After a decade of education upheaval and reform, the gap in GCSE grades between the very poorest and the rest remains as wide as ever.

Since the inception of the Education Policy Institute (EPI), we’ve made it our mission to hold policymakers to account for progress on closing the disadvantage gap.

Sadly, our latest research on educational inequalities in England paints a troubling picture.

The pandemic and the attainment gap

The cohorts we consider in today’s report - who were awarded GCSEs, A levels and other 16-19 qualifications in the summer of 2021 - are of particular interest, having had their learning severely disrupted by the pandemic over the two years leading up to their assessments.

We find that the learning losses during the pandemic appear to have reversed much of the progress in closing the disadvantage gap between poor children and the rest over the past decade.

In fact, 2021 marks the biggest annual increase in the GCSE disadvantage gap in England since 2011.

The worrying rise in long-term poverty 

The lack of progress for the very poorest pupils - those who are eligible for free school meals for at least 80 per cent of their time in school - is even more stark.

When we compare 2021 to 2011, we see no progress at all in closing the persistent disadvantage gap over the past decade. The GCSE gap for these pupils is more than twice the size of the gap for those who experience poverty more fleetingly.

Yet despite their additional challenges, persistently disadvantaged pupils receive no extra support or focus beyond the pupil premium.

This profound impact of persistent disadvantage on educational outcomes is particularly worrying as we’re seeing more and more children falling into long-term poverty - a trend that predates the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis.

The percentage of students who are persistently disadvantaged has grown from 35 per cent of disadvantaged pupils in 2017 to 42 per cent in 2021.

The roll-out of Universal Credit and the use of benefit protections are complicating the picture of who is disadvantaged, but even when we allow for this in our analysis, we still find rising persistence of poverty and worsening outcomes for persistently disadvantaged pupils - both of which are likely contributing to the widening disadvantage gap.

Grade outcomes

It’s also concerning that the disadvantage gap grew in the 16-19 phase of education in 2020 and 2021, having remained relatively stable in the two preceding years.

The Department for Education (DfE) rightly cautions against comparing grades in 2020 and 2021 with exam-based grades in more “normal” years. But nevertheless, these are the grades that young people have been awarded and consequently have real-world consequences.

The fact that grades did not increase equally for all students could make the difference between a disadvantaged student getting into, or missing out on, a more competitive 16-19 or higher education course.

Taken together, our findings make clear that we have an entrenched problem with tackling inequality across education phases.

This was not caused by the pandemic but has been exacerbated by it. Part of the issue is that those in long-term poverty are flying under the radar, with no official persistent disadvantage gap statistics and no direct way for schools and colleges to identify these students.

The DfE can remedy this within existing data collections and help schools and colleges target support where it is most needed.

How to target support

But what of levels of support? Our research, coupled with previous EPI research on learning loss and emerging results for the 2022 cohort, all show that much more needs to be done to prevent disadvantage gaps further widening.

We need additional targeted funding for disadvantage - which is weighted more heavily towards persistent disadvantage - to get policy back on track.

Even then, we cannot expect schools to fix all societal problems. Children cannot learn if they’re cold and hungry. More than a decade after the 2010 Child Poverty Act was enshrined in law - former prime minister Tony Blair’s pledge to end child poverty by 2020 - the challenges facing schools, particularly those with the most disadvantaged intakes, are laid bare in another shocking report out this week.

The Sutton Trust finds that 54 per cent of the teachers it surveyed have seen an increase in pupils coming into school without adequate winter clothing, such as a coat, and 38 per cent reported an increase in children coming into school hungry.

As a starting point, we urgently need a credible cross-government child poverty strategy to tackle the social determinants of educational inequalities.

Anyone who cares about education policy should be concerned that, for our poorest children, 2021 looked little different from a decade before.

We must do better.

Emily Hunt is associate director at the Education Policy Institute