Category: CREU News

Last week’s Twitter sensation was middle class lockdown bingo, where thousands rated their performance against a list which included growing tomatoes, baking banana bread, meditating, sourdough starter, ordering from independent shops and 5pm gin.  One might conclude that for many, the current lockdown represents a welcome breather from the daily commute, the grind of office politics and the hectic pace of middle-class leisure pursuits.

But how highly would you score in a game of middle class homeschooling bingo, which might include doing the Joe Wicks daily workout, making your own playdough, a virtual tour of the musée d’Orsay, leading a mini-beast hunt in the garden, taking piano lessons on Zoom, and learning a new language?  Extra points perhaps if mum or dad can share their degree-level passion for specific topics: Irish poetry, calculus, glaciology, German history, astronomy…

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?  But, this middle-class homeschooling idyll belies the grubbier reality of class division and educational disadvantage.  Of course, this is nothing new to Northern Ireland.  There is a wealth of evidence that pupils in receipt of Free School Meals here are much less likely to attend selective grammar schools, and consequently much less likely to achieve 5 or more A*-C grades in their GCSEs than children from wealthier families.  There is little doubt that the current lockdown has the potential to increase this achievement divide even further.  While some might assume that all parents are relishing this opportunity to support their children’s learning through high-quality interactions at home, there is already some evidence from the Republic of Ireland that there are two other groups of parents whose voices are less frequently heard on social media: those who are trying their best but feeling overwhelmed and stressed by their new role as home educators, and those who can provide little or no support through a lack of ability, confidence, patience, time or health.

Access to Online Learning

Homeschooling during the lockdown also exposes the digital divide, not just between generations, but between rich and poor.  A recent Ofcom survey revealed that tablets followed by smartphones are the most popular devices used by children aged 5-15 to go online, but online access is mediated by family background.  Children in working class homes are less likely than those in middle class homes to access the internet via either a tablet (59% vs. 72%) or a mobile phone (49% vs. 62%).  There is also a world of difference between working on a large screen PC or laptop in a quiet bedroom or home study, and sharing access to Google Classroom with other siblings on a single mobile phone or tablet in a small living room or kitchen with the television on in the background.  Furthermore, children who have special educational needs or English as an Additional Language are likely to fall further behind through the lack of additional assistance during the lockdown.  Public libraries, which would usually offer free internet access to all, are also shut.

So, while there has been a social media focus on the educational silver lining for parents from the current pandemic (the rapid rise of online learning, and the potential for this to strengthen parent/teacher/child communication), let’s not forget that the reality is a much more prosaic hodgepodge of educational opportunity, where those who are already most educationally disadvantaged are likely to fall even further behind their peers through no fault of their own.

Four Priority Areas

There are few simple solutions, but I would suggest four priority areas where improvement could be made, during the remainder of the lockdown. First, many parents need basic, practical guidance on how to support their children’s learning during this enforced homeschooling, since the vast majority of parents are not trained teachers and had not signed up to this new role.  This is not to seek to load more work on already busy teachers, but perhaps there is scope for fewer lessons and some brief supporting notes for parents, which could be made available online and posted home for those families with less access to online resources.  Second, there is an urgent need for CPD for teachers who are also learning how best to embrace the full potential of online learning, maximizing opportunities for pupils to participate in engaging, multi-media, interactive lessons, and to be able to submit work and receive formative feedback.  At Stranmillis, we have already made available a free online course which has proven extremely popular.  Third, it has been reported that the educational authorities in New York have begun to distribute iPads with free data plans to low-income families unable to access online lessons. Could the Department of Education here consider making some funds available for the same purpose?  And, fourth, there is an urgent need for research in Northern Ireland to tell us exactly how different parents are coping with homeschooling, to allow schools and government to target resources more equitably.

In due course, when schools do eventually re-open, educators will need to plan carefully for the resumption of classroom teaching, acknowledging that there will be an educational gulf, wider than ever before, between the educationally advantaged and disadvantaged.  For some children, the lockdown will have had no negative impact, and for some possibly even a positive impact, the consequence of weeks of committed parental tutorial support; others, however, will have stalled or regressed in their learning; some will take time to re-adjust to the routine and discipline of the formal school environment; and some, sadly, will also be dealing with the emotional and practical consequences of family illness or bereavement as a result of the pandemic.  All of this will have both curricular but also pastoral implications for teachers, who themselves are under enormous pressure during the lockdown.  In terms of assessment, too, educators will need to consider how weeks of lockdown will impact on future test grades, making use perhaps of special circumstances.  As ever, the middle classes will be able to rely on existing familial support structures supplemented by private tutoring.  For those on lower incomes, tutoring has never been an affordable option, but there are more and more free resources available online, and there could be opportunities here for our talented student teachers to do some volunteer tutoring offering their services to pupils who have fallen behind, either through face-to-face teaching or through use of a video-conferencing service.

The Northern Ireland Curriculum, last revised in 2007, states that it aims to “empower young people to achieve their potential and to make informed and responsible decisions through their lives.” Unless action is taken in the days to come, the current lockdown and the differentiated experiences of homeschooling have the potential to further disempower and disenfranchise, thus exacerbating the social injustice of an already deeply divided education system.

About the Author

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Policy reports and academic research in Northern Ireland have repeatedly highlighted the major, persistent problem of educational disadvantage. The most recent ‘New Decade, New Approach’ agreement specifically mentioned educational underachievement amongst working class Protestant boys as a priority. It required the establishment of an ‘expert group’ to “address links between persistent educational underachievement and socio-economic background” (Smith and Coveney, 2020). Last month the Department for Education’s ‘Tackling Educational Disadvantage’ team published “10 Features of Effective Schools”, a collated set of key features identified as ‘effective practice’ for school leaders in challenging circumstances (DE(NI), 2020). In this post we’ll take a closer look at this paper, and draw out some more lessons from the case studies described within.

The paper identifies eight schools that were “producing good or improving results (at level 2) whilst operating in very challenging circumstances including a high percentage of Free School Meal Entitled (FSME) pupils”. These schools’ leaders have provided a number of examples of policies and actions that have contributed to their schools’ success, which are reproduced within the document. These case studies are intended to practically advise peers in other post-primary contexts, and are undoubtedly useful in that regard. However, reading through the document prompts us to ask a number of questions. We hope that this discussion may lead to ways of developing it further.

1. Why these schools?

Despite sharing a high percentage of FSME pupils, the schools included are from a diverse range of contexts. Geographically, they span Northern Ireland (though there is a predominance of Belfast schools). In terms of sector, they are Maintained, Controlled and Integrated (though none are Irish Medium). Some are co-education and some are all-girls. However, none are all-boys, the most common context for educational underachievement. Interestingly, one school is a grammar school (St. Dominic’s High School), and produces some of the highest exam results in Northern Ireland. This raises the often overlooked question of whether, to what extent, and how a grammar school pupil can be thought to be at an educational disadvantage, and prompts us to think about the different ways in which educational underachievement is a reality in that context.

As disadvantage and underachievement are inherently relative concepts, some pupils in grammar schools inevitably will be at a disadvantage and at risk of underachieving in relation to their peers. If they have FSME, this is more likely. School leaders in these contexts should therefore still proactively seek to tackle disadvantage. However, in relation to their peers in non-selective secondary schools, grammar school students are undoubtedly at an educational advantage by virtue of already having “succeeded” in the transfer tests.

The other point to make about the schools sampled is that they are all post-primary, and as such only consider interventions and policies that affect post-primary education (with the partial exception of Hazelwood College’s cross-phase links described in part 7). Whilst this is a natural consequence of the paper’s focus on high performance at Level 2 (GCSE), such a focus should not preclude consideration of the crucial role of primary schools in closing the educational attainment gap. The strong case for early intervention’s success in equipping disadvantaged students with the necessary skills to succeed in education (Woods et al., 2013; Greaves et al., 2014) means that the voices of primary principals working in these same communities might shed valuable further light on these success stories.

2. Are these key features generalizable?

Together, the leadership-focused approach taken by this paper and the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format in which each of the case studies is discussed, imply a linear progression from problem to solution caused (or at least influenced) by a top-down policy intervention. However, we know that this is rarely how management and policy change works. These case studies are essentially testimonials on “what works”, and should be useful for school leaders and Boards of Governors working to raise achievement in their schools. However, the degree to which they will be generalizable will be highly variable. This is something the paper does well. By grouping the case studies into sections highlighting ‘key features’, it makes clear the overarching, generalizable lesson.

3. What are the costs?

As could be expected given ongoing constraints on the public purse, none of the key features mentioned a deployment of financial resources (except for one mentioning their reduction). This means that all the case studies described ways to ‘do more with less’ through managerial strategies and policy decisions. Whilst of course there are ways that increased investment in education could have beneficial effects in tackling disadvantage (Frawley, 2014), their omission from the list of ‘key features’ is understandable.

However, what is missing from these accounts is a broader sense of the costs of these interventions and policy changes. School leaders will be just as well served to understand what might have been sacrificed (extra-curricular activities, lesson time, curriculum choice…) to achieve these positive outcomes, as simply reading about their success. This accounting for costs needn’t take the shape of some kind of cost-benefit analysis or a cold zero-sum game, and of course school improvement can be achieved even in the most resource-poor contexts. However, by acknowledging the need for compromise, where some priorities are sacrificed in the service of others, such case studies could be even more helpful to other schools facing similar challenges.

We at CREU welcome the publication of “10 Features of Effective Schools” and have raised these three questions as a way of critically engaging with its content. We hope to have the opportunity to collaborate on developing this important work, which will play a role in addressing the “links between persistent educational underachievement and socio-economic background” (Smith and Coveney, 2020) in Northern Ireland.

About the Author

Dr Jonathan Harris is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement (CREU) at Stranmillis University College. He completed a PhD in Geography at Cambridge University and trained as a Geography teacher at the IOE in London. His research interests include education and language policy, geographical inequality, and indigenous knowledge.

@JonathanHarri5

References:

DE(NI) (2020) Tackling Educational Disadvantage: 10 Features of Effective Schools. Bangor: Department of Education.

Frawley, D. (2014) “Combating educational disadvantage through early years and primary school investment”, Irish Educational Studies, 33(2), pp.155–171.

Greaves, E., Macmillan, L. and Sibieta, L. (2014) Lessons from London schools for attainment gaps and social mobility: research report. London: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Smith, J. and Coveney, S. (2020) New Decade, New Approach. Belfast: Northern Ireland Office.

Woods, A., Mackenzie, N. M. and Wong, S. (2013) “Social justice in early years education: Practices and understandings”, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(4), pp.285–289.

Persistent educational underachievement, among segments of the population already at a comparative socio-economic disadvantage, is a significant and complex challenge in Northern Ireland (ETI, 2018; Perry 2016).

Seeking to build a robust evidence base in order to inform effective responses to the issue, this evidence summary, carried out by the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement (CREU) at Stranmillis University College, provides an overview of current knowledge related to educational underachievement in the Province.

Using a rapid-review methodology, the summary identified forty-eight peer-reviewed studies published since 2000 that shed light on the relationship between underachievement, social disadvantage and the myriad in-school and out-of-school factors which are associated with student achievement.

The evidence summary sets out what is currently known about underachievement and its implications for children and young people in Northern Ireland, and makes recommendations for future research.

We found that research on educational underachievement in Northern Ireland since 2000 has not been comprehensive, with only one substantial academic research project (Leitch et al., 2017) fully focused on this issue, despite policymakers’ repeated calls for progress in this area.

Many of the included studies shared a concern with empowering learners, for example through inclusion interventions based on a children’s rights imperative or widening pupils’ curricular choices and post-compulsory education options. Whilst significant attention has been given to the role of schools and communities in both maintaining and mitigating social inequality, through analyses of policies such as Shared Education and Extended Schools (Borooah & Knox, 2017), the effects of ongoing policy supporting academic selection remain understudied.

Finally, whilst the international literature has a contribution to make, research is also needed in the specific context of Northern Ireland in order for local solutions to be developed and proposed which can address the range of needs that underlie the persistent phenomenon of educational underachievement.

Download and read the full summary of evidence here.

CREU is holding a series of public seminars in 2020 on the theme of ‘Achieving Education’, the first of which will discuss this Evidence Summary. Registration is now open, here.