The Guardian published an article* on Monday 1 May that quoted a teacher at a secondary school in Surrey describing a recent Ofsted inspection in which the inspector interrupted her lesson to ask her – in front of all her 11- and 12-year-old pupils – to point out the most disadvantaged children in the class.
The teacher told The Guardian: “I was so shocked I just stood there like a goldfish.” The teacher refused to openly point at the children, but offered to show the information on a seating plan, which the inspector refused. This also happened in other classrooms and apparently the Ofsted team took a dim view of any teacher’s failure to point out their disadvantaged students during the lesson. This wasn’t a one-off; ‘closing the gap’ is writ large in the Inspection Handbook and schools expect Ofsted inspectors to ask teachers to identify their Disadvantaged** students during inspections.
The Guardian article raises a number of questions, the first of which is why would you be asking a teacher in front of the whole class to point out the students who are ‘Disadvantaged’? Is that a defensible thing to do? I think not. Or maybe it would have been in Victorian times. Or maybe I’m being hard on the Victorians.
The second question is: what’s the point of an inspector asking the question anyway, whether it’s done crudely upfront or discretely with the teacher to one side? An Ofsted inspector reading this question might say ‘Because the progress of Disadvantaged students is a key Government priority, and teachers should know who their Disadvantaged students are’. Okay, let’s follow that through. I’m the teacher and I say to the inspector that in my class the Disadvantaged students are Ahmed, Sonia, Paul and Michelle. What then? Will the inspector look at their books for a minute? Or talk to them for a minute? So what, if they do? What insights will flow from this extraordinarily brief piece of contact with a tiny number of the students that I teach? What conclusions about the impact of my work with Disadvantaged students – or indeed the school’s efforts with them – could be reasonably drawn by the inspector?
In my fictitious class I have these four Disadvantaged students – they are deemed to be Disadvantaged because at any point in the last six years their parents have claimed free school meals. But hold your horses, I also have in my class: four students whose family income is £1 above the threshold criteria for claiming free school meals, so they aren’t deemed to be Disadvantaged; three students who would qualify but their parents are unaware of how the system works; two students who are really struggling because their family circumstances have changed dramatically this year (one suffered a bereavement and the other’s parents have just split up); one student who presents as having ADHD but is currently undiagnosed; four students who are on the Special Needs register; and three other students currently suffering from mental health issues, for whom staff at the school are trying to get an Early Help Assessment completed – it is, in other words, a typical mixed ability class in a mainstream secondary school.
My point here is that the inspector is not going to ask me for any information at all about these other students in my class, but that information is surely every bit as relevant and important as the fact that four of my students are deemed to be Disadvantaged by the Government? Schools don’t divide up neatly between young people who are Disadvantaged on the one hand and everyone else who is not, on the other – the situation is far more complex than that. Everyone is unique, and everyone matters; we have a duty to help everyone who has fallen behind where they should be at a given point, not just some of them.
Of course, I understand successive Governments’ priority to close the yawning average gap in attainment that exists between the cohorts of Disadvantaged students and those who are supposedly not. This has been Government policy for many years but the efforts made to fix it have had almost no success: the Education Policy Institute (EPI) published a famous – now dated – report in 2017 entitled ‘Closing the gap? Trends in educational attainment and disadvantage’ which said: ‘despite significant investment and targeted intervention programmes, the gap between disadvantaged 16 year old pupils and their peers has only narrowed by three months of learning between 2007 and 2016. In 2016, the gap nationally, at the end of secondary school, was still 19.3 months.’ The report went on to say that ‘three generations’ would be needed at the current rate of progress for the gap to close; this was widely reported as ‘100 years’ in the Press. Whilst the EPI report is old now, the situation remains dire – indeed, the pandemic has exacerbated the gap in the past few years – it has actually gotten wider than it was in 2017. How is an Ofsted inspector asking a teacher bluntly to identify forthwith their Disadvantaged students helping that situation exactly?
Why focus on narrowing the relative gap? First of all, students with higher prior attainment tend to make more progress. Should we close the gap by trying to impede their progress? That would be unethical. The plain fact is that the gap starts right at the start, in those pre-school years when some children build up significant advantages over some other children, that never go away.
There will always be a gap – a difference between the top and bottom of any distribution curve; that’s how distribution curves work. Is this a doom and gloom message? Absolutely not, because surely what all schools, the Government, and Ofsted should be focusing hardest on are the best techniques for improving the attainment of all students – what David Didau describes in his book ‘Making Kids Smarter’ as ‘shifting the whole bell-curve up’. By ensuring everyone gets a great diet of powerful knowledge, taught through direct instruction techniques. Simply put: committed teachers banging away, lesson after lesson, day after day, using the best techniques we know of for making the learning stick – not just for the so-called Disadvantaged students but for all children and young people.
Ofsted inspectors asking teachers to point out their Disadvantaged students during lessons is not helping; it was never going to help. If you want to fix the relative gap problem, you’re going to have to fix it at source – from the infant stage through to starting school and beyond. Or don’t focus on the relative gap and instead focus on the absolute gap by helping schools deliver minimum standards for every learner, including the Disadvantaged – that will require a far bigger investment in schools than we have seen in many years, alas.
Going back to my fictitious mixed-ability class, into which an Ofsted inspector has just stepped: I’m telling you now, I’m not especially focused on the Disadvantaged students in my class; I’m focused on helping all of my students learn well, because they all matter.
*Teachers asked to chip in £1 each for legal case against Ofsted, Anna Fazackerley, Mon 1 May 2023 06.00 BST
**The Government defines as ‘Disadvantaged’ those students who are in receipt of free schools or who are looked after children. Sometimes the term ‘Ever-Six’ is used; this term indicates entitlement on the grounds of qualifying for support at any time during the past 6 years.
