The traditional narrative of urban–rural educational disadvantage is that urban pupils do less well in the English exam system. Decontextualised data (as exemplified in table 1 across different English exam performance measures) demonstrates how rural pupils outperform their urban counterparts. This blog post and the evidence presented demonstrates how rural underachievement in England has been masked by the relative sizes and socioeconomic deprivation (SED) distribution of rural and urban populations.
While this pattern can be noted every year for which rurality data has been gathered in England, it is a prevailing narrative of urban underperformance which has attracted political attention and funding (DfEE, 1999), in part due to the concentration of SED in urban areas.
It is only in the past three years that the pupil GCSE outcome database in England has provided rurality measures (DfE, 2023) and in part, this lack of visibility has meant that rurality is rarely integrated into the analyses of educational inequalities (Hatt et al., 2005; McGrath, 2001; Shucksmith, 2000). Rural disadvantage in secondary (high school) education in England is therefore an important but understudied dimension of educational disadvantage. Fortunately, this discontinuity has recently been given more political attention (Baker et al., 2022; DLUHC, 2022).
