Disadvantage gap in education has failed to improve, EPI report finds
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has published a report on the disadvantage gap in education, which was funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
The report examines the gap in 2020 at a national level, across different regions and local authorities, among varying levels of disadvantage, and at two stages of education – key stage four and five.
The research offers the first comprehensive picture of the impact of 2020 grades on different students – the year that saw the first switch to teacher assessed grades.
The study finds that the gap in GCSE grades between students in long-term poverty and their better off peers has failed to improve over the last ten years.
It highlights fears that the switch to teacher assessed grades for GCSEs in 2020 would penalise students from disadvantaged backgrounds are largely unfounded – with no evidence poorer GCSE students lost out under this system.
But for students in college and sixth form (16-19 education), the gap in grades between poorer students and their better off peers widened in 2020. This was driven by A level students gaining a whole grade more from teacher assessments than those who studied qualifications such as BTECs.
The gap for persistently disadvantaged pupils – those who are disadvantaged for at least 80 per cent of their school lifetimes – has been consistently wider than the headline gap for all disadvantaged pupils over the last decade. In 2020, the measured grade gap for persistently disadvantaged pupils stood at 1.60 grades. This was a small decrease from 2019, when it stood at 1.62 grades. This indicates that, as for disadvantaged pupils, persistently disadvantaged pupils did not lose out under centre assessments. But unlike the headline disadvantage gap which narrowed until 2017, there has been no substantive progress in closing the gap for persistently disadvantaged pupils over the last decade.
There has been a marked increase in persistent poverty among disadvantaged pupils in recent years. Among disadvantaged pupils, the share of pupils who have been eligible for free school meals for their entire time at school has increased from 18.8 per cent (or 26,000 pupils) in 2017, to 25.3 per cent (34,100 pupils) by 2020 – a rise of over 8,000 pupils in three years. Rising persistent poverty within disadvantaged pupils is associated with stalling progress in closing the headline disadvantage gap since 2017.
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