Education and poverty

Introduction

This programme of work explores how poverty affects children's education, and the role of education as a route out of poverty.

The first phase of the programme looked broadly at how poverty and children's education interact. It aimed to challenge some of the assumptions of the UK educational system and uncover why it continues to fail low-income families and other disadvantaged groups. A second strand focused specifically on the formation and impact of children's attitudes and aspirations towards education.

Following on from this, two current projects will assess how far policy and practice solutions that address attitudes, aspirations and behaviour can reduce the educational attainment gap between richer and poorer children.

If you want to read more about the programme, download our Investigations Summary (PDF, 105KB) 

Key issues

Children growing up in poverty and disadvantage are less likely to do well at school. This feeds into disadvantage in later life and in turn affects their children.

Our research so far indicates that:

• Socio-economic differences affect children's learning through a range of factors.
• Some influences are felt inside school, interacting with children's attitude towards education.
• Others occur outside school, but are nevertheless important for learning and development.
• Children from different backgrounds have diverse experiences and develop different attitudes, despite also having many things in common.
• The aspirations, attitudes and behaviour of both parents and children play an important part in explaining the gap between richer and poorer children's educational attainment.

Only by understanding the varied factors influencing social differences in education will it be possible to design effective responses in policy and practice.

A key message of the evidence is that equality of educational opportunity cannot rely solely on better delivery of the school curriculum for disadvantaged groups, but must address multiple aspects of disadvantaged children's lives.

Overview

Two major projects have been examining the formation and role of attitudes and aspirations towards education:

The first was published in April 2010. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and CMPO, University of Bristol carried out a project to help us understand more about how important attitudes and behaviour are in the educational attainment of poorer children. We are now looking in more detail at the implications of this research for policy and practice, in school and children's services and more widely. We also asked for people's views on these findings: whether they have had any personal experience of the issues raised; if they know of any actions being taken to address the issues; and what other factors they believe are important.

A second project will be published on October 4, 2011. Glasgow University has carried out longitudinal research to understand how attributes of the individual, family, place and school in deprived urban areas come together to shape aspirations in the critical early years of adolescence. In particular, it explored how parental circumstances and attitudes, the school as an institution and the opportunities available within neighbourhoods influence children's identities and aspirations towards education and employment. 

We have also commissioned two projects to explore what part policies and practice that address attitudes and aspirations could play in closing the attainment gap. This builds on the research published in 2010 showing that children and parents’ attitudes, aspirations and behaviour were important factors explaining the difference in education results between children from richer and poorer backgrounds. These projects are now aiming to find out whether these links are causal and whether a specific set of interventions addressing attitudes and aspirations would have a good chance of reducing the attainment gap between richer and poorer children. If so, we will aim to build support for trialling and implementing these more widely across the UK. A team of researchers at Birmingham University (led by Prof. Steven Gorard) and at Newcastle University (led by Prof Liz Todd) have undertaken this work and we currently anticipate publication of the reports in March 2012 along with a roundup of the evidence from the programme as a whole.