Last week, we heard a lot from the government about their interest in children from ‘ordinary working families’. (For our initial take on the topic, see here and here.) In its new consultation document, the Department for Education has provided information on the GCSE grades and progress of these children – defined as those not [...]
The new government consultation on ‘ordinary working families’ is being used as the latest piece of arsenal to shore up support for grammar schools among the general public (the majority of whose children will, of course, get to attend secondary moderns). From it they conclude that the children of ordinary working families stand a good [...]
The Department for Education has published a consultation document on family incomes, pupil attainment and school attended that will either fascinate (if you are a data cruncher) or terrify you (if you are a privacy campaigner). For the first time, the records of pupils sitting in the National Pupil Database have been matched to parental [...]
Today the Sutton Trust have published Global Gaps, a report I produced for them considering gaps in performance between highly able disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children, using PISA 2015 data Read the full report here [PDF]. A blogpost on some of the findings can be found here.
There’s long been interest in socio-economic inequalities in educational achievement in England. Typically, most research in this area focuses on differences in average scores. Less attention has been paid to young people at the extremes of the distribution – for instance, how achievement varies between the most able pupils from advantaged and disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. [...]
One of the most interesting figures in Tuesday’s statistical first release on pupils in state-funded schools was the fall in the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals to the lowest level recorded since the introduction of the School Census in January 2002. Of course, it's well-known that free school meal eligibility is an [...]
