“If I had anything to do with the pupil premium, I would weight it most towards early years, then early primary, and less in secondary,” says Jean Gross.

It’s one of several ideas that she has about how to tweak the education system to better serve children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and help to reduce the attainment gap in the process.

The disparity in outcomes between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers is something that Gross knows a lot about. As well as being a former teacher, head of children’s services and educational psychologist, she was a senior director for the Blair government’s National Strategies - responsible for its work on overcoming barriers to achievement - and a founding trustee of the Early Intervention Foundation, a charity focused on supporting evidence-based approaches to early intervention.

Unfortunately, Gross says, there is still a long way to go to level the playing field.

“The data shows that even pre-pandemic, we hadn’t made a lot of progress on closing the attainment gap, and Covid means it’s only going to get worse,” she explains.

So, what exactly does she think needs to change in order for the sector to turn things around? Tes sat down with her to find out about how she thinks funding could be better allocated, and why social and emotional learning shouldn’t be overlooked as a tool for tackling the attainment gap.

Tes: Why do you think the sector has so far struggled to make significant progress in closing the disadvantage gap?  

Jean Gross: The problem is that the policy tends to start at the wrong end. It often focuses on getting disadvantaged children into top universities and raising their career aspirations but, actually, this work needs to begin in early years.

There is a fundamental imbalance in the money we spend on disadvantage; the biggest investment needs to be made between the years of conception and age 5. 

Pupil premium is the key investment that the government currently makes around disadvantage. Are enough children covered by this?

It’s a crude measure, isn’t it? There are always children who are disadvantaged but not eligible for free school meals [and therefore pupil premium funding].

It’s hard, though, to find a better measure, and I don’t think we should put our efforts into how to target it more broadly. Instead, we need to rethink what we do with the funding and how we can spend it better.

What should pupil premium funding be spent on?

There needs to be a focus on English, spoken language and maths, but crucially - and this is often missed - we need to concentrate on how these children feel about their learning, and the relationships we have with them. 

There’s no typical disadvantaged child; I am talking in generalisations here. But in my experience, these children start school full of beans, wanting to succeed, but they then fail on early reading and become aware that they’re not doing as well as other children despite their best efforts. They get put in bottom sets and, progressively after that, they come to a feeling of powerlessness. In this journey, disengagement is the outcome. 

We spend a lot of time on policy that looks at structural factors: we say “let’s change the school”, “let’s academise”, “let’s give them extra English and maths”.

But we don’t spend enough time thinking about what is happening in the disadvantaged child’s mind: how they’re feeling about themselves, school and their teachers.

What can schools do to change that?

There are a few approaches that I believe work really well. The first is to encourage them to see their own role in any success, no matter how small it may be.

I spent a lot of time watching skilled Reading Recovery teachers working one-to-one with children. Often, when they’d finished reading a book with a child, they’d choose a page and ask the child to show them where on the page they’d made a mistake and sorted it out by themselves. The key phrase here is “by yourself”.

Another example of this might be a boy who is in the school football team. When his team wins a game, he may say, “Oh, well, we just won because it’s easier to win at home.” That is a low self-efficacy response; he is saying the success wasn’t down to him but an external factor. Here, the teacher’s role needs to be to challenge this. You could say, “OK, Jason, maybe it is easier to win at home, but what have you done lately that’s helped your team to win?” If he can’t name anything, then help him. Say, “Well, I’ve noticed you’ve been practising in the playground every day.”

We need to always be feeding back their successful strategies to them, even when they’ve made mistakes. 

The second thing we need to do is give children real responsibility, and a chance to make a difference. Examples include asking disadvantaged Year 9s to help Year 3s at a local primary with reading, or training lower-attaining children to be forest school leaders. 

There’s a fascinating study, for example, which asked Year 10s to complete a 15-minute writing exercise giving advice to struggling younger students on what makes a good learner. The proportion of the targeted Year 10s with low grades dropped by 5 per cent by the end of the year as a result.  

I can’t stress enough that we need to think about how disadvantaged children feel about their learning, rather than just focus on the knowledge we are pouring into them. Self-efficacy is so important: if children feel powerful they are much more likely to engage with school and with their teachers. These relationships, too, are really important.

Are those relationships more important for disadvantaged children than for others?

There’s a lot of research that shows that disadvantaged children do better at school when they feel they belong there, that they’re valued and when they have strong relationships with the adults in the school.

There was some great research published by Professor Michael Rutter that really stressed this. 

He looked at children who had serious disadvantage in their early years: parents who were drug users, others who had problems of domestic violence, who lived in extreme poverty, and so on. He tracked those children as they grew up to be teenagers and then adults, and he found that one-third of those children not only survived but thrived.

‘I can’t stress enough that we need to think about how disadvantaged children feel about their learning’

He tried to unpick what the factors were that led to the outcome. One factor was high attainment at school. The second factor was having at least one strong adult relationship. That relationship could have been a family member, but it could equally be a teacher. 

There is this huge power in relationships, and I don’t think we consider that enough when working with disadvantaged children.

What sorts of strategies can schools implement around relationships?

Daniel Sobel is a great writer on inclusion, and he tells the story about a disadvantaged group in a secondary school who were struggling with maths. The school didn’t give them more maths, but instead organised a camping trip for both the maths teachers and the students. It made a huge difference to maths outcomes because it built those relationships up first. 

Another school I know has a “10 per cent kinder” strategy. They identify children who are struggling in any way, particularly emotionally, and then every teacher in the school tries to be 10 per cent kinder to them. It might be that whenever they see them in a corridor or in a lesson, they just chat, ask them how they are and show that little bit of extra warmth.

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There’s another strategy called “2 x 10”. You pick two pupils you are struggling with, and for 10 days you try every day to have a positive chat with them, which is unrelated to school work. It could be about their interests or what motivates them. 

We really do need to think about relationships and belonging, as well as literacy, maths, science. Some schools, like the ones above, do this brilliantly. But too many don’t think about it at all. 

Why do you think these approaches aren’t more commonplace?

The focus of professional development definitely has a part to play. A lot of the initial teacher training, the early career framework and then the CPD teachers do is about subject teaching, knowledge and the cognitive side of teaching and learning.

There’s much less professional development about the internal, emotional side of teaching and learning. I’d be very interested in how many teachers have been on a course that focuses purely on building relationships with pupils. 

Many teachers don’t think they need this sort of training; and of course, many do know how to build relationships with pupils in general. But disadvantaged children need that 10 per cent extra. 

Not all disadvantaged children, but some, make building the relationship really hard. By the time some have reached secondary school they are pretty teed off and won’t be easy to reach. They lose faith that school is a benign place, so it does take more than the usual [amount of effort to build a relationship]. 

Marc Rowland, who writes a lot about pupil premium, says it’s the 1,000 little interactions we have with children, rather than the big shiny interventions, that matter most. I agree.

This work is rooted in social and emotional education. How far do you think schools have come in effective delivery of this?

The field of social and emotional learning is closely linked with disadvantage. Not all children struggle here, but quite a few do. 

When it comes to the wellbeing and mental health of these children, Covid has made schools much more proactive, and that is great. Some are implementing trauma-informed practices, changing their environment and approaches to behaviour management, which is welcome. 

However, I would say that it’s led to a rather piecemeal approach, rather than a developed curriculum. Schools are grabbing materials on wellbeing and using them, but they’re not using them in the context of “what does a four-year-old, seven-year-old and then 13-year-old need to learn and how can we develop this progressively?”

What does an effective social and emotional curriculum look like?

In 2005 I oversaw the delivery of the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) programme in schools, and it is the piece of work that I am most proud of. I’d still advocate for that approach to be embedded in every school.

My thinking has always been governed by an understanding that social and emotional learning has a number of different components. I co-wrote an Education Endowment Foundation report that highlighted these: children need self-awareness, they need to manage their feelings and they need to be able to empathise and get on with others.

‘Marc Rowland says it’s the 1,000 little interactions we have with children, rather than the big shiny interventions, that matter most. I agree’

I’ve always felt passionately that schools need to have a whole-school systematic approach that explicitly teaches all of those skills, not just wellbeing, through personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE). There need to be regular, timetabled lessons at least once a week that work in a spiral manner so that you don’t get a 12-year-old who’s actually learning to talk about the same feelings as a four-year-old.

These skills should be modelled by the adults in the school, and there need to be reward systems that recognise and celebrate children who demonstrate empathy, friendship skills or conflict-management skills.

SEAL was popular; schools loved it and it still is being used by some. It stopped being funded when we moved from the Labour government into a coalition. Nick Gibb, the minister at the time, was reported as saying that social and emotional learning was “ghastly”.

There was also a negative evaluation by the University of Manchester, wasn’t there?

Yes. I could talk about its evaluation endlessly; I don’t think it was conclusive at all.

It was just in secondary schools, over a two-year period, and we all know that implementing any whole-school approach in a secondary school is like turning around a tanker: it takes time.

There was a positive evaluation of the small-group strand of the programme and of primary SEAL, though that wasn’t a randomised controlled trial. 

Anyway, because the funding stopped, schools didn’t feel they had permission to do SEAL. 

And yet the University of Manchester has published research more recently that shows it is still the most popular programme of this type used in schools. I have set up a website where people can download the materials for free, and every day people request access to these materials. There has been a lasting legacy, but I would love to see this come back as part of what the government feels should be part of what all children learn.

Why do you think it’s no longer a priority for the government?

It’s a curriculum issue. The curriculum has shifted, in my long years in education, more and more towards the accumulation of knowledge. PSHE, in all its forms, often gets sidelined by the pressing demands of the subjects that are tested and examined.

I’ve thought very long and hard about this: I’m not of the opinion that social and emotional learning should be formally assessed and reported, but nevertheless, it needs to be given a status that makes it clear to schools that this is a crucial part of how we want all children to grow up. 

We want them to grow up as whole human beings, capable of managing conflicts, dealing with their feelings and making wise decisions. This is so important and I would love us to come back to this being a fundamental part of the curriculum. 

For disadvantaged children, though, it is especially important that they have access to this education in school. I am a strong believer that social and emotional learning would complement the acquisition of knowledge to produce human beings who can make the world a better place. By goodness, we need it. 

Jean Gross was talking to Kate Parker