This article was originally published on 28 January 2024
We know that half of disadvantaged pupils who are top attainers in maths at 11 are no longer top attainers by 16, and all the evidence suggests that the big drop-off happens early on in secondary school.
We’ve spoken to lots of key stage 3 pupils about why this happens, and two themes have emerged.
One is about how their experience of maths changes in the secondary transition, which I explored in a recent article for Tes. The other is about their friendship groups.
We surveyed 2,000 pupils to find out more about what was going on, and discovered something really surprising.
The friendship group effect in maths
In this survey we showed pupils a screen full of words and phrases, and asked them to select the ones that described their friends. These were things like “do their homework” or “mess around in lessons”. From this, we grouped pupils into those with “studious” friendship groups, “non-studious” friendship groups and “mixed” friendship groups.
In Year 6 around a quarter of all pupils have non-studious friendship groups. This is the same for both disadvantaged pupils (defined as living in the bottom 30 per cent of Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index postcodes) and non-disadvantaged pupils.
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But in Year 7 something changes. Around a quarter of the non-disadvantaged pupils still have non-studious friendship groups. Yet the proportion of disadvantaged pupils with non-studious friendship groups shoots up to around 40 per cent. There is no change in the proportion of more advantaged pupils with friends who don’t behave well, but for disadvantaged pupils, it goes up by around half.
This really matters. In our survey the strongest predictor of attitudes to school and maths was a pupil’s friendship group. A big increase in pupils with non-studious friendship groups is associated with a big increase in negative attitudes to school and maths. This friendship group effect appears to be driving a major shift in attitudes - predominantly among children from less affluent families.
This phenomenon is seen across attainment levels, but is worst for high attainers. Although they’re most likely to have studious friendship groups, there is a sharp increase in the proportion of high attainers with non-studious friendship groups in Year 7.
They also become increasingly self-conscious about being good at maths as they move into Year 7. The proportion of high attainers describing maths as “uncool” increases by 50 per cent from Year 6 to Year 7, while there’s little change for lower attainers.
What’s the cause?
So, what’s causing this change in friendship groups at secondary school? We don’t definitively know, but here are some of the hypotheses that have come up in our work so far.
1. Pupils start having agency in their friendship choices
To terribly oversimplify the situation, in primary school your friends are the people you got sat next to when you were 4. You didn’t have a huge amount of agency, or a huge pool of possible friends to choose from. In secondary school you have hundreds of possible friends to choose from, and are far more socially savvy about choosing them. This allows for a big “re-sorting” of friendship groups, even in cases where whole classes from primary tend to go to the same secondary.
2. Disadvantaged pupils feel more pressure to be “cool”
In this re-sorting, students are choosing friendship groups based on a range of criteria. One of them is what a given choice of friends will mean for their social status. Disadvantaged students, who, on average, have less social capital, might be more likely to feel they need to be in the “cool” group than those from families that imbue them with a great deal of confidence. And in many or most schools, plenty of “cool” groups are the less studious ones.
3. Setting may play a role
Many schools determine their maths sets based on assessments taken at the start of Year 7.
Students from different backgrounds will have had very different preparation for these. Some will have done no maths since their Sats, others will have been completing study guides at the kitchen table all summer. This practice may disproportionately put disadvantaged pupils into lower sets due to less preparation, and if there is a relationship between set and level of studiousness (which seems reasonable) then it makes them more likely to form friendship groups with less studious peers.
We need to get the transition right
It’s clear from our research that friendship groups form early in Year 7, and that more disadvantaged students are selecting into peer groups that make their perception of maths worse.
We need to do everything possible to influence what happens in this critical window at the start of Year 7, so that maths isn’t something that students feel makes them uncool and will harm their social standing. We know there are thousands of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who love maths in Year 6, and can’t let the side effects of transition to secondary school steer them away.
At Axiom Maths we support schools to run maths circles, where groups of like-minded pupils come together to do challenging maths for the fun of it. This gives them a social group where maths is prized, and there’s no pressure to be someone you’re not.
David Thomas, CEO of Axiom Maths, is a former maths teacher, secondary headteacher and Department for Education adviser
