Schools minister Nick Gibb has admitted the disadvantage gap is not falling as fast as the government wants, as the latest A-level results revealed a growing regional divide in pupils achieving top grades.
Mr Gibb said children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be more persistently or severely absent than other children.
He said the government has been focusing on improving outcomes and attendance for those disadvantaged children, with the gap falling since the pandemic “but not falling as fast as we want”.
The release of A-level results yesterday showed a broad return to nearer the 2019 grading levels, as had been planned, following three years in which results had been higher as a result of the response to the Covid crisis, with exams not being held in 2020 or 2021.
However, there have been concerns raised about a widening regional divide in the 2023 A-level results. In the North East, the percentage of pupils receiving A*/A grades was lower than before the pandemic in 2019, and the figure was also slightly down in Yorkshire and the Humber.
Commenting on the results, Mr Gibb said: “There are some very good and outstanding schools in the North East. The issue in the North East is that they have a higher proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds - and that is reflected in the results. The focus of this government is closing that attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers.
“Before the pandemic, we had closed that attainment gap by 9 per cent at secondary and 13 per cent at primary. Now we are geared toward recovering that position post-pandemic and indeed improving on it further. It has widened over the pandemic.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme yesterday, Mr Gibb said that tackling absenteeism is currently the priority of the government, with the number of pupils classed as persistent absentees currently at 22 per cent.
The government will be allying across sectors such as health care, social care and even the police to try to get children to stay in school in the new academic year, the minister said.
As well as regional disparities, this year’s A-level results saw a bigger rise in the proportion of top grades awarded to private school students from 2019 levels than at state schools. The disparities have raised concerns about the widening of the disadvantage gap.
Stephen Morgan, Labour’s shadow schools minister, said: “Students receiving their results have worked incredibly hard despite enormous challenges, yet these results show that the Tories have failed to level the playing field.
“Students in the North East are no less capable but after 13 years of Conservative governments they’re seeing their results go backwards compared to their peers across the South of England. After Rishi Sunak said the Conservatives had ‘maxed out’ on support for young people, it’s hard not to conclude that the Conservatives are happy to see the managed decline of educational standards across the parts of our country.”
Labour added that just one in seven secondary school pupils received government-funded tuition this year.
Mr Gibb said that the Department for Education’s National Tutoring Programme will provide one-to-one tuition in the new academic year to get children back into school and caught up.
