For those of you who saw John Humphreys’ BBC2 programme on the attainment gap between pupils from poor backgrounds and their richer counterparts, it was indeed very thought provoking. Despite massive investment in education over the past decade, the gap seems to be growing wider which will have drastic consequences on society in years to come.
However, the analysis fell into the trap of oversimplifying the relationship between poverty and academic achievement and their subsequent effect on social mobility. While the link between the two is essentially a “no-brainer” Humphreys’ analysis failed to pick up on two essential points.
Firstly, the fault does not lie with private education - there will always be people richer than you who can pay for private education, tuition or anything else for that matter. The quandary is that in modern Britain there shouldn’t be “good” schools or “bad” schools - every school should be a “good” school and as the BBC2 programme highlighted, funding is not the single determining factor. It falls to good leadership, good teaching and a desire to promote excellence. So the question that should be addressed is: Why are there not more “good schools”?
Secondly, the education system can only help break the poverty trap when parents come on board - something Humphreys ignored. A crazy comment was made by a primary teacher from Tower Hamlets, London - that despite living near a park there are “three year old children who have never set foot on grass let alone be taken to a museum or a cinema.”
Sorry, but this has nothing to do with poverty - it’s down to lazy, uninterested parents. It costs nothing to go to a park, library, museum or art gallery. Many of those same parents have no problem spending their cash on plasma TV’s and the latest mobile phones yet can’t afford a bus ride into town to take their kids to the local museum? Stop blaming poverty for what is nothing more than a can’t be bothered attitude! If parents took the time to engage their children more rather than sitting back and expecting the state or the school to do all the work, some of these kids would have a better chance to fulfil their potential.
Education can liberate people from a life of poverty and ignorance but only when it is valued.
Do you agree? If not, why not? let me know by leaving a comment.
I found it interesting that you drew a conclusion that the families have a can’t be bothered attitude(from the head teacher describing that families had not ever taken children to the park). I saw it quite a different way. My son recently moved to secondary school from primary school in the inner city in which nearly all the other pupils came from families that were very recent arrivals in the UK. They never went to the park with their children and I discovered (through getting to know them) that it was something that was completely outside their culture. We started inviting them along with us to try to encourage families to include it as part of their cultural adaptation to living in the UK.
ReplyDeleteThe school in the programme was very similar to the school my son went to.
When the head teacher described taking children to see a movie (which for many of the children was the first time they had been to the cinema) and that they screamed when the lights went out, it immediately brought back the memory of the occasion when I joined a specially organised Saturday morning school trip to a science learning centre, a kind of exploratorium. The Somali families had brought picnics and laid them out over the discovery tables, and there was a LOT of screaming and chatting when we went into the planetarium.
Other people visiting the science learning centre complained to the staff who complained to the school.
An interesting lesson was learned: there's a need for an induction session to explain to recently arrived families what the cultural norms of behaviour are in the places they are going on school trips.