At the Education Policy Institute, we spend a lot of time examining trends in the disadvantage gap. 

Our 2018 annual report focused on the disadvantage gap and found that progress was stalling, despite it being estimated that it would be more than a century before the gap in maths and English language grades fully closes. More positively, we also found that the curriculum is becoming more equal, with poorer children beginning to catch up in terms of the breadth and challenge of the GCSE subjects they study. 

This forensic sifting of results in England each year helps us to understand when policies are working, and when more needs to be done. But many of the challenges in education are global, and there is much to be learned by pooling our experience with other countries that are also seeking to create better lives for children born into disadvantage. 

Today, we hosted the launch of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) report, Equity in Education, which assesses how well-developed countries are performing on measures relating to social mobility. Improving the outcomes of the most disadvantaged features prominently in both education policy and discourse in this country. Having pored over the comparison tables to place our results in an international perspective, how do we fare? 

Beginning with the performance of poorer pupils at 15 years-old, the picture in the UK is perhaps less pessimistic than we might expect. Or, at least, many other countries have it worse: 10.5 per cent of the differences between pupils in science test scores in this country are explained by socioeconomic status - this is lower than the OECD average of 13 per cent. Countries such as France, Hungary and Luxembourg have much higher rates, with 20 per cent of these differences explained by social background. Canada, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia and Norway lead the way on under 9 per cent.

There are other positives to be found. More disadvantaged students in the UK are also proficient in core skills for reading, maths and science than the OECD average. Since 2000, the disadvantage gap in reading has reduced, while students’ belief in both their ability to solve science problems, and their career expectations have become more equal since 2006. Research finds that these beliefs and expectations may be linked to academic outcomes.

‘Failings in post-16 education’

Today’s report is about more than just Pisa tests, however. It also considers how disadvantage gaps grow over the course of education and early adulthood, and it is here where we should sit up and pay attention.

England’s numeracy skills gap at ages 25-29 is the largest out of all participating developed countries. This does not stem from education in schools, where the disadvantage gap was only a little larger than average, but rather from a sudden, large decrease in educational equity for young people between the ages of 15 and 29. These striking findings, which include pupils from the 2000 Pisa tests, suggest significant failings in post-16 education in England, which we recently found to be increasingly segregated by background. 

This isn’t the only broader insight in the new OECD report, however, and schools do not get off the hook entirely. Pisa also includes questions about students’ social and emotional wellbeing, and these data have been crunched from a social mobility perspective too. 

Shockingly, the report says that just 15 per cent of disadvantaged students in the UK were considered “socially and emotionally resilient” - that is that they were satisfied with their life, felt socially integrated at school, and were not suffering from test anxiety. We often see ourselves as a mid-ranking country in most international education comparisons - but these figures are well below the OECD average, and ought to worry policymakers.

It is suggested that behaviour in schools may play a part in the academic skills gap, but with such low levels of wellbeing, we also need to question whether both disruptive behaviour and attainment gaps could be symptoms of a wider failure of successive governments to effectively support children’s wellbeing. 

Jo Hutchinson is director for social mobility and vulnerable learners at the Education Policy Institute thinktank