Until recently I was a Vice Principal at a comprehensive school in a coastal region of Kent. We served a community that has more children eligible for Free School Meals than the national average. Amongst other areas I lead on Pupil Premium and I genuinely thought that I had seen and read all there was to know about supporting this group of young people.
It turns out I was mistaken. The Sutton Trust has been publishing research for almost 20 years looking at the issue of school admissions. Our research shows that children eligible for Free School Meals are less likely to attend a top performing comprehensive than their more advantaged peers. The system is creating schools that are socially segregated.
Some of this is predictable. More affluent parts of the country have, on average, higher performing schools. But how do we account for the fact that even at a local level social segregation exists? Partly it is down to house prices and the fact that the majority of schools use a distance measure as their first oversubscription criteria after EHCPs and CiCs. As the reputation of a school improves, the cost of the houses around it increases, slowly displacing working-class families until they can no longer afford to live near enough to a top performing school.
But that isn’t the whole picture. My journey to understand this complex eco-system has reminded me that there is always more to learn and more to uncover. In an industry such as teaching we must strive for a model of continuous, unrelenting improvement driven by learning and professional development.
