Do ‘poor’ children get ‘poor’ teaching?

If our schools were segregated by race there would be public outcry, so why does segregation by wealth and class not elicit the same response, asks Graham Birrell...

“We have one of the most stratified and segregated school systems in the developed world…far, far too many young people are being robbed of the chance to shape their own destiny. It is a moral failure; a tragic waste of talent; and an affront to social justice. We need nothing short of radical, whole-scale reform.”

Who said this? Some lefty member of the educational establishment? One of the blob? No, it was the Secretary of State for Education himself, Michael Gove. And he’s absolutely right; Britain’s school system is astonishingly segregated. Leaving aside the fact that seven per cent of our children are taught in private schools (only Korea spends more on private education in the OECD), the level of segregation within the state sector, most particularly by poverty and social class, is “an affront to social justice” and we do “need nothing short of radical, whole-scale reform”.

Where Michael Gove and I part, though, is on the solution to the problem.

There is plenty of research on the extent of segregation in our schools, but a good summary was provided by the Sutton Trust in 2010 (Worlds Apart: Social Variation Among Schools), which found the most deprived comprehensives have 16 times as many children from disadvantaged backgrounds as the least deprived.

If this segregation were by race there would be a national outcry, but because it is by class and poverty it appears to generate almost no opposition whatsoever. So if it doesn’t appear to cause much anxiety amongst the general population, why is it such a problem?

I don’t actually propose to discuss the moral arguments, which I believe speak for themselves in decrying a situation where we teach children from different backgrounds in different settings. I also don’t want to get into the academic debate as to whether segregation affects overall standards of education – although it’s clear that middle-class parents across the country believe it does, hence their desperation to get their kids into the ‘right school’. Instead, I’d like to focus on segregation’s effect on teaching and finish with a proposal for how we might begin to end it.

The point about segregation and teaching is this: the more you congregate children from similar backgrounds together, the more likely it is that you will provide different pedagogical diets to each.

In 2008, the American journalist David Whitman, who is now speechwriter to US Secretary of State for Education, Arne Duncan, wrote a much-lauded book called Sweating the Small Stuff, a celebratory analysis of six US schools that teach children from predominantly challenging backgrounds. He said the achievement gap could be narrowed if “poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction”, i.e. “rigorous academic” approaches such as frequent testing, strict dress codes, extended school days and summer school. Above all, he advocated the paternalistic school, which he defined as:

“[A] highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance.”

The American Educationalist Alfie Kohn has rightly described these approaches as “poor teaching for poor children”. But this isn’t just an American idea as there are indications that these methods are beginning to take hold as a way to teach and educate children in schools with disproportionately deprived intakes in this country. A good example is an increasingly popular approach called ‘SLANTing’, which stands for ‘Sit up, Listen, Ask and Answer questions, Nod to show you are listening, Track the speaker with your eyes’. S, L and A are perfectly reasonable, but for me, N and T turn this into the educational equivalent of The Stepford Wives.

To anyone familiar with the work of Jean Anyon (Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work, 1980), none of this will come as a surprise.  Over 30 years ago, she identified five types of schools, ranging from Working-Class Schools (high levels of deprivation, procedural, mechanical, reliant on direct, rote teaching methods) to Affluent Professional Schools (very low levels of deprivation, students’ opinions are valued, individuality prized, and creative approaches encouraged).

Children from deprived backgrounds are, therefore, at serious risk of being given the kind of education from which middle-class parents run a mile: controlling, homogenising, directive and demeaning – where thinking differently gets you singled out instead of singled in. This is something we should all be concerned about.

So how did the segregation in our school system come about? The answer to that is choice and parents’ ability to exercise it. Whether you choose your school through house purchases or through careful navigation of admissions procedures, the evidence strongly suggests families with financial and social capital are able to congregate together, leaving ‘sink schools’ to families without the means to get ahead.

And how do you solve segregation and its subsequent inequality? Trying to make sure all children receive the same pedagogical approaches isn’t likely to work as schools would rightly be upset about governments dictating how they teach. Furthermore, it wouldn’t solve the core problem of desegregation itself; so the best solution is to try and eliminate that through replacing parental choice with lotteries. This would absolutely not be a panacea – extremely careful processes would need to be followed – but at a stroke it could dramatically reduce segregation in our schools.

Parents would take a great deal of convincing and, for some, it could raise the spectre of things such as bussing policies à la the USA in the 1960s. But let’s not deceive ourselves on these issues as ‘bussing goes on in a big way now. The difference is that this bussing occurs in people carriers, not big yellow school buses.’ (1). 

“More than almost any developed nation ours is a country in which your parentage dictates your progress. Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege in England than in any comparable county. For those of us who believe in social justice this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.”

Once again, I couldn’t put it better than Michael Gove. But instead of addressing that inequality, his polices of more choice between an ever-growing list of different types of school is only likely to make segregation worse. As the OECD rightly puts it, “choice tends only to work for a well informed and confident clientele…in the United Kingdom” leading to the middle class navigating the system better and congregating together in the ‘best’ schools. It’s therefore time we started looking at truly radical solutions.

1. Burgess, S et al (2006) School Choice in England: Background Facts, Centre for Market and Public Organisation,