Examples of specific policy proposals

It is clear from this book, and long before, that educational participation and outcomes are strongly linked to era, place, social class, sex and family background. It is important to recall that these same inequalities appear just as strongly in other areas of public policy like housing, health and crime. In the same way, most of the datasets used in this book portray long-term, sometimes erratic, improvements in equity over time. Such historical improvements are common to the UK and other developed countries. They are more likely to result from long-term social and economic changes in the population than from improvements brought about by education policy itself. There are, generally, no abrupt changes in the data trends following policy implementation of the kind we would expect if investment, legislative changes, new curricula and so on actually made much of a difference. Education mostly appears to reflect society, which suggests that the root cause of inequality is at least partly not educational. Education policy cannot be expected to solve issues such as child poverty alone, in the short term, or even at all. This means that education policy has to be humbler, but it still has important roles to play – in ensuring that inequalities are not worsened by the education system, and by promoting structures and interventions that can ‘compensate for society’, to some extent (Pring, 2009; Gorard, 2010f). Pushing for quality and equality are in union here, and it is much more efficient to invest in disadvantaged rather than already advantaged learners (Chiu and Khoo, 2005).

There are several more specific recommendations that emerge when viewing, and re-reading, the whole body of lifelong evidence in this book. Each of the preceding chapters leads naturally to several specific recommendations for policy changes, only some of which are repeated here. For example, the proportion of time spent in education while living below the poverty threshold (years FSM% in England) would be a better indicator for allocating the pupil premium or contextualizing results than whether a student is currently or has ever been FSMeligible. This would be fairer, and would help address the poverty gradient between schools, types of schools and regions. All attainment should be age-standardised even for entry to HE.