What do we know about Educational Disadvantage? 

New analysis by SchoolDash for Gatsby summarises what we know already about educational disadvantage in England and shows that is more complex and multifaceted than traditionally discussed.  

As the analysis shows, the current approach of defining disadvantage by focussing solely on Pupil Premium eligibility or using a geographical-based approach fails to capture the full spectrum of challenges faced by schools. 

Key findings 

• Poorer schools appear to have more difficulty in recruiting teachers. They tend to advertise a higher number of teacher vacancies and spend more of their budgets on supply teachers. These gaps between poorer and more affluent schools have grown since the pandemic.  
  
  
• There are large regional differences in the supply of newly trained teachers entering state schools, with London seeing relatively high and increasing supply, while other regions are experiencing low and declining supply.  
  
  
• Poorer schools spend more money on staff development. While this may be seen as a positive: they are investing some of their extra funding in improving staff effectiveness, it could also be a sign that they experience greater challenges and have less experienced staff. 
  
  
• Poorer schools tend to have younger teachers and lose more teaching days to sickness absence. 
  
  
• An analysis of topics arising in Ofsted reports reveals poorer schools are more likely to discuss exclusions, attendance and behaviour, and more affluent ones to discuss personal development and individual subject areas. This suggests that school life is qualitatively different in ways that are not fully reflected by academic outcomes. 

Limitations of current measures 

There are significant limitations of using Pupil Premium, or area-based approaches such as Education Investment Areas to define disadvantage as these measures fail to capture the spectrum of deprivation levels and other multiple forms of disadvantage such as housing, health, crime, or environment. The analysis shows that schools with identical Pupil Premium rates often serve dramatically different communities. On the surface, they appear to face the same level of disadvantage, the policy solutions to addressing the problem are unlikely to be the same for each of the schools.  

This is the first part of our work with SchoolDash to look at how more nuanced metrics and measures to define disadvantage in state schools could be used to target policy interventions more effectively.  

For the full analysis, by Timo Hannay, Founder, SchoolDash, visit: https://www.schooldash.com/blog-2410.html#20241024

Jenni French is Head of STEM in Schools at Gatsby