How do we know if we're any good?

Are students successful because of or despite us?

In spite of our best efforts, the gap between the academic performance of our most and least advantaged students stubbornly refuses to close. In fact, as a 2024 report from the Education Policy Institute shows, the gap seems to be getting wider.

Nationally, disadvantaged students at the end of primary school were 10.3 months behind their peers in 2023, a whole month increase since 2019…

Nationally, the disadvantage gap widens as pupils progress through schooling, reaching 19.2 months at the end of secondary school in 2023, an increase of over a month since 2019.

Some of these increases are no doubt connected with the appalling rise in child poverty over the past decade. According to sources, “in half of UK cities, the poorest families today are worse off in real terms than the poorest families a decade ago” with the government estimating that “4.3 million children, or 30% of all children in the UK, were living in relative low-income households.”

These terrible statistics are, of course, no excuse and the suspicion remains that more could and should be done in schools. Especially if we consider that there are no schools in which the most disadvantaged students outperform most advantaged.¹ It therefore seems reasonable that ‘good’ schools are those in which the gap between the most and least disadvantaged is narrowest. (If you’re interested, Weareinbeta have put together a list of the top performing schools in England according to this metric.)

To understand the idea that the performance of the most disadvantaged tells us most about the success of a school, we need to view students’ results through the lens of ‘despite’ and ‘because’. Simply put, we should view students’ results like this: More advantaged students will tend to be academically successful despite the choices we make, whereas the performance of less advantaged students is more likely to be because of what we’ve done.

What this means is that although you may feel very proud of the results of more advantaged students they are likely to have been successful regardless of your actions and decisions. One counter argument is the oft repeated axiom, ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’. But the performance of the most advantaged tells you nothing about the ‘tides’ in your school. As in economics so it is in education: there is no ‘trickle down effect’.

Taking credit for the success of advantaged students ignores the role of family background, private tutors, extended social networks and a host of other, largely invisible factors.² These same factors largely explain why the performance of the less privileged is much more likely to be due to the efforts and choices of school staff. We should rightly take pride in the achievements of these students as they are far more dependent on us to get things right.

Too often we ignore or excuse the poor performance of more disadvantaged students because we can point to the relative performance of their more affluent peers. Instead we should take responsibility for the performance of our most vulnerable cohorts. Their performance is the clearest yardstick of the success of our school improvement efforts. If these children are not doing well we cannot conclude we are doing a good job. Conversely, if these students do well³, this really will constitute a rising tide.

This is a social justice issue: ignoring it is pernicious. If we wave away the results of our most vulnerable students we risk fooling ourselves into believing we are better than we really are. Of course we should celebrate the success of all students but, if we want to know how effective we are, we should hold ourselves to account by looking first and hardest at the results of our most disadvantaged students.

1. Do get in touch if you know of one.

2. According to a Sutton Trust report, “30% of young people aged 11-16 report ever having had private tutoring, up from 27% pre-pandemic, and the joint highest figure since the time series began in 2005, when it was 18%. 11% report receiving tutoring in the 2021/22 school year, and 12% in the previous year.”

3. We can quibble about what we mean by ‘do well’ but thinking in this way is less about the performance of individual students and more about the relative performance of cohorts.