Less than half of disadvantaged yet highly able pupils in primary go on to achieve top maths GCSE grades, research published today reveals.
Through primary school, high-ability five-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds “largely manage to keep pace academically with their equally bright but wealthier peers”, University College London researchers Professor John Jerrim and Maria Palma Carvajal found.
But in secondary school 65 per cent of highly able five-year-olds from affluent homes achieve a 7(A) grade or higher in GCSE mathematics, compared with just 40 per cent of disadvantaged pupils of the same ability.
The findings come after a new analysis published this week revealed that the absence gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils widens in the transition from primary to secondary school.
What happens to disadvantaged high-attainers?
“These [high-ability five-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds] are the kids that are in the best position to go on to achieve well at school, smash through the glass ceiling and increase diversity within professional jobs,” Professor Jerrim said.
“But if many are unable to achieve top school grades, how are we ever going to become a more socially mobile society?”
The study tracked the outcomes of 389 highly able five-year-olds from the most disadvantaged quarter of families in the UK throughout primary and secondary school, and compared them with the same outcomes for 1,392 equally able five-year-olds from the most affluent 25 per cent of families.
The affluent group had a larger sample size because “high-income children are more likely to have high levels of early achievement”, according to the report, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
For the research, pupils’ ability level was based on assessments at ages 3 and 5, and used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which follows the lives of around 19,000 young people born in the UK between 2000 and 2002.
The pupils in the study would have been in secondary school at a time when Michael Gove was bringing in major education reforms. He was education secretary from 2010 to 2014.
Attainment gap widens in key stage 3
The study found that key stage 3, when students are aged between 11 and 14, is a “key period” when there is “substantial decline in school engagement among academically able children from poor backgrounds”.
“This is when we see sizeable differences in the cognitive skills of early high achievers from rich and poor backgrounds emerge,” the report says.
The new findings come after separate research revealed in January that half of primary schools’ top-attaining maths pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds fail to get a grade 7 or higher in the subject at GCSE.
Today’s study shows that disadvantaged KS3 students in the sample developed a more “negative attitude towards school” and displayed “increasingly troublesome behaviour,” which meant they were more likely to “fall into a poorly behaved friendship group” and develop “declining levels of mental health”.
By age 14 almost two-thirds of highly able children from wealthier homes felt it was important for them to work hard, in contrast to just half of those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
RBA ‘valuable’ for tracking pupils
The study recommends that the Department for Education and the Social Mobility Commission consider “how further evidence on this important group can be generated in the future”.
The Reception Baseline Assessment - taken by children within the first six weeks of starting school - could be a “particularly valuable resource” in tracking high-attaining disadvantaged pupils, the report suggests.
Schools should be “regularly collecting information from young people - particularly during the transition into secondary school - to ensure they are able to quickly respond to the challenges faced by their high-achieving, low-income cohorts”.
The results are the first to be published from a wider study funded by the Nuffield Foundation looking at the outcomes of high-achieving primary school children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
Professor Jerrim said he will use England’s range of administrative data sources to further explore the health, crime, education and employment outcomes of pupils from poor backgrounds who were high achieving at the end of primary school.
The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.
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