Dropping Out

Why improvements in school standards are at serious risk

A few weeks ago I published a paper with the Sutton Trust taking a wide lens view of how our education system has changed over the past few decades and what the main challenges are now.

There are some big positives. England now has some of the best performing schools in Europe according to comparative tests. In the TIMSS (Trends in International Maths and Science Study) test for primary age maths England is one of the top performers in the world, doing better than countries like Finland or Germany that are often cited as ones we should copy. Improvements have been sustained and consistent.

(Source: scores are scaled so you can see changes over time with 500 being the average for all children taken the test.)

As I set out in a post earlier this year, this is partly due to our relative success in integrating immigrant students. We are the only Western European country where second generation immigrants outperform their peers. But it’s also a function of genuine improvements in the school system, under successive governments.

We can also see this is in the public and media perception of schools which has completely transformed since the late 1990s. Back then there was a constant stream of articles and columns about failing “sink” schools, particularly in inner cities. In 1997 education briefly became the issue voters were most concerned about, the only time that’s been true in the almost 50 years the pollster MORI have been asking the question.

Now it barely makes the top ten and media criticism of school standards is far more muted (relatedly there are also many more journalists who went to comprehensives). Schools in inner London, which was a topic of much concern back then, are now the highest performing in the country.

We’ve also seen a rapid expansion in access to further and higher education, with far more students staying in education to 18 and 21. This is as much about the changing nature of labour markets as it is about schools but has undoubtedly increased the amount of education the average person gets.

It’s impossible to pin down the exact causes for these improvements in standards. We don’t have the data to tease out how much is due to social and contextual shifts, like the changing demographic mix in urban areas, and how much is about policy. But we can say that schools are the only public service where the core metric of success has improved over the past 15 years, and that this hasn’t happened in many other countries, including Scotland and Wales, where there have been declines. This points to policy playing an important role.

From Thatcher onwards governments in England have made two big choices that I would argue have contributed to this. First, they decided to set standards centrally via a national curriculum, regularly test against these standards, and publish the results. School inspections were also overhauled and published for the first time. These shifts highlighted the extent to which some schools had been warehousing kids without getting them any qualifications. While there is a still a wide spectrum of quality today – there are now very few, if any, schools like this.  

Secondly, our national curriculum, which was part of this standards setting, has remained fairly traditional. It is not, as some seem to think, a Gradgrindian list of facts to be learnt. But we have also not made the mistake that many other countries have of confusing the purpose of curriculum, by filling it with a load of abstract “21^st century skills” like “innovation” and “creativity” which are neither skills nor new to the 21^st century. (The issue is not that these aren’t important character traits, but that they can’t be taught directly absent subject specialism. They are emergent properties of being well educated).

The problem is that while these choices have been important in transforming schools from the state they were in 30 years ago, we have now realised the gain. To progress further will require something different. Attempts to ratchet up centrally imposed accountability even more would be counter-productive, given we have workforce shortages and increasingly low morale in the teaching profession. Schools are now strongly incentivised to get good results. If they don’t it’s because they don’t have the means rather than an absence of will.

Since Brexit, efforts at school reform have largely stopped, with a succession of Tory education ministers spending barely any time in the job and making little impact (we’ve had ten in the last eight years).

At the same time we’ve seen a set of negative trends around children’s lives start to have a seriously detrimental effect on schools that risks undermining the progress we’ve made.

The Behaviour/Attendance Crisis

Understanding the causes of these negative trends is complicated by the effects of the pandemic which seems to have significantly exacerbated, or exposed, a set of underlying problems.

For instance, the number of suspensions for poor behaviour were increasing in secondary schools in the years running up to the pandemic, dropped during it (as many children weren’t at school), and then jumped dramatically afterwards. They have doubled in the space of two years (roughly an additional 300,000 suspensions a year).

(Source: the rate is the number of suspensions divided by the total number of pupils x 100. Of course some pupils will suspended multiple times.)

Schools have been introducing tighter behaviour policies, which could explain some of this, but not such rapid growth post-Covid. Surveys by Teacher Tapp, an organisation which polls teachers daily, also show increasing levels of classroom disruption. The number of teachers concerned poor behaviour will affect learning in their next lesson rose from 36% in 2019 to 48% this year.

The same trends have hit attendance. A student is considered “persistently absent” if they miss 10% of sessions during a term and “severely absent” if they miss 50%. Pre-pandemic 12.7% of secondary pupils were persistently absent. It’s now 23.9%. The number of severely absent pupils has almost trebled from 1.2% to 3.5% (this is equivalent to around 100,000 children missing the majority of their lessons).

Unsurprisingly, both of these trends affect more vulnerable groups the most. As you can see from the chart below if we take year 11 pupils - those taking their GCSEs – 27% who have been on free school meals in the past six years are missing more than a fifth of their lessons, and for those with serious special needs (an EHCP – Education and Healthcare plan) it’s 31%. It’s almost impossible to get good grades if you’re missing so much of the required content. Far too many of our most vulnerable kids are effectively dropping out of school.

It's the same story with sanctions for poor behaviour. Those on free school meals or with special needs are four times more likely to be suspended. Permanent exclusions are much rarer but also a lot higher for these groups.

These trends feel like they must be connected to the rise in EHCPs that I wrote about recently and the increase in referrals to child and adolescent mental health services I discussed in one of my earliest posts here. In the last seven years referrals for under-18s have increased 150%. 

It’s not clear, though, which direction the causal relationship goes. Are we seeing schools feel they need additional support for more pupils because their behaviour and attendance is getting worse? Or is their behaviour/attendance getting worse because they are more likely to have a mental health issue or special need?

This highlights the broader challenge for government – and schools – in figuring out how to stop these trends: it’s not clear what’s causing them.  

It doesn’t seem like it’s primarily a funding problem. Money has certainly been tight for schools, and even more so for those in lower income areas, who have seen cuts as a result of changes to the funding formula under Boris Johnson. But relative to other parts of the state (including FE colleges and sixth forms, which have been hammered) they’ve been relatively protected.

When I talk to groups of school leaders about these issues someone will nearly always raise the issue of parenting to murmurs of consent. There are two different concerns – first that the general quality of parenting has fallen, partly because it’s now so easy to stick young kids in front of screens for hours at a time. Jonathan Haidt’s theories about the dangers of smartphones are disputed by many but teachers tend to think they have a lot of merit.

Secondly that the experience of lockdowns “broke the contract” between parents and schools, with a more lax, and sometimes aggressive, attitude taken towards education and school staff since the pandemic ended.

These are such widespread complaints, and not confined to this country, that it feels like something must have changed, but there’s little data to allow us to really explore this phenomenon. What we have is circumstantial. For instance, we can see that pupils are more likely to be absent on Fridays which is also when parents are, post-pandemic, most likely to be working from home. Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, has said this didn’t used to happen, but unfortunately we don’t have the data to compare with pre-Covid years.

As well as a lack of data there’s a worry that parents could become a convenient scapegoat for schools. They don’t have much of a voice in our system and there has been a reduction over the years in schools’ engagement with parents, particularly secondary schools, as schemes designed by New Labour to boost it have fallen away (something I wrote another paper on last year).

Plus the pandemic, and associated economic affects, has made parenting harder too, especially for those with lower incomes. The combined impact of benefits cuts and inflation have pushed millions more people into destitution. In 2023 7.2 million people experienced what the government euphemistically describe as “low food security” aka sometimes going hungry. This was 2.5 million more than 2022 and includes several million children. In cities, and particular London, the lack of living space is becoming acute, with tens of thousands more children living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. In some boroughs more than 10% of all children are homeless. It’s hardly surprising that school attendance and behaviour are getting worse.

What can be done?

At the moment all of these negative trends are being seen, within government and beyond, as separate problems. As such the magnitude of their collective impact on children’s lives, and schools, is being somewhat overlooked.

Part of the problem is that the various policy levers for improving the situation are scattered across Whitehall, and cross-departmental working is notoriously difficult. Welfare sits with DWP, housing with MHCLG, mental health with DHSC, digital regulation with DCMS and so on. There is a real limit to what the Department for Education can do by itself.

In theory the government’s “mission-based” approach should support working on challenges that go beyond the remit of any one department. But efforts to get this off the ground seem half-hearted and confused so far, and changes to Number 10 staff and structures have raised questions as to whether it’s still a model they’re interested in.

Ideally they’d take the “opportunity mission”, which appears to have little definition or guiding purpose, and focus it on some of the metrics I’ve discussed in this post  - such as attendance, behaviour, and mental health referrals. This could also incorporate the work going on around child poverty. But to have real purchase in Whitehall there would have to be far more engagement from the Prime Minister and, ideally, the Chancellor, than we’re seeing for any of the missions right now.

As things stand there’s a real risk we’ll see the hard won improvements in schools standards over the past 30 years dissipate due to growing disengagement with the education system. It’s already the case that the gap between lower income students and their peers has started widening again. For a decade or so up to 2017 it was narrowing but all those gains have now been lost. We’re now seeing falls in the number of students from lower income families applying to university too.

While part of the answer might be about better school funding, or a new approach to school improvement, these currently seem like less of a factor than broader societal problems that are harming children. There is an alarming lack of urgency about this, perhaps because the solutions aren’t obvious and the problems are neither clearly defined or neatly supportive of any particular ideology. But if it’s not gripped we’ll lose one of the few big gains we’ve made in public policy in the last two decades.