair: What about the effect size of the teachers?  I think the previous Chief Inspector of Schools said the variance of teacher quality within schools is greater than between schools.  We always talk about “good schools”, “bad schools”, or “outstanding schools”, but in fact the variance, according to her, is greater within schools.  What is the effect size of that bell curve of teachers?

Professor Plomin: It is technically difficult to answer.  I do not know the answer to it.

Loic Menzies: There is also the question of thinking about which of these aspects we can affect, and which we cannot.  If we know there is 20% variance, that is at least 20% that we can impact on and do something about, because we know that there are schools that are serving those kids very well, and those kids will then do better.  Given that we can do that, that is a good place to start.

Jenny North: That comes back to the aspiration point, which was mentioned obliquely, and I know is a thing that comes up again and again in this conversation.  We are all fascinated with the idea that there might be something to do with aspiration within the family background that leads to attainment, but when you look at the literature, while there is quite a lot of correlation between aspiration and attainment, they have tried to find causality and they just cannot.  Going beyond that, when they have looked at interventions that specifically seek to raise aspiration, they can see no link between that and attainment.

Q58   Chair: What about action, then?  You are talking about aspiration, but typically people come back and say, “Everyone has high aspiration, it turns out”, so the idea that people do not is wrong.  But, actually, if you then ask, “How often do you read to your kids?  Have you ever spent any of your money on their education?”  That is obviously linked to how much money you have got, but you can compare different groups that may not have a lot of money.  Some spend money on the further enrichment and education of their children; others do not.  If you make it action-oriented, rather than aspiration-oriented, do you find interesting differences?

Jenny North: Certainly, the most promising area of intervention is around parental involvement and parental behaviour in education.  When I say “promising”, I am being quite specific here.  There is not a massive, undisputed body of evidence showing a clear causal link for changing behaviours then changing attainment, but there is far more for that than there is for raising aspirations or changing attitudes towards schooling.  That is where people like my organisation, which puts money behind policy organisations, will certainly be looking to invest over the next few years.

Q59   Chair: Does private tutoring make a difference, and are there differences between ethnic groups in their tendency to spend their money on private tutoring?

Jenny North: It is an interesting question.  One-to-one tuition is rated moderately impactful by the Education Endowment Foundation, and that is the headline figure.  There is stuff to unpick around whether you can do to one-to-three tuition, and how great the dosage of tuition has to be to make a difference.  I have not seen data on ethnic variation for the effect of tutoring, but you will be aware that there are several randomised control trials happening around the tuition, and whether we can, in a few years’ time, say whether it definitively makes a difference for low-income children.

Q60   Chair: There seems to be a correlation between strong interest in private tuition in-country and their performance.  In Singapore, in every shopping centre we went past, there were tutorial schools everywhere, and South Korea apparently has a great tendency to do that.  Becky?

Professor Francis: I think what you were talking about earlier is cultural and social capital, and when we talk about aspirations, you are absolutely right: there is a lot of evidence that working-class families have high aspirations.  What they do not have is the information and the understanding as to how you might mobilise that aspiration effectively for outcomes for your children.  Money makes a big difference here, as you have identified, but also understanding the rules of the game.  The recent report that I have done with my colleague Merryn Hutchings for the Sutton Trust really shows some of the differentials here.  It is partly about money, and having that to spend on private tuition and so on; there is a discrepancy for ethnicity there.  Of course, there is getting into the right catchment for a good school and so on, but it is also about the different sorts of information that parents are accessing and the differentials are really clear; albeit, perhaps, not quite so distinct according to social class as some of the research has previously suggested.  There are some working-class parents who are mobilising school choice in the way that we anticipate middle-class parents to do, and, indeed, some middle-class parents that are not behaving in those ways as well, which we sometimes forget.

Q61   Ian Mearns: I do not know this for definite, but it is kind of an intuitive feeling that I have got: we are focusing on the underachievement of white working­class kids, and I have got a funny feeling that the parents of white working-class kids do not in great numbers embark on spending the little money they have got within their household on private tuition.  Is that an over-generalisation?

Jenny North: It is whether private tuition might have a part to play in schools that is the interesting question.  There are schools trialling that approach now.  The Every Child a Reader programme was effectively one-to-one tuition, which I believe is no longer happening, but it had good results.  There are several trials happening in schools now.

              Chair: If we define it as free school meals, then it is very unlikely that people with such low means will spend money on this.

Loic Menzies: I do not know how it breaks down by ethnicity, but what you can see, if you take, for example, the EPPSE study that looked at kids who performed against the odds, what they talk about is the importance of active cultivation, so to speak, which is about their home environment.  Even in families that are disadvantaged, it is about having that kind of environment, where there is the reading and so on that we talk about.  But what is important there is that it is not any of this myth that you have about lazy parents and so on.  It is often about that know-how that Becky talked about, and we do have information about effect sizes on those kinds of interventions that are about helping parents to understand what ways they can talk to their kids and how they can help them with reading, and so on.  Those factors can make a really big difference.

              Ian Mearns: All too often, as a governor, when I have come across some youngsters who have gone off the rails educationally, it is not because they have got lazy parents; it is because they have got parents who are working all the hours that God sends, and therefore, because they are working all the hours that God send, they are not engaged actively as much as they would like to be in the activity of parenting their children.

Q62   Alex Cunningham: What can Government actually do to make sure that parents can access, or can understand, what is available and what they need to be doing?  What can Government do to change things?

              Chair: And is what they are doing working?

Professor Francis: Specifically around parents, I have suggested two elements in the Sutton Trust report that I have produced.  One is, really, to facilitate engagement and empowerment of working-class parents: we have suggested education enrichment vouchers, means-tested and directed to working-class families, to be able to spend on a range of educational activities for their children from the early years, which we think would engage but, as I say, crucially, empower parents to be involved with decision making around their kids’ education.  The second point has gone out of my head.

Q63   Mr Ward: I am interested in this subject of aspirations.  There is, certainly within the Muslim community, a tradition of doing something other than school and paying for it through the madrassah, so it is quite interesting in terms of the possible difference between white working-class communities and other communities regarding home tuition or doing something other.  But, in terms of the aspirations, there is certainly no shortage of those within the BME community who know they are underperforming and want to do something about it.  Do you have the same sense within the white working-class community that, “We are not doing well enough, and somebody needs to do something?”

Professor Francis: Obviously, I have done a lot of work around the British Chinese.  In relation to some of the discussion earlier, I have got some thoughts there.  What we need to remember about working-class families is that, almost by definition, they have had bad experiences themselves of our UK education system.  It has not realised their aspirations; it has not helped them.  They want, often, to protect their children from the painful experiences that they had themselves going through education.  We talk about resilience; if you are placed in a low set or a low-ability table from age six, pick up the messages that you are being told about your place in the education system, and then you go through school in a low set, you are pretty resilient to survive at all, I would say, and come out intact. 

There are those encultured issues for the white working classes in British society, which are very distinct from migrant families coming in, who are, in a way, fresh to the system.  Some of them actually have quite well-educated backgrounds.  Others, including the first-generation British Chinese families that I studied, are often very low-educated; often, interestingly, very low interaction with the school, but with incredibly high aspirations.  Really, success in education is being seen as an absolutely fundamental part of what it means to be Chinese in the UK.  A lot of effort is being put in—working all the hours that God sends in catering and so on—to pay for extra tuition and suchlike.  We actually found that there was an element of “good face”: in terms of community relations, the importance of your kids doing well at education in relation to this British Chinese identity.  That also must not be separated from what David mentioned earlier about the very high expectations of teachers for the British Chinese.  These two work absolutely hand in hand.

Q64   Pat Glass: Can I ask if there is any of that within white working­class communities?  Do you see anything, or does anyone have any evidence, of that kind of aspiration in white Jewish communities or white Catholic communities, or “white other” communities?

Professor Francis: It is a really good question.  Apart from the broad findings about high aspirations among white working-class parents, I am not aware of any studies particularly breaking that down.  Others might be.

Loic Menzies: What you can do is look at, in the Understanding Society survey, the proportion of kids from different ethnicities who are aspiring to different professions.  That is 10 to 15-year-olds, and there you see that the picture ethnically is not as mixed as you might think it is, and that the gaps are not that high.  What is really important is to come back to this question of the know-how and how you get there, linking together education as the route to, and knowing that doing things differently can lead to a different outcome in experiencing that.  This comes back to this issue of going off track.  As Becky said, the repeated experience of frustrations, of falling behind from an early age, and so on are the things that are causing people to no longer believe that going into school every day and doing these particular things will end up having an impact.  Again, going back to that EPPSE study, what they found was that when you did have interventions at an early stage to improve how kids were doing in terms of their reading and so on, one of the big ways that had an impact was that the kids were no longer feeling that they were the failure, or they could not do it.  They got back their pride in their ability to succeed, and this ties into Becky’s point about resilience.  At what point does it stop being rational to believe that you are going to succeed if every day you are not managing to read what is on the board?

Q65   Pat Glass: Can I talk about genetics and IQ?  I have to say, I feel slightly uncomfortable talking about IQ. 

Professor Plomin: Well, let’s not.  Let’s talk about educational achievement.

              Pat Glass: Can I just define first the children we are talking about?  I accept, if we are talking about raw IQ, children who have got an IQ below 70 are going to struggle enormously, but most children, as I understand it, are between 90 and 110.  Is that right?  Is that the average?

Professor Plomin: Well, no.  The average is 100; it is standardised to be 100, so it is that normal distribution.  That is where Boris Johnson gets his 15%.

Q66   Pat Glass: Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Michael Gove, said recently that discussions on social mobility that ignored genetics were “at best misleading and often worthless”.  Do you agree?

Professor Plomin: I think the topic that is before the Committee is achievement.  In a way, when I went to the Department for Education and talked to them, I did not use the word “intelligence”; I was talking about educational achievement.  We have a paper coming out next week, the first one on GCSE scores, for example, and we are interested in individual differences in GCSE scores.  What we are asking is, “To what extent are those differences between children due to genetic differences?”  I know that is anathema for a lot of people in education, but I really hope the Committee will take the important role of genetics seriously. 

In the media brouhaha following that Dominic Cummings report, I find there have been two major misunderstandings about what it means to say there is genetic influence.  The first is like Polly Toynbee’s headline about this, about 70% of a child’s reading ability being determined by genetics.  First, I would like to say that we are not talking about just significant effects; we are talking about very substantial effects.  If schools account for 20% of the variance, the research throughout the world points to about 50% of the variance being due to genetic differences between children, but that does not mean that 50% of your reading or math ability is due to genetics.  It is about the population, and on average, the differences between children in their reading ability are, say, 50% or so due to genetic, DNA differences between them.  It is a variance issue, and people have a lot of trouble understanding that.

The second one they have a lot of trouble understanding is that genetic influence does not mean pre-determinism or hard-wiring.  You do not learn to read or to speak unless you are exposed to an environment that lets you see letters and words and that sort of thing.  Words are not innate in your head; you have to learn to read.  But, as all of you who are parents know, some kids learn more readily, and some struggle to learn how to read.  That is the other thing that people mix up.  It does not mean innate; it just means that there are genetic influences and differences between children in how readily they learn to read or to do maths.

Q67   Pat Glass: I think what we wanted to try and establish is, “How important are those differences?”  I have seen children who come from the low socio-economic groups in one school that are outperforming children across a whole city.  How important is that basic intelligence, or is it just something like putty that we can take and mould?

Professor Plomin: I would really like to move away from intelligence.  We can talk about it, but it raises a lot of other red flags.  Why not talk about achievement, which is the topic here?  It is the same question, though, is it not—how important?  That is the effect size issue.  50% of the variance is due to genetic differences, and the science does not do that any more, because everybody knows that, but not in education.  There are some interesting things.  It occurs in the early school years just as much as GCSE, so at Key Stage 1.  It is just as heritable as at GCSE.

              Chair: Pat’s particular question was about the variance between schools.  If you take a particularly outstanding school in an impoverished area, they appear to be able to, through excellent practice, change achievement and outcomes.

Q68   Pat Glass: If we are talking about those children within that average group, with an IQ between 90 and 110, I had always understood that for that group of children—not the ones who are below that, who can make progress but face different challenges—the things that make a difference are parental aspirations; perhaps parental qualifications; the teacher makes a huge difference to those children; and the culture within the school.  Is that a reasonable understanding? 

Professor Plomin: You know, it feels so good, does it not?  But you have to ask “What is the effect size?  Where is the evidence?  How much of the variance is explained by those school effects, by parent aspirations, and by these other things?”  They are important, and we all believe in them, but when you get down to the hard science of it, they do not explain a lot of variance.  Whether they do or not, genetics, I am saying, explains 50% of the variance.  So how important is it?  50%.  It is 50% of the differences of all kids in schools.  As a parent, I do not care so much if one school is a bit better than another; I want to know about the effect size, and how much of the variance and how much of an effect it will have on children in the population.

Q69   Chair: But your numbers are taken system-wide, I assume.  I suppose, going to the point of Pat’s earlier question, how much elasticity is there in that school effect?  If you are saying the school effect is 20%, typically, how much is it when there is an exceptional school?  In other words, how much is there to play for in the elasticity of expanding the school effect?

Professor Plomin: There is a difference between what is and what could be, and science begins by describing what is.  We get GCSE scores.  These kids are from different schools, with parents with different aspirations, and their tutoring has differed.  All those things vary, right?  But, given all of that as it exists in Britain—these are GCSE scores; it does not refer to Uganda or some Eastern country—in this country, with these environmental and genetic differences that exist now, genetics accounts for 50% of the variance.

Q70   Chair: No, you have said that.  I was pushing you on whether that is true in the individual school.

Professor Plomin: But, see, that is “what is”—that is what is in the whole population.  What could be is a different issue.  Could you push children to do better?  Yes.  Do some kids do better than others in some schools with some teachers?  Yes.  But, overall, it is like asking the first descriptive question.

Loic Menzies: Professor Plomin has said, quite rightly, that we do not talk about this much in the field of education.  I guess one of the reasons for that is because we need to know what we would do with that information.  I have been a teacher, I have trained teachers, and I think, “Okay, now we know this, what can we do about it?”  Luckily, you have given us one really useful thing there that we can do about it and that we can put into practice, which is that there will be some kids who will find it harder than others.  We know that, but we can act on that.  That is something where we can say, “Right, because there will be some children who will find it harder at first, we need to do something to give them that extra help, so they do not have the immediate experience, as soon as they enter school, that they are behind and they are the slow one”.  That is a useful learning that we can take from that.  Apart from that, we need to work out what we can actually do differently that is going to be useful as a result of this understanding. 

Professor Plomin: I think where this will come in—and it is happening—is with DNA.  Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, says that within five years, all of us are going to have our DNA fully sequenced.  At that point, we really will—and it is happening already—begin to identify genes that account for some of the genetic influence on reading ability.  That will start getting us into a whole new world of making genetic predictions of risks, and it can do good.  I do not push the policy; I just think the science of this is so clear.  I feel like Alice in Wonderland or something.  It is completely the elephant in the classroom.  Nobody in education wants to take on the fact that genetics accounts for more variance than everything else put together.  Now, you can say, “It does not tell me exactly what to do right now”, but to ignore that seems to me to be incredible.  When the chips come out—they are called chips, which can identify people’s DNA differences—it is really going to change things fast. 

Q71   Chair: What is it going to mean?  Loic’s point was about what it means.  Part of the tremor of fear about this determinism is that it reinforces low expectations of children because they are poor, or because they are from an ethnic minority, and it creates an even less fair society than the one we have got.  That is the fear.  How would you see this scientific understanding affecting the education system when shared across it?

Professor Plomin: We have a book that came out a couple of weeks ago.  That is partly what this publicity has been about in the media, and we talk about policy implications there.  The first point to emphasise is that there are no necessary policy implications of finding genetic influence.  There are no necessary policy implications.  That depends on your values, which is almost always the case, is it not, with policy?  You could take genetic influence and have a right-wing agenda.  You could take genetic influence and have a left‑wing agenda, like the Finnish model, where you say that based on that, there are these individual differences that exist due to genetic differences that are going to be hard to erase; therefore, you might want to put all of your resources in the low end and define minimal levels of literacy and numeracy, and do what it takes to get kids up to that level so that they can participate in an increasingly technological society. 

That is a different level—the policy implication.  What I am most excited about is that it suggests to me a very different way of thinking about education.  You were kind of dismissing it in a way by saying, “It just tells us kids are different”, but does it?  I think it tells us a lot more.  It suggests that kids create their own environment genetically.  The DNA does not code for reading ability.  Kids differ in their appetites as well as their aptitudes, and they create and seek and modify environments that are correlated with their genetic propensities.  It suggests to me an active view of education that is literally leading out, rather than the old passive view of instruction, cramming in.

Q72   Chair: So we might have a different style of education, a different curriculum, or a different qualification path depending on the genetic analysis?  Is that what you are suggesting as a possibility, and therefore you are going to have something that is more relevant, and that better fits the environment that these children naturally would seek to create but do not get, because the school system forces them to do something else?

Professor Plomin: It is not, exactly.  What I want to do is just say, “Genetics is hugely important”.  Genetic research, for example, tells us more than just, “Genetics is important”; it tells us that the causes of underachievement are the same causes throughout the whole distribution.  That is important information.  There are not unique genetic causes of underachievement.  It is the same genetic and environmental causes that run throughout the distribution.  That is important.  It is the same genetics for boys and girls; the same genetics for early school years as later school years.  I think these are very important facts, and I am not a policy expert.  That is what you guys do.

Jenny North: One of the recommendations that we made for schools based on what our most successful charities do when they work one-on-one with kids was around better use of data, and I know that in the literature, the best-performing schools are using data really wisely.  You are looking for where the gaps are when children enter at 11, and then setting realistic but stretching targets for them, and checking on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis where they are not making progress; putting in interventions, testing interventions, and coming back to it.  If we are talking about more information that we could enter to make the data more robust and mean that resources are better targeted and that interventions that we try can be better tracked, as to whether they are making differences to individuals, that could be really useful.  It is a big gap in terms of implementation.  We should not just assume that schools would have the capacity and abilities to use that data smartly.

Professor Plomin: That is one example, though, where if you have a genetic perspective, you think about these things differently.  Most of the interventions we are talking about are supposed to have a mean effect.  You have got to ask about the variance.  Does it change the variance?  A lot of good things you do for schools will actually increase genetic influence.  If we are successful at making educational opportunity equal for children, many of our goals will actually end up creating more heritability and greater genetic differences, because you are equating environmental differences that exist and getting rid of some of those environmental differences, so that the differences between children that are left will be relatively more, due to genetic differences between them.  These are just examples.  You have an intervention, and you have got to watch that, because intervention sometimes increases variance.  We are only looking at means, very often.  The genetics at least has an impact on the way we think about these things.  When I go to teacher conferences and talk about this, I always get a teacher afterwards who says “Yes, but what good is this when I have this ADHD, reading-disabled child in my classroom?”  The answer is, probably, nothing.

Professor Francis: Presumably, you see this variance according to social class, and that is what we are not seeing at the moment.  With middle-class kids, presumably, there is variance there, but it is being addressed by all these cultural factors?

Professor Plomin: Are you saying there is no variance in the middle class?

Professor Francis: No, I am saying that presumably there is variance, but it is being equalised by the input that they are getting into their education.

Professor Plomin: How much of the variance in GCSE scores is explained by SES?

              Chair: We will not have a dialogue between witnesses, Socratic or otherwise.

Q73   Mr Ward: Is this not all about knowing individual child and where they are coming from?  I coach football, and there are those who are naturally fitter than others, so the others just have to work harder.  It is about identifying what it is, genetically, they are better at, and then ensuring that those who are less well in those areas receive whatever they need—it might just be more homework—to bring them up to an equal level.  The more you treat children who are unequal equally, the more you reinforce the inequality.  It is about realising this, whether it is genetically or otherwise.  It might be characteristics, or personality, that is different in each child, and then compensating for that with whatever is required.  Is that it?

Professor Plomin: That is basically what we say in our book.  It is not at a prescriptive level of policy yet.  It is just to say that this is hugely important, but we do say that one thing that would seem to follow from recognising and respecting genetic differences between children is that you do not just blame teachers, and you do not just blame parents.  Kids are different; they are different from birth.  They differ genetically, hugely.  It seems to us that personalised learning is one thing that almost follows conceptually from this, just along the lines you were saying.  Give the children opportunities to see what they are good at, and to see what they like to do.  I firmly believe that genetics is as much appetites—what you like to do—as it is aptitudes.  It is not just hard-wiring in the brain. 

              Mr Ward: But it is also what they are not good at necessarily, but therefore need some additional help with in some way.

Professor Plomin: To some level, yes.

Loic Menzies: I really agree with both of you there on the personalisation side of things, but not just from a genetic point of view.  At the moment, we have got a conception that, “Here is a group that is underperforming” or, “Here is another group that is underperforming, and we need to do something to sort that out”.  I was contacted by a school recently who said, “We have got a 40% attainment gap.  Can you come and do a 45-minute session for us on how to close that?”  Now, what you are talking about there is a very different process, which is about looking at a particular community of pupils or a particular pupil, working out what the specific barriers are that they are facing, and then bringing in interventions that address that. 

That sounds like something that is very hard for you to do on a policy level, but if you look at one of the interesting things about London Challenge, when they closed some of these gaps they did not necessarily say, “You all need to do this.”  They said, “Right, I want you to identify an issue in your school, plan how you are going to address that issue, and then here is a pot of funding that you can bid to to fund that plan.”  That takes us outside of the ring­fencing versus anything else funding formulae and so on.  It is about saying to people, “Really do some work, reflecting and analysing of what the issues are for your specific pupils, and then do something that is tailored to them, not just this one-size-fits-all 40% gap” or whatever it might be in a particular school.

Q74   Mr Raab: Just to take your analysis, Professor Plomin, one step further, I know you do not want to get drawn too much into the educational policy making side of things, but one of the points that I think Dominic Cummings, to some extent Boris Johnson, and others have been talking about in relation to genetics is the impact it has on social mobility.  There seems to be a debate between the LSE research on social mobility in this country and others, people such as Professor Saunders, who say we are making up a problem.  Politicians love talking about it but it is not the big problem they think it is, partly because of genetics.  I just wonder whether, over time, even in a perfectly meritocratic society with high social mobility, you will find that it will silt up because of the high influence of genetics that you are talking about.  Do you think that is correct, and what stage along is Britain?

Professor Plomin: That is a terrific question.  I am not an expert in that area, but here are my thoughts on it: if you realise social mobility, you will increase heritability.  Does everyone see that?  We look at social mobility and we assume that it is all environmental.  We do not like it, because we thinking parents are giving their children environmental advantages.  Nobody thinks about social mobility from a genetic point of view, but if you got rid of that environmental effect of social mobility, you are still left with the genetic differences.

Q75   Mr Raab: Just to break that down, you mean that high-flying or successful partners get together, and that is their endowment as much as nurture to their kids.

Professor Plomin: Parents contribute to their children genetically; children get their genes from their parents.  That is a very important point.  You could say heritability is an index of social equality, because you are getting rid of the environmental differences, but you will be left with those genetic differences.  Here is a subtle one, which I was not going to bring up, but that interests me a lot: I am not an expert on social mobility, and there are probably people who know more about it than me, but the primary index is inter-generational—from parent to offspring; you measure that, in a way, by parent-offspring resemblance.  There are parents who are either well-educated or have a lot of income; you measure that in the children, and you look at parent-offspring resemblance, because everyone assumes it is all environmental.  They assume parents are giving those advantages to their kids environmentally.  So what if you buy into what I said about genetics?  Parents and offspring resemble each other genetically.  It could be that, instead of high parent-offspring correlations for inter­generational mobility being an index of lack of social mobility, it might be an index of social mobility.  I know that is hard to get your head around right away.

              Chair: I shall have to read the transcript.

Professor Plomin: The general point is that that is another example of why it makes sense to just think about genetics, even if it does not have the really specific teacher­in­the­classroom policy implications right at the moment. 

              Chair: What implications does it have for—maybe we should not go there.

Q76   Pat Glass: Could I ask about the classroom policy?  I have always thought, coming from a special‑needs background, that it would be great if every child could have that kind of assessment, so that we know what they are good at, what they are not so good at, where their challenges are, and where we need to target our interventions and resources?  Using something like genetics, would it have that kind of impact on the makeup of educational policy?

Professor Plomin: I study learning disabilities, primarily, and with reading disability, as I am sure you know, almost all children who have reading disability in school had language problems earlier.  There are intervention programmes you can do with language, but there are no simple, cheap, silver-bullet things.  It is usually intensive and expensive, so you are probably not going to be able to do it for everyone, but what if you could predict genetically which children will be at risk for genetic reading disability?  Then, you could intervene early, using that information as well as other information.

Q77   Pat Glass: How secure is that?  You get families with five children in, and two of them do incredibly well, and the other three do not.  Is there not a risk in that that, if we target resources on the basis of genetics, you are going to miss out a whole lot of kids?

Professor Plomin: The neat thing about DNA is that it would be specific to each of those children.  You have a harder time explaining that situation environmentally than you do genetically, because the first law of genetics is, “Like begets like”: first-degree relatives share 50% of their genes.  The second law is, “Like does not beget like”.  Genetically, you expect children in a family to differ.  Genetics does not have trouble explaining why two of the kids are reading-disabled and the others are not.  It is a little harder, actually, environmentally, if you think it is all the parents.  Those kids grew up in the same family; why are they so different?

Loic Menzies: We know, for example, the huge differences in the amount of language that is used by parents of children in low socio-economic groups, and the language they use in higher socioeconomic groups.  We know the difference in the type of language they are using.  We know that by shifting that, we can have a big impact on attainment.  Those are some of the things we can do immediately to be working on those areas, as well as thinking about what the potential future things we might be able to start doing are.

              Professor Francis: Given that Professor Plomin has explained that this does not just come down to genetics across a family—this is about individual differences as well—there may be, in the future, predictability.  But I am very much focused on what we can do now, and I think the comments made about plasticity, environment and the school difference that we know exists and has an impact—however sizable that proportion is—is really what we need to be focusing on.  I have got lots of ideas there. 

Q78   Ian Mearns: How much of a difference can schools alone, working within the confines of DfE policy frameworks, make to the performance of the group that are defined as white working-class kids?  How much can schools alone do?

Professor Francis: I think they can do a lot.  My report, partnered with Ofsted for the RSA, looked at some of the patterning here in terms of concentration of working-class kids in lower-quality schools.  There, we know, lots of comments have been made earlier that the quality of teaching is going to be poorer, which we know is absolutely fundamental and significant. 

I think that there are several key policy interventions that are clear here.  We cannot dissociate schools, and what schools can do, from wealth.  We know the impact of money—separating out everything else; just the impact of money—on the pattern with achievement, but in terms of schools, we have to address the patchiness in the English education system.  We need to make sure that all kids can access good schools.  Otherwise, the admissions games will just carry on being played, with those with the best purchasing power accessing the best schools.  We need to drive up performance, and I have a range of recommendations there in relation to the academies programme and the tightening of transparency and accountability there, to make sure that we see the transformation and ensure that converter academies are held to account for their commitments to work together in the local area to support straggling schools.  But, fundamentally, I do feel that at the moment we have very strong accountability for schools that are struggling, but not such good intervention or support for those schools, to make sure that they improve.  That is fundamental.

Q79   Chair: Do we have the right incentives?  If quality of teaching is the key determinant, which it is, and you have got a strong accountability system in which teachers of those—genetically or otherwise—predisposed for lower success are more likely to be found failing, certainly in the current systems, what do we need to do to change the playing field so that the best teachers are going to be incentivised to be in the toughest schools, and is there any reason to believe the best utilisation of best teachers is in the areas with children most genetically, and otherwise, challenged?

Professor Francis: I really do not want to get into the genetics thing.  I think it is really problematic that, actually, we have not yet unpicked the really problematic potential conflation we are doing with working-class-ness and genetics.  It is really, really problematic, so I would prefer not to talk in that way.  Certainly, there is more that we can be doing to redistribute teachers.  We know that, of course, famously in the Shanghai case, what they have done is move excellent teachers and leaders around to raise achievement across the board.  Obviously, we do not operate in a system like that, but I do think there are levers and incentives we could use.

Q80   Chair: Singapore does the same.  Why do you think no politician has taken that lesson?

Professor Francis: I do not think you have quite the power.

Q81   Ian Mearns: Shanghai is interesting, as well.  The official population is about six million or seven million less than the actual population.  17 million is the official population, and the actual population is probably closer to 24 million or 25 million.  That is because they do not count people who do not have residency status, and their kids do not get counted in the statistics, so we are not comparing like with like.

Jenny North: One thing in the London Challenge was around incentivising excellent teachers to come to schools that were not excellent.  There were housing allowances and housing schemes, and I think a little flexibility was given on pay, as well.  We have tried that.  An interesting question is what has happened to the London Challenge approach since the City Challenge evaluation in 2011 of the black country and Manchester variations.  The gap that is opening up between metropolitan areas and non-large metropolitan areas is concerning, particularly if you look at where the lowest income groups of white working-class are. 

Again, that was a point well made that we are talking about white boys on free school meals here, and where they are concentrated.  It is less and less in large metropolitan areas.  We did a map, mapping where the biggest NEET hotspots were, and they were not the metropolitan areas; they were very much the ex-industrial towns and areas, and some seaside towns.  We looked at what was happening in schools there.  Specifically focusing on them is really important.  Becky was talking about improving schools, which is of course important, but even if all FSM children were in outstanding schools, that would only close the attainment gap by a fifth.  You are looking at what is happening to individual pupils who are falling behind within schools, good or bad, and how personalised learning and one-to-one work is being taken forward. 

What our very qualitative research—very anecdotal research—with our charities showed was that what they felt made a difference was a one-to-one commitment to children who were disengaged from education over time, that those children could rely on and come back to.  However they might move away from it, they could come back to it, and that support would still be there.  If schools could work in that way, we would not need youth work, but for whatever reasons, schools do not.  That is where youth work fills the gap again and again to re­engage children in education.

Q82   Ian Mearns: When we look at the marketisation of education, with people choosing their schools, do we see significant class variations in the awareness or the ability of parents from different backgrounds to actually access the system and be able to make those informed choices?  I see lots of nods.

Professor Francis: Yes.  My Sutton Trust report is going to show lots of interesting facts and figures around this, about both access to information, and as I have already said, financial access to actually make the most of the education system in a range of ways.  As I did say earlier, though, it was quite interesting that although the patterns are absolutely as you would expect—with working-class families across the board having less access, both in terms of information and money in relation to their choice-making, and therefore not actualising their choices in the same way—our findings were a bit distinct from previous research, in the sense that we did find that some working-class parents are behaving like stereotypical middle‑class families.  Again, we were quite interested in terms of what might facilitate that to happen from a policy perspective.

Q83   Chair: Sorry to go back to our earlier conversation: when you say “working class”—and we have started this by using “working class” in the title of our inquiry—do you mean “deprived”?

Professor Francis: I mean “blue collar”.

Chair: Oh, you do mean blue collar.  You are not just talking about FSM, then.

Professor Francis: I am not just talking about FSM.

Loic Menzies: To come back on that point, yes, you are using this “white working class” definition, but when we do that we get into this binary of saying “FSM or not FSM.”  Actually, we have got a continuous spectrum.  If you do these things by IDACI, then you see a continuous line, so I am not sure it is actually a very good idea to divide it and chop it at a particular point.  What we need to see is that we are having a correlation between socioeconomic status as measured by your small area of living and your educational achievement.  That is where the problem is, and that is what we need to be addressing.

Professor Francis: I think that is fundamental.  I am talking about the Es, Ds, and C2s in RG parlance.  Remembering a point that went out of my head earlier, one of our other recommendations is really about how you might get more information to working-class families, which we are not very good at.  Clearly, it is not going to be working-class families that are most likely to be spending ages Googling the DfE website or whatever.  However, there are lots of businesses and charities out there that are really good at marketing to working-class families, and I am not quite sure why we are not drawing on their expertise to make this more accessible.

Q84   Ian Mearns: While a relatively small number of schools are successful in the attainment of poor white children, are they by definition exceptions, and does what they are doing represent something that is scalable and easily replicable across the broader scale?

Loic Menzies: I think there are some things that can be done that are scalable.  There are three areas: parents, support on careers, and networks and collaboration.  In terms of parental engagement, my work for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation looked at what specific schools were doing in terms of helping parents to understand what they could do to help their kids, what they could do over the weekend with their kids, or what they need to do at home to create an environment in which they can learn; how they can invite parents into schools in ways that are friendly and unthreatening for parents who might have had a negative experience of schooling.  There are those kinds of parental things that are perfectly scalable. 

Then, in terms of careers, there is an issue with making decisions at an early stage, which can then affect future life choices.  I mean that from a very early stage, because there is a difference in terms of knowledge of the employment market, so to speak.  A kid starting secondary school may want to be a doctor, but may not know that maths is being part of being a doctor and that you need to work hard in maths as well as in sciences, or whatever.  They need to have that kind of support on what they will need to do to get to their careers from an early stage, and then some of the things I mentioned earlier on about the sharing of good practice.  Schools can build links with schools in other areas that are doing better and learn from them.  Those are the three areas.

Professor Francis: I think that is fundamental, actually: schools modelling one another and looking at the great cases of practice and rolling that out.  A lot of it, I agree, is scalable, and some of it is not rocket science, either.  Actually, hearing some of the winners of the recent Pupil Premium awards talking about what they have done at some of their schools, it is both inspiring and also relatively obvious, and so I think we could be doing more.

Q85   Mr Raab: We have talked a bit about factors inside schools and inside the home that are fuelling, or causing, the white working-class underachievement, whatever the ills of that definition.  What other factors outside of those two categories do you think are significantly relevant? 

Loic Menzies: What were the two categories you said?

              Mr Raab: We talked about home environment; we talked about school, obviously, being critical; and we talked about genetics.  What other nurture, social or community factors do we think are relevant or salient?

Loic Menzies: I mentioned at the start the isolation of communities, and that thing of having to leave your community if you want to achieve this end is a really big thing.  People like Diane Reay have written a lot about the identity work that a kid has to do.  They are having to manage what their friends are doing and what their family is doing, this community that has lived there for however many generations, and suddenly “Well, if I want to do this—if I want to go to a university—then I have to go to another town.  I have to leave my community.  I have to leave my friends.  I have to do all these things.”  That is very different from areas like London, where those things are on the doorstep and you can manage that dual life in a very different way here.  That is very difficult, because it is not an easy fix, is it?  We are talking about major geographical and economic issues here.

Jenny North: Local context is really crucial, but to go back to schools and what they can do, someone made a point in the earlier session about teachers these days being more middle-class.  There is possibly an element of teachers not being terribly aware of options outside of degrees, and perhaps either not valuing them or not educating themselves about them.  We all know that our vocational qualification landscape is a bit of a mess, frankly, and is difficult and confusing.  We leave it, perhaps, to the 50% or slightly more less-able children to navigate their way through something that often employers do not understand, parents do not understand and parents do not understand.  There is an element of that when you are looking at the options that a child that is growing up in an area without very many opportunities in it faces.  Not only are they looking at moving away further than we would expect a better-supported child, possibly, to do, but also to navigate their way through a labour market and a qualification minefield that their teachers do not understand or particularly want to talk about.  That is a third issue on top of, “What kind of home do you come from?” and “What kind of school do you go to?”: “What kind of labour market and what kind of vocational options are facing you?”

              Chair: Thank you very much for giving evidence to us this morning.  Please do be in touch if you have any further thoughts, reflections or recommendations you would like to have us put in our report.  Thank you.

              Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727                            2