Research School Network: Levelling the Playing Field Challenging our own presumptions is the key to tackling educational disadvantage


Levelling the Playing Field

Challenging our own presumptions is the key to tackling educational disadvantage

by Durrington Research School
on the

Yesterday here at Durrington, Marc Rowland came to talk to us about tackling educational disadvantage. This blog is an attempt to distill some key points from Marc’s immense wisdom and experience on this subject. We all know that this remains the most stubborn challenge facing our schools, made even harder by the pandemic, but we have to be optimistic about the future. If we are going to be successful with tackling the challenges caused by disadvantage, we need to think with clarity around the following points:

1. Underachievement, as a result of socioeconomic disadvantage, is a process and not an event. It’s a process that, in some cases, can start before birth.

2. All pupils, irrespective of their background, need to feel included in school life.

3. The most effective strategies for tackling educational disadvantage focus on improving the pupil as a learner.

4. We need to become experts in the children that we are teaching.

5. We need to see life in our school through the lens of a disadvantaged pupil.

If we are committed to addressing this challenge, we need to tackle the presumptions we all make as teachers. This matters, because we need to level the playing field, and eliminate the challenges to learning that too many of our children face. Let’s think about three of these presumptions and why they are so problematic.

Presumption of Language


The language gap is the attainment gap. If pupils are poor readers and have poor vocabulary, accessing the curriculum is going to present a significant challenge for them. So rather than presuming pupils have a firm grasp of the tier 2 and 3 vocabulary we use in lessons, we need to employ a range of strategies to support them with this. For example:

a) Incidental teaching vocabulary – when reading rich texts in class and using tier 2 and 3 vocabulary, stop and discuss the word and its meaning.

b) Explicit vocabulary instruction – plan what tier 2 and 3 vocabulary will be used in a topic and explicitly teach this vocabulary beforehand.

c) Word consciousness – teach the common root words to help pupils decode words. More on this from Fran Hayneshere.

Take a look at Alex Quigleys website for some brilliant guidance on this.

The EEF secondary guidance report also provides further information on this.

Presumption of background knowledge


Pupils in a Y7 history lesson will bring a wide range of prior knowledge on the black death. Some will have talked about this with their parents, maybe watched a documentary about it or even read about in a book. As a result, they will have a relatively well developed schema on the topic, and so grafting new knowledge about the black death onto this existing knowledge, will make this new learning easier.

Other pupils will have done none of these things, so will have a very limited background knowledge on the topic, making learning considerably more difficult. A consequence of this is that those better informed pupils will dominate the discourse in the lesson, whilst the others sit quietly in the corner, wondering how do they know that?’ We need to demystify and unpackage this for these students, so that they understand how their peers have acquired this knowledge.

The point is, we can’t presume the level of background knowledge that they have, so we need to empower all pupils by making sure they have the knowledge required to be successful. So take some time at the start of a lesson/​task to discuss and share the knowledge they will need to tackle what they are going to do. If we don’t do this, we’ll be putting some pupils at a disadvantage.

Presumption of learning behaviours


Going back to the example above, when our more advantaged pupils share their prior knowledge of a topic, it’s important for them to share how their learning behaviours have enabled them to acquire that knowledge, by asking how do you know that?’ This is important because it shows other pupils that their peers don’t just know this by magic! They know it because they read, listen and are inquisitive about the world around them. They are articulating their learning behaviours.

A learning behaviour can be thought of as a behaviour that is necessary in order for a person to learn effectively in the group setting of the classroom (Ellis and Todd, 2018). These can be grouped into emotional, social and cognitive learning behaviours. Kirsten Mould unpicks these here.

A pupils’ background will clearly influence these behaviours, so we need to be conscious of this and think about how we will support pupils with this. For example, the ability to self-regulate your learning is a key characteristic of an effective learner, however for some pupils this will be a struggle. To support them with this, we need to model to our pupils how we plan, monitor and evaluate our learning, when we are approaching a new task. We can’t presume that they will be confident with this.

Tackling educational disadvantage is complex. We can’t address all of society’s ills, but we can use what’s within our gift to make a difference. Marc quotes the American poet Sylvia Plath:

If you expect nothing from somebody, you are never disappointed’.


Shaun Allison

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