disadvantaged | Schools Week

Covid: Poorer pupils missed 30% more school days last autumn

Poorer pupils missed almost 30 per cent more school days due to Covid in the autumn than their better-off counterparts, new data shows. The Department for Education has updated absences data for the autumn term with statistics broken down by pupil characteristics. It shows pupils eligible for free school meals missed 8.5 per cent of […]

The working class: Poverty, education and alternative voices

As a senior leader who has been championing equality for disadvantaged pupils since stepping into education, you can imagine how excited I was to get my teeth into this book. There I sat, one cloudy afternoon, marking a set of year 11 assessments, when I heard the distinctive sounds of a delivery driver wrestling a […]

Educational disadvantage: how does England compare?

We know there’s work to do with the disadvantage gap in this country – but where do we stand on the international scale, asks Natalie Perera? The gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers is the leading measure used by policymakers to gauge the state of educational inequality in England. Organisations such as […]

Disadvantaged pupils’ maths attainment sees England fall behind

England needs to double the number of disadvantaged pupils who achieve the top GCSE grades in maths to catch up with the best-performing countries around the world, according to new Education Policy Institute (EPI) research. Just one in 10 disadvantaged pupils in England achieve a grade 7, 8 or 9 in GCSE maths, while nearly twice […]