Part Three in a new series of articles looking at Britain's crumbling education system.
Author: Gary Hammonds
Britain's education system is in disrepair, in a new series of articles, Gary Hammonds explores how we got to this point and how we can fix Britain's education system.
One aspect of the English education system that requires improvement is the social segregation resulting from our approach. Our system divides children into winners and losers. It claims to do so under the guise of parental choice and school autonomy, but the reality is that these dividing lines are cut almost entirely along demographic lines. Society’s inequalities in terms of socio-economics are mirrored in schools. It would be better if they were challenged there, rather than reinforced.
There are problems with international comparisons, and particularly with the way they can be misused to make inferences about what constitutes best practice without properly allowing for non-educational, cultural differences. The tendency of the press and some policy-makers to look at PISA studies and despair is inappropriate. Even those who criticise some comparisons as reductive, though, accept that there are lessons to learn from other nations. In a speech in 2013, Tim Oates asked: “Are we in crisis? Is our education system falling apart?” And – entirely appropriately – concluded that no, it is not in crisis. Instead, he said it was in “a period of chronic stasis – an inability to improve significantly and quickly. The key indicators are flat, and that’s going back three decades.”
PISA and other similar studies generate league tables which can, and have at times, cast England in a negative light. But it would be foolish to simply look to those countries which topped the tables and attempt to uncritically emulate their practices, and arguably it would be foolish to even aspire to moving up those league tables. If there is evidence that cultural and social differences better account for the performance gap, education policy would be an inappropriate response. If there is evidence that other countries outperform England on those simple metrics but that this comes at the cost of other things we may want an education system to deliver, then emulation would be an inappropriate response.
That said, there does seem to be cause for concern. In terms of maths, our school leavers have been worse than their counterparts in many Western nations, and much worse than their counterparts in leading Asian nations. The picture is slightly better for reading, but the broad pattern is the same. The estimated nine million working-age adults in England with low literacy or numeracy are a product, and indictment, of the country’s education system, and that figure – more than a quarter of adults aged 16-65 – identifies that England is below average relative to other OECD countries. Functional literacy and numeracy for the adult population seems as though it may reasonably be the bare minimum expectation of a functioning education system, particularly a system with such a chosen, heavy emphasis on knowledge and skills. Our inability to deliver something which other countries are managing gives legitimate cause for rethinking our approach. England’s standing in PISA maths rankings has risen from 27th in 2009, to 17th in 2018 and again to 11th in 2023. There are trajectories to celebrate, and a resilience to C19-disruption too. But there are still improvements to make.
Skills mismatch occurs when people either find themselves with a surplus of formal qualifications not needed for their job, or with a job requiring skills they do not have. Studies routinely find that mismatch is worse in the UK than in similar European countries. There are justifications for education which do not refer whatsoever to employment. The 1988 settlement, whose paradigms we still work within, was, though, designed with exactly such comparisons and international competition in mind. Baker told the Conservative Party conference before the passing of the 1988 Act that “we will not tolerate a moment longer the smug complacency of too many educationists, which has left our national educational performance limping along behind that of our industrial competitors.” And this concern with the link between education and international competitiveness and industrial performance is not the preserve of the Conservatives. Callaghan’s Ruskin speech saw him stressing his concern with “complaints from industry that recruits from schools sometimes do not have the basic tools to do the job that is required.”
There are critics of those arguing for a more direct link between education and employment. But Callaghan had it right, also in the Ruskin speech. “Schools should best prepare children for a lively, constructive place in society, and also to fit them to do a job of work. Not one or the other – but both.” Any less is to fail those who need help the most.
A government should provide public goods for its people in the best way it can. It should always believe that it can do better, and continually seek improvements to its practice that will secure improvements to the lives of its people. For as long as the English system of education falls behind the systems of other European and Asian competitors, then we can reasonably say that the English system requires improvement.
The international comparisons have identified the justification and the necessity for improvements. To identify where those improvements should be situated, the international comparisons can now be set aside, and a more introspective look taken at the English system. R. H. Tawney, in 1931, concluded that the “curse upon English education is its organisation upon the lines of social class.” This diagnosis is still wholly appropriate.
Every year, despite their childhood years spent in mandatory state education, nearly a fifth of English school-leavers are functionally illiterate. The figure is just over a fifth for those leaving functionally innumerate. The strongest predictor of these outcomes is the socio-economic status of the children concerned. It is children from working-class families where the improvements to English education should be situated.
As David Laws, the Minister for Schools, told the House of Commons Education Select Committee, “Many of the problems with low attainment in school are due to factors outside the school gate: parental support, or lack of it; parental aspirations; poverty in the home environment; poor housing; and lack of experience in life.” There are elements of that to disagree with, particularly the failure of the state to be reframed so that the responsibility is placed back on those working-class families who are denied resources and opportunity by the system. But elements of the Laws’ point are true, and the question then becomes two-fold. Firstly, which policy solutions can best remove those external barriers? Secondly, which policy solutions will allow schools to overcome those external barriers that exist? In answering that second question, the unavoidable conclusion is that we are not presently doing all we can to overcome those external barriers.
Poorer students are taught substantively different things: “the curriculum taught to children in poorer parts of Britain is significantly different to that taught in wealthier areas”. The 1988 education settlement is demonstrably not tackling the problem, because in 2015 the educational achievement gap between pupils of different socio-economic status widened for the first time in decades. More damning, the Social Mobility Commission reported in 2017 that “the gap has widened; since 2012, low income pupils have been making less progress year on year compared to their more affluent peers.” Covid saw this trend continue, and worsen.
Poorer students demonstrate higher premature departure rates from education. Drawing on Gorard’s findings, poorer students are more likely to experience less qualified teachers and experience classes more like those of their younger but more affluent peers. Schools serving low-income communities are more likely to employ staff who are either not qualified, under-qualified, or newly qualified: it is these types of teachers with whom pupils tend to make the least progress.
Gaps between the disadvantaged and their less-disadvantaged peers are established early: by three years old, children in lower socio-economic status households were already up to a year behind. TeachFirst talk about these inequalities at every stage of life, lasting “from cradle to college to career”, with only one in three children from poorer families achieving the expected levels in reading, writing and maths aged 11, with only one in four progressing to university, and children from poor families are less likely to complete an apprenticeship. The government’s own research suggests that these socio-economic inequalities have been persistent over time. Any inroads that had been made to reducing this gap were broadly reversed, if not completely undone, by the pandemic.
Poverty impacts directly and strongly on educational outcomes. But it also clearly contributes to the stability of work, physical and mental health, diet and nutrition, crime and conviction rates, and almost every other area a public policy may hope to shape. Further, poverty and income inequality directly shape children’s early lives. The quality of education is shaped by the quality of parenting, and it’s this which is shaped by all the other things impacted upon by inequality – the health, work status, diet, etc. of the parents is simultaneously a direct consequence of poverty and income inequality and a direct cause of children’s educational outcomes.
The relationship between socio-economic status and education is strong. Family wealth is the strongest predictor of educational outcomes. The particularly worrying findings are that, rather than compensating for these external factors, gaps widen the longer students spend in the school system. This suggests that approaches to English education are exacerbating issues and further disadvantaging the disadvantaged, rather than closing gaps. Further consideration needs, therefore, to be given to how the current education system is designed concerning issues of class.
Much of the Conservatives’ argument when designing the 1988 Education Act was that parents acting as informed consumers could ‘fix’ broken schools through creating a functioning market system. It was an argument that only theoretically worked on the assumption that parents would always move children in response to the publicised performance data in relation to schools. One of the problems with this, though, is that “some parents do not choose schools by placing a large weight on school performance… This has a systemic impact in that poorly performing schools may be insufficiently pressurised if their admissions stay ‘undeservedly’ high…” The very notion that parents would pursue schools for their children in line with any criteria other than strict academic excellence did not occur to those designing the market system, where parental choice was intended to exert pressure upon schools to improve. As well as failing because some parents value different things, it also failed because “studies of the impact of the 1988 Education Reform Act showed that already-advantaged families were more likely to gain places at desirable schools than disadvantaged families.” Middle-class families have, on average, found themselves better positioned to game school admissions processes than working-class families.
So, the market forces so extolled by those responsible for the 1988 education reforms can be seen to work against, and to further disadvantage, the disadvantaged. This is entirely the problem. Almost every policy decision will be seen to advantage one group and not another. When it further advantages the already advantaged, at the expense of the already disadvantaged, it can reasonably be said to be a bad policy.
It is not just ‘the invisible hand of the market’, though. Parents selecting schools is problematic in reality, but at least it has some theoretical appeal. The more problematic behaviours, both in practice and in theory, are evident when schools select pupils. The most obvious instances of this are in the authorities which retained the 11-plus and the grammar school system. But schools in non-selective authorities, nominally operating as comprehensives, continue to select their intakes.
In the extreme and pernicious cases, school leaders have artificially engineered catchment areas with pupils who are likely to make better progress, rather than better running their schools to ensure that a natural and pre-existing catchment is better served. The problem here is that when schools try to manufacture rather than serve a community, and there are pressures on schools to hit certain targets, certain types of pupils inevitably get left behind. The accountability system is designed to fall onto schools and school leaders - who can select who they serve –rather than onto bodies responsible for everyone who lives within a certain area. The inevitable result of this is that leaders, the majority of whom are acting entirely in good faith and in line with the system’s design, have generated a situation whereby schools give preferential status to some types of students. It is invariably disadvantaged, working-class, and low-income students who lose out, as well as students from certain ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds, and students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
How do schools engineer or manufacture their catchments? Not all of this process is overtly negative: some of it is just about improving transition arrangements between key stages. Secondary schools will run clubs, booster classes, trips and visits for local primary schools – most of these activities are not to be criticised, though we should be honest about why school leaders are investing their time, resources and energy into them. Beyond this, there are forms of softer selection which still stratify intakes along socioeconomic lines.
The most objectionable means by which schools create for themselves an artificially ‘easy’ school community is off-rolling – the illegal exclusion or removal from school of pupils, here specifically due to the impact on performance measures. The arguments around off-rolling are complex, and schools need more support about their rights to exclude, because tackling poor behaviour is the low-hanging fruit of school improvement in most contexts, but the evidence is: that there is a substantial proportion of the school population who endure unexplained exit from mainstream schooling into alternative provision; that this has become increasingly prevalent over recent years; and that very few of those who see an unexplained exit then return to their original school. The types of pupils most at risk of ‘off-rolling’ are those with low prior attainment, those with special educational needs or disabilities, and those eligible for free school meals.
Off-rolling is generally agreed to be bad. Deliberately targeting different ‘types’ of pupils for admission in the first place sees less universal consensus. Schools in charge of their own admissions are more able to operate covert selection processes, and – unsurprisingly – the introduction of schools in charge of their own admissions also saw a return of selection. City Technology Colleges were free to design their own entry criteria. Faith schools interview and seek references for their applicants. David Milliband introduced ‘aptitude testing’, which allowed for schools to select up to ten per cent of their intake. The reforms had proceeded relatively slowly over the 1990s and 2000s, but Gove and the coalition government made academies in control of their own admissions the “chosen vehicle for school reform”. After the New Labour years, not even three per cent of schools were academies. This had grown to more than twenty per cent by the end of Gove’s tenure, and the trend continued apace after his departure. He also oversaw the introduction of Free Schools – entirely autonomous bodies, state-funded, but run by groups including parents and religious organisations.
The removal of democratically controlled local authority oversight of schools’ admissions has been one part of the move to an academy system. New Labour introduced a quite modest number of academies; the Coalition and later Conservative governments effectively rolled this school-type out, aiming for it to become universal. One of their defining features (along with Free Schools) is the ability to control their own admissions. Nick Stevenson argues that the comprehensive system has been replaced by one which is more selective than the one which came before it. Starmer’s government have shown no appetite for engaging with this idea or challenging the practice.
Diane Reay’s ‘Miseducation’ provides ample evidence of this exclusive approach to selection and admissions. Research from the National Pupil Database finds that more than half of recently established academies were admitting a smaller proportion of pupils in receipt of Free School Meals than were present in the local area. The Academies Commission has had to respond to numerous complaints of academies selecting covertly. A Europe-wide study makes this whole situation unsurprising, as it documents a link between school autonomy over admissions and increased social segregation, via selection. Free schools – the logical end-goal of the academisation program – harm surrounding schools, because they concentrate the already-advantaged into one building, and leave the already-disadvantaged out of this more generously funded new educational offer. There are other forms of segregation at play, too – notably, more than half of minority ethnic pupils in the UK are in schools where the White British pupils are a minority.
The market system of the post-1988 educational system has other perverse and unintended consequences, too. The systems and institutions created to allow for a full flow of information for parents-as-informed-consumers – here mainly league tables and Ofsted inspection reports – were designed to create a market regarding school admissions. As already argued, they have failed to do so because some parents have different preferences, and some parents have different levels of ‘purchasing power’. But these same systems and institutions have also distorted the labour market for teachers. The parental incomes of a school’s intake effectively determine that school’s outcome data. That outcomes data effectively determines that school’s Ofsted inspection judgements. The threat of poor performance in published league tables and of a negative Ofsted judgement can deter people from working in schools serving deprived communities. “Well-qualified teachers prefer to take jobs in less challenging environments; high-deprivation schools have fewer applicants for jobs; and those who do work in more challenging schools might continue their job search whilst in post.” The market system has led to a situation where it actively works against school improvement, where those improvements would be most equitably felt, because the most qualified, effective and desirable teachers face disincentives to working where they are most needed. The issue is compounded because schools in deprived areas tend to give teachers training with them, or newly joining them, less high-quality mentoring and tougher teaching timetables, which generate higher levels of turnover and further negative consequences for pupil progress.
Even within the state-run comprehensive sector, inequalities manifest themselves. Predominantly working-class comprehensives have been seen to have achievement levels about half the levels of those seen in predominantly middle-class comprehensives. The same study found that fewer than fifteen per cent of comprehensives were not drawing from predominantly one social class. It is interesting to note that this socially mixed subset of schools performed pretty much as well as the predominantly middle-class schools. Benn and Chitty concluded that social mixing “might produce its own positive effect.” Other studies found that working-class kids were more likely to go to undersubscribed schools, and middle-class kids were more likely to go to oversubscribed schools.
It is clear, then, that children from different family backgrounds face a very different deal when admissions to schools are decided, with poorer families ending up sending their children to worse schools with less effective teachers. That is grounds enough for concluding that the system requires improvement. The selection and resultant problems seem almost intentional: if all children simply went to their nearest school, the school-age population would be less socially segregated than it is now. The situation becomes even bleaker when you consider what happens to children after the admissions process is over, and they actually arrive at their allocated schools.
It is not only with the differences in intake between schools of different ‘type’ that we should concern ourselves. “Most of the gap in progress between low-income pupils and their peers stems from differences in achievement between pupils in the same school, rather than differences between schools.”
So it is not just that demographics are segregated by school type. It is not even ‘just’ that different types of pupils are segregated in different schools, even of the same type. The real divisive force in English education is the segregation of pupils along socio-economic lines inside individual schools. This within-school segregation exerts a stronger influence on attainment gaps than any issues related to do with school type. The elephant in the room for any policy discussion concerning itself with class and English education is the ghettoisation of already disadvantaged learners, regardless of the school they find themselves in. This issue has been ignored, avoided or denied by those on the left and on the right, with Tony Blair referring dismissively to “the ideology of unstreamed teaching” before he came to power, and promoting the linking of ‘provision to individual aptitudes and ability’ once in power. This was not without pedigree. Even Crosland, the champion of comprehensives, wrote about schools working with ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ inputs, and assumed that setting and streaming must be protected as practices.
Ability grouping – setting or streaming – leads to the social segregation of working-class pupils and minority ethnic pupils in ‘lower’ groups. The consequences of this pattern of behaviour are profound, with these pupils already being taught less and by less qualified teachers. These approaches to organising schools are now dominant, nearly ubiquitous. There is no real evidence that these arrangements drive up standards, with most studies finding no discernible impact. There is, though, evidence that it impacts negatively those students whom it ostracises. When low-achieving students are identified and labelled as such, there is a documented tendency for this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. None of this is new: the NFER concluded a study of 1998 by noting, “In the current political climate, there is likely to be an increase in the prevalence or setting and perhaps even streaming, despite the lack of evidence for its effectiveness in raising levels of achievement and thus standards.” We remain in that neo-liberal political climate, and there remains a lack of evidence for the effectiveness of the default arrangement of pupils in schools into perceived ability groupings.
The government knows this. Its own Social Mobility Commission reported in 2017 that “Decisions about pupil grouping and resourcing have a profound impact: low income pupils are less likely to make good progress in schools where they are grouped by ability…” Commitment to school autonomy and diversity, combined with a lack of concern for the performance of those low-income pupils, has led to a situation where that finding has been left largely unaddressed.
Even if there were strong evidence that setting by ability could drive up standards, there would remain problems with accurately identifying pupils ‘ability, because the pupils who arrive at school already behind their peers would inevitably be those disadvantaged children. The information available to staff making setting decisions is incredibly poor as a proxy for ‘ability’, but is a highly reliable function of family income. Pupils who perform similarly on cognitive testing can be allocated across a wide range of sets: those setting decisions are driven by things other than ability, or even prior attainment, and tend to punish low-income pupils. Where teacher discretion and judgement is used, the problem manifests itself because teachers often hold views and unconscious biases which result in their having lower expectations of low-income pupils.
The school system sorts pupils into different school types, different individual schools, and different sets and streams within those schools. Each step of this sorting process cuts along socio-economic lines, with more effective school types, individual schools, and sets and streams reserved for well-off families. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, it is patently unfair – there is a moral obligation to improve the quality of provision and ensure it is equitably distributed. Secondly, it is counterproductive and not in the nation’s collective interest. The English education system has fallen behind that of its competitors. It is with the children who lose out during these processes of selection that we can make the largest gains, most easily.
The atomisation and marketisation of the sector, which has driven this problem, is a barrier to the solution, too. The conceptualised market system of education is one where individual schools making efforts to improve will lead to system-level improvement. The first problem here is the one noted earlier regarding covert selection, off-rolling, and the construction of student bodies who are well-suited to performativity and accountability measures. Any atomised processes of school improvement have been at the expense of, and achieved via the exclusion of, predominantly working-class children. The second problem is that the within-school differences are unlikely to be fixed via wholesale changes to the ways schools group and organise their pupils under the current conditions. Head-teacher retention rates have been falling since 2012. This trend is exaggerated, unsurprisingly, in lower-performing schools, though it should be noted that this means it is a problem disproportionately concentrated in schools serving the learners we are most concerned with assisting. Head-teacher turnover is highest in schools receiving poor Ofsted inspection judgments. Whilst this may seem intuitive, or even desirable, the problem is that those in charge of organising and running our schools are likely to be more risk-averse when the stakes are so high. Accordingly, given that the time commitment for training staff in mixed-ability teaching strategies and the opportunity costs of such a fundamental restructuring are so demanding, very few leaders are likely to take that risk. Better, instead, to tow the orthodox line and maintain the status quo. Even if school leaders knew that they could achieve remarkably better and more equitable outcomes given time, the high-stakes accountability model, combined with market forces, means that leaders do not make the changes needed.
The conclusion, then, is that an atomised system of schools where each will deliver its own improvement programmes in response to clear market signals will not, in fact, generate system-level improvements. It thus falls on those with responsibility for the system, rather than those responsible for administration within that system. The central government should respond to the social segregation of the English education system and make moves to end the stratification of students along socio-economic status. Only by doing so can they make England’s students and workforce competitive on the global stage. The burden falls now on the central government, but the actual solution will likely involve a transfer of real control and power to local government.
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The publisher is Citizen Network. Britain's Crumbling Education System. Part Three: Education in England up to 1988 © Gary Hammonds 2025.
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