I first met Jason when I was a young educational psychologist. He was referred because he was 6 years old and he was showing no signs of learning to read.

When he was 4, Jason had started school full of excitement, like most children of that age. Everything had gone reasonably well in Reception, though he didn’t always do as he was told and found it hard to share. When I met him at the end of Year 1, however, he had begun to notice that other children could read and he couldn’t. He sat next to a little girl with neat handwriting and could see the difference between her work and his.

When I talked to Jason, I was struck by his limited vocabulary and lack of life experience. He had never been to the seaside, nor even played in a park. His horizons stretched not much further than the small council estate where he lived, the village shop and the school.

I gave the school some advice about how to teach him phonics and went away. He was placed in a small group made up of children described as “low ability”, and had help in class from a teaching assistant (TA).

A year later, he had made little progress in literacy and was well behind in maths. At some point in key stage 2, the school referred him again, in the hope of obtaining what was then called a statement of special educational needs. He still couldn’t read and had begun to have friendship and behaviour problems, which increased as he moved into Year 6.

When I next caught up with Jason, he was in secondary school. He had a statement by then, for TA support in lessons. It made little difference. He still struggled with reading and had begun to play truant. When he was in school he often got into fights. After several fixed-term exclusions, he was permanently excluded while we were reviewing his statement to try to get him into a special school.

After months out of education, he went to a very good pupil referral unit. But it was too late for him to catch up academically and he left with no qualifications.

Jason’s story is one of waste. But there are many other stories just like his - the stories of a group who have been called “the unseen children”: white boys eligible for free school meals.

Of course, not all pupils who do poorly in our education system are white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds; pupils from some black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds and disadvantaged white girls are also important groups that need support. Similarly, not all white boys who live in families experiencing poverty do poorly. So, why focus on this group?

In 2008, Ofsted flagged up disadvantaged white boys as persistently underachieving in a survey report that highlighted common features of schools that had been successful in improving their educational experiences and achievements.

Five years later, in 2013, there was another Ofsted report on the same theme. In 2014 and again in 2021, the Commons Education Select Committee also published reports on the issue, the latter titled The Forgotten: how white working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it.

Policymakers have been attempting to solve this problem for some time now. But so far, it seems, little has changed. White boys eligible for free school meals tend to perform poorly in the early years foundation stage profile at age 5, in the phonics check at 6, in KS2 tests and in GCSEs - with attainment well behind that of all other ethnic groups except for the very much smaller group of pupils of Gypsy Roma and Traveller heritage.

Only pupils of white Irish, Gypsy Roma and Traveller heritage make less progress over their years in secondary school than disadvantaged white boys. These boys make up a high proportion of what Roy Blatchford, who chaired the Association of School and College Leaders’ commission looking into this problem, calls the “forgotten third”: the pupils who reach the age of 16 without any meaningful qualifications.

The scale of the issue alone makes this group worth focusing on. But how do we fix the problem? There is, of course, no one stereotypical disadvantaged white boy, nor one life history. Every child is different, and labels can be dangerous and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Jason’s story I encountered repeatedly with the children I worked with. We can learn from these commonalities, and implement some specific interventions to address them (see box, below).

Schools also need to avoid falling into some of the common traps that I observed in Jason’s case:

• Over-supporting children in class, inadvertently reducing their sense of capability and independence.
• Further reducing their sense of control by using only external reward systems to manage behaviour, rather than teaching them strategies to self-regulate.
• Identifying them as having special educational needs or disabilities (SEND), and in so doing placing them outside their teachers’ perceived sphere of responsibility.

Why are schools falling into these traps in the first place? Unfortunately, many popular interventions are based on misinterpretations of the research in this area.

For example, if the research shows that the poor attainment of disadvantaged white boys is linked to (that is, correlates with) lack of cultural capital and low aspirations, we might conclude that if we tackle these factors then the result will be improved attainment. This is not necessarily the case. Correlation does not prove cause.

So, what are some of the approaches that schools would do well to avoid?

Aspiration interventions

Poverty of aspiration among pupils and their parents has been a recurring theme for those seeking to explain the low attainment of disadvantaged children, and for those devising national policies to tackle the issue.

However, there is little evidence that school-based interventions to raise aspirations have any effect on attainment. Research summarised in the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit seems to show that most young people (and their parents) already have high aspirations. What many lack, however, is the means to achieve their goals. Therefore, it makes more sense to work directly on pupils’ knowledge and skills rather than on their aspirations.

Smaller classes

Another common myth is that reducing class size is the holy grail in tackling disadvantage gaps. This approach is hugely popular with parents and favoured by many teachers.

However, unless it is possible to reduce class sizes to below 20 or even 15 pupils, research summarised in the EEF Toolkit suggests that spending money on smaller classes is unlikely to make much difference to attainment. Only at these very small numbers, beyond the reach of most schools, can teachers actually teach differently; reducing a class from, say, 30 to 25 will have little impact.

Setting and streaming

Schools often seek to combine reducing class size with setting or streaming, creating small groups where (in theory) lower-attaining pupils will get more personal attention. Studies show that socioeconomically disadvantaged children (and boys in particular) are more likely to be placed in these groups. But an extensive body of research shows that placing pupils in streams or sets has no overall impact on attainment, and actively disadvantages those placed in lower sets or streams.

In fact, grouping children flexibly by prior attainment within their class for specific activities or topics, such as literacy, has a better pedigree than setting or streaming. But the evidence suggests there are fewer benefits for lower-attaining pupils than for others, and that within-class attainment grouping may have long-term negative effects on these pupils’ confidence and engagement.

Allocating TAs to work with lower-attaining children in class

Based on the assumed benefits of giving underachieving disadvantaged pupils more individual attention, many schools choose to spend pupil premium funding on extra TA support. This practice has been called into question by the 2009 Deployment and Impact of Support Staff in Schools (DISS) study (Blatchford et al), which demonstrated a negative relationship between pupil progress and the amount of TA support that they received, after controlling for other factors that might explain this relationship (prior attainment, SEND, disadvantage, gender). One reason for this is that TAs had come to replace, rather than supplement, teaching from qualified teachers, resulting in TA-supported pupils making less progress.

Practice has moved on since the original DISS study in 2004, but nevertheless I still meet many teachers and school leaders who view extra TA support as the solution for children in “low-ability” groups, particularly in primary schools.

In fact, some schools have even gone so far as to interpret the requirement to account for pupil premium spend as a discrete budget line as an indication that they should appoint a dedicated “pupil premium TA” to support eligible children in class, irrespective of their actual learning needs and the effect this might have on their self-perceptions - and their progress. This particular wrong turning runs against all the evidence, but it’s an example of how well-meaning policies can have unintended consequences.

We know that the above policies don’t work. But what does?

One thing that will help is good teaching. There is good evidence that being exposed to higher-quality teaching makes more difference to disadvantaged pupils than others. A 2011 analysis by the Sutton Trust categorised teachers as high-quality or poorly performing, on the basis of the value-added results of the children they taught. It found that the effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds: over a school year, these pupils gain 1.5 years’ worth of learning with very effective teachers, compared with 0.5 years with poorly performing teachers.

To me, this has always meant that the first port of call for raising the achievement of disadvantaged pupils should be making sure they are taught by the very best teachers. This is something that doesn’t always happen in schools, with the best teachers more commonly allocated to pupils on the cusp of exam success.

But ensuring access to the best teachers alone is not enough; to close the gap we need to make sure that disadvantaged children get more great teaching than others, which can probably only be achieved by additional intervention programmes delivered over and above the regular curriculum. Here are three approaches that seem promising:

High-quality nursery provision in the early years

There is extensive international evidence that high-quality preschool education and childcare can reduce income-related gaps in later attainment.

In the UK, the Effective Preschool, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) longitudinal study, for example, has followed a cohort of approximately 3,000 children born in England in the 1990s, and found a strong association between the use of high-quality group-based preschool provision and children’s early cognitive development and long-term school attainment.

More recently, the interim findings of the Study of Early Education and Development (SEED) (Melhuish and Gardiner, 2020) suggest less impact overall, when looking at the amount of time children spend in early education rather than whether they attend or not. However, SEED did find some significant impacts for the 40 per cent most disadvantaged children.

So starting preschool provision early is really important. Many schools understand this and, as a result, have used government funding to develop their own provision for two-year-olds.

Another important factor is working with families. There is strong and consistent evidence for providing two-generation programmes (that is, programmes targeting the home-learning environment through support for parents alongside centre-based care for children) to low-income families where children are at particular risk.

Finally, it is worth noting research showing that high-quality nursery provision will not by itself narrow the disadvantage gap in the long term. It has to be followed by high-quality provision in the school years.

Additional time in schooling before the age of 5

A fascinating 2019 study by Thomas Cornelissen and Christian Dustmann made use of the historical variations in the rules for starting school across local authorities to investigate the effects of age at school entry. Up until 2005-06, some schools could defer entry for children born later in the year until the second or third term of Reception. Information from the National Pupil Database on more than 400,000 children in England born in 2000-01 was combined with information on more than 7,000 of these children from the Millennium Cohort Study.

The researchers found that additional time in school was linked to higher test scores in language and numeracy at age 7 for all children, with pupils’ age at the time of testing controlled for, but that the effects were particularly marked for disadvantaged boys. An additional term of schooling before age 5 reduced the achievement gap between boys from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds at age 7 by 60 to 80 per cent.

There could be a number of explanations for this finding, so it needs to be treated with caution. However, the research does suggest that early exposure to the more formal aspects of schooling can be actively beneficial to disadvantaged boys - or at least not harmful. It also implies that those who argue that we should delay the age of formal schooling for all children need to consider carefully whether this might inadvertently widen the disadvantage gap.

Additional one-to-one and small group tuition

A huge weight of evidence summarised in the EEF Toolkit demonstrates the impact of one-to-one and group tuition delivered by teachers or TAs to low-attaining pupils.

Programmes involving TAs or volunteers tend to be less effective than those that utilise experienced and specifically trained teachers, which, on average, have nearly twice the effect.

As a rule, the smaller the group, the better; one-to-one tuition has the largest impacts; and effects start to diminish with group sizes of six or more.

The potential of this approach is particularly significant considering that there has been funding in England recently for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), in which paid tutors not on school staff provide extra tuition for disadvantaged pupils. If successful, the programme offers a real chance to narrow the disadvantage gap, given the fact that private tuition is very common for parents who can afford it, with one in four pupils outside London having accessed it (Nichols, 2020).

The evaluation of this national programme will be interesting. However, it is worth noting that so far the UK evidence on such external tutoring (which relies on tutors who are not teachers or TAs) is limited.

Every child who experiences disadvantage is different; there can be no single prescription but there are possibilities.

What can teachers and school leaders take from all this? First, it’s important to recognise that some of the approaches commonly taken by schools to narrow disadvantage gaps have little evidence of impact. These include aspiration interventions, small reductions in class size, and allocating TAs to support low-attaining pupils in class.

Schools should instead be investing in those interventions that are well-evidenced, including, but not limited to, those listed above. There is also very strong evidence for teaching approaches that develop metacognition and self-regulation, explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies, oral language interventions, and social and emotional learning, to name just a few.

Secondly, schools need to develop their own theory on delivering change for the groups of children whose attainment gives them cause for concern, based on a real understanding of the life course of at-risk pupils, and of their individual psychology, together with an understanding of the lived experience of their families and community.

Policymakers have often assumed that structural changes to schools, such as academisation or introducing more grammar schools, are key to narrowing gaps, and that longer school days or summer schools may be the solution to Covid catch-up. The evidence suggests otherwise. Everyday interactions between teachers and pupils and their families are what matter most.

For me, then, the secrets of closing the disadvantage gap lie in applying relational rather than structural strategies and basing them on engaging with the subjective experiences and perceptions of underperforming groups of students.

We need to understand what is going on for individual children. We can learn more about how they experience school, for example, if we track them over a school day. We can ask their parents about their strengths, as well as talk about their difficulties. To tailor our teaching, we can listen to children to find out what makes them tick, what they’re thinking and feeling. Often, we will find that, like Jason, they feel helpless, with little control over their experiences, and realise we need to take steps to make them more powerful in their own lives, and in their own learning.

Jean Gross CBE is an author, educational psychologist and former government communication champion for children

This article originally appeared in the 19 November 2021 issue under the headline “How do we help the ‘unseen children’?”