[UK] Poverty trap: but how do some schools buck trends?

From The Herald

FOR generations, the chronic underachievement that has dogged deprived areas of Scotland has been blamed on severe levels of poverty.

When challenged over poor exam results, time and again the mantra from local authorities has been to highlight the well-established links between deprivation and attainment.

Now statistics revealed by The Herald show for the first time the extent of that link. The figures, which map the exam achievements of S4 pupils against the 2004 Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, show clearly that a local authority such as Glasgow, consistently outperformed by the rest of Scotland, has the greatest problems of poverty.

At the other end of the scale, authorities such as Moray, East Lothian, Aberdeenshire, and Perth and Kinross – which are relatively well-off – perform much better than the average.

However, while the general pattern bears out received wisdom, some councils manage to buck the trend quite spectacularly, while others, such as Midlothian, appear to be punching below their educational weight.

Midlothian is ranked as the seventh least deprived area, but performs below the average in Standard grade results.

The council argues rightly that the data can be misleading because it hides the spread of deprivation across communities, but it also accepts attainment levels need to improve.

Foremost amongst the councils which are doing much better than expected is Inverclyde.

The area covers some of the most deprived parts of Scotland, including Greenock and Port Glasgow, but the council's attainment is at the same level as some of the more affluent areas such as Perth and Kinross and East Lothian.

Dr Nigel Lawrie, head of service within Inverclyde's education department, believes the key to the authority's success is a combination of factors, from providing a warm, welcoming environment in every school to good leadership from headteachers, commitment from staff and close links with parents and the wider community.

What is also important is identifying struggling pupils from an early age with baseline testing and giving them additional support, but also setting challenging targets.

"It starts at the age of three and we work throughout the system to make sure their attainment is better than we have a right to expect," said Dr Lawrie.
The key factors raised by Dr Lawrie feature prominently in a report on the links between poverty and low attainment which is published today by HM Inspectorate of Education.

The report seeks for the first time to isolate the factors that influence the poor performance of pupils and to highlight the strategies which are having an impact on turning their performance around.

It calls for a more flexible curriculum to engage pupils of different abilities and experiences, and recommends pupils in danger of low attainment to be identified at an early stage and given support, not just within the school but from outside bodies such as social work or health professionals.

Although the report highlights positive work across Scotland, it also states that the gap between the best and worst-performing pupils is getting bigger. For the billions spent on education since devolution, greater progress for the bottom 20% of pupils – some 60,000 children – should perhaps have been expected.

Peter Peacock, the education minister, is known to be con-cerned some of that money is not reaching schools in the way it was intended, something which is also a common complaint of headteachers.

However, he insists the executive is making a difference and that progress will be delivered in future years, with a particular focus on using data which charts the performance of individual authorities as a tool of accountability.

"Poverty is one of the major factors which contributes to pupils' poor performance and I have made tackling the link between deprivation and attainment a high priority. It will take a generation or more to fix but we are acting now and decisively," he said.

The clock is ticking. Children born in the most deprived areas of Scotland currently leave school with two fewer Standard grades at level three than the average. Some 11% of pupils from the poorest backgrounds leave with no qualifications, compared with 3% for the rest of Scotland.

What makes the situation more acute is the fact that when many low-attaining pupils leave school, they have no job or training to go to. A young person in this position is three times more likely than average to have mental health problems and five times more likely to have a criminal record.

Click here to see a chart of the council's ratings