: Stories make us stay John Rodgers emphasises the importance of knowing your pupils and their families to understand disadvantage in your school.

Often within education, presentations on disadvantage begin with a slew of slides showing facts, figures, graphs, data, and information describing the widening gaps we work so hard to address. This sometimes reminds me of a Walt Whitman poem, ​“When I heard the learn’d astronomer”.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.¹

I heard once at a meeting or conference someone say of disadvantage,​“It’s the data that brings people round the table, but it’s the stories that make us stay.”

And the data makes pretty stark reading at the moment. According to the Social Metrics Commission report ​“Measuring Poverty 2024”, poverty rates have increased since the pandemic and have increased most for children. More than a third of all children (36%) were in poverty in 2022/23, an almost five percentage-point increase since 2019/20.² The report says that those in poverty are more likely to have poor self-reported mental health and also experience poorer physical health outcomes. Not surprisingly the Commission’s Lived Experience Indicators show that those in poverty experience worse outcomes than those not in poverty.

I recently read a book by Katriona O’Sullivan called ​“Poor”. It is a difficult, moving, and brilliant book that charts O’Sullivan’s life from desperate poverty and disadvantage to academic achievement and success. The stories that she recounts elucidate her lived reality of disadvantage, a word that for many of us is a label, shorthand for so many varied experiences and lives that it has lost its power to help us understand what really goes on in the lives of our pupils.

O’Sullivan says, ​“The title of this book – Poor – is meant to get under your skin… Poor cuts through a lot of jargon – words like ​‘disadvantaged’, ​‘underprivileged’, ​‘deprived’, ​‘underclass’. Words that have their place but don’t capture the visceral truth of what it is to grow up the way I did. The way thousands of children are growing up right now.”³

To understand disadvantage in our schools and settings we must begin to listen to the stories of our pupils and families.

​“Most of the time being poor felt like a sodden blanket was lying heavy across my shoulders, dragging me down into dark waters.”

As we listen and hear the stories of our pupils and families, we understand our learners, not their labels. We move from ignorance and assumption to being informed and empowered to meet them where they are and support them to success.

References

1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer

2. https://wpieconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/SMC-2024-Report-Web-Hi-Res.pdf

3. Katriona O”Sullivan, 2023, ​“Poor”, Sandycove