Five favourite facts and findings

After nearly six years at the Sutton Trust, my reflections on some of the research findings that most interested me and helped to advance the policy debate.

Today is my last day at the Sutton Trust after nearly six years in post. It has been a privilege to be involved in commissioning and communicating 100 pieces of research over that time, and I will miss working with such great colleagues. It seems like a good time to take stock too. So, I thought I would share my five favourite findings and facts from those reports, facts chosen because of their symbolism and influence in different stages of the social mobility debate.

Stop Start: The lost children’s centres

In the week of Tessa Jowell’s sad passing, it is worth reflecting on an important part of her legacy – the Sure Start programme, which brought a range of children’s services, including childcare, education, health, family support and play together under a single roof. Professor Kathy Sylva and her team showed in our 2014 report, Sound Foundations, the importance of good quality early years provision to school readiness and giving disadvantaged children a decent start in life. Her research this year brought an auditor’s eye to what had happened to the children’s centres at the heart of Sure Start, and in Stop Start, showed that 1000 centres had effectively been lost, nearly a third of all those set up by 2009. While some had been amalgamated, others had been hollowed out. It highlighted the importance of a much clearer early years mission in all parties if we want to address social mobility at the time when the gaps start to widen for poorer children.

Missing Talent: The high attainers who slip back in secondary school

In 2015, we published a much-cited research brief by Dr Rebecca Allen, which we called Missing Talent. Her research looked at what happened to a cohort of around 60,000 of the highest attainers in the Key Stage 2 tests at age 11 – the top 10% – when they took their GCSEs five years later. She found that 15% of highly able pupils who score in the top 10% nationally at age 11 fail to achieve in the top 25% at GCSE, but the figures were much higher for disadvantaged students, particularly boys, a third of whom fell behind. The report helped to highlight the absence of dedicated provision for disadvantaged high achievers in too many comprehensives, and made the case for the Future Talent Fund, announced in Justine Greening’s social mobility plan last year.

Admissions in Context: Giving poorer pupils a break

The debate on contextual admissions has moved on quite a bit over the last decade, and a report we published in 2017 helped to show that. Admissions in Context not only made the case for selective universities having transparent policies that show any breaks they are willing to offer disadvantaged students who have triumphed against the odds, but maybe don’t have quite the same grades as those who enjoyed a more privileged education. Crucially Dr Claire Crawford and Professor Vikki Boliver showed that a fifth of those from more advantaged backgrounds are being admitted to the more selective universities with two A level grades below the advertised ones. In the media coverage that followed, even columnists on right-wing newspapers traditionally suspicious of contextual admissions accepted that a change was needed to address the gaps that still exist – from, six to ten times – between those from the poorest and best off neighbourhoods at those universities.

Access in Scotland: Progress in higher education equity north of the border

I had the privilege to sit on the Scottish Commission on Widening Access, which reported in 2016, and subsequently to chair a Framework Development Group which has just commissioned a new access toolkit for Scotland. One thing that surprised me on first engaging with the Scottish debate was the dearth of data compared to England. That was what prompted me to commission Professor Sheila Riddell and colleagues at Edinburgh University to produce the Access in Scotland report. It had an enormous impact on the debate in Scotland, and is still cited regularly. Ironically, the finding we chose to lead on – that 90% of all access places in Scotland had come through colleges rather than directly to university – was overshadowed by a figure we quoted that I (mistakenly) assumed was widely known: that the university access gap was wider in Scotland than England. Either way, there remains a need for more good data and candour about it in the debate. But what is heartening is the progress being made on the policy front – driven by Nicola Sturgeon and Shirley-Anne Somerville (her higher education minister) – not least in the acceptance of commission recommendations. With the redoubtable Professor Peter Scott as Commissioner for Fair Access, acceptance of a minimum threshold for disadvantaged students by all Scotland’s universities and the progress towards better evidence on access, there are real prospects for progress north of the border.

Real apprenticeships: Improving quality and progression in job-based qualifications

When we asked the Boston Consulting Group in 2013 to look at how other countries did apprenticeships, we did so at a time when the political consensus on the value of apprenticeships was being undermined by the poor quality of too many of them. BCG’s analysis Real Apprenticeships has helped move the debate on and has given the Sutton Trust a locus in an area where it had not previously engaged. In their first report, BCG not only highlighted how relatively few British employers were then offering apprenticeships in those pre-levy days (there are other challenges now) but the low quality of what the majority of young people were doing compared to their German or Swiss counterparts. Later BCG research in 2015, Levels of Success, showed that those doing advanced or higher apprenticeships had comparable earning power to their A-level or average traditional degree counterparts. And our Better Apprenticeships research in 2017 by LSE and UCL Institute of Education academics showed how poor the progression rates were from intermediate to advanced apprenticeships. All of which has helped make the case for the Sutton Trust’s 2018 #BetterApprenticeships campaign for automatic progression, improved quality and more higher apprenticeships. Giving young people real choices must be the key to getting this right for the future.

Helping the high attainers

This piece appeared in the TES print edition on 14 July 2017.

Nearly 20 years ago, as then education secretary David Blunkett’s special adviser, I helped to introduce a programme for gifted and talented pupils in urban secondaries. The initiative focused the efforts of many comprehensives on new ways of tailoring provision for more-able students. The programme sadly lost its way in the later years of the Labour government, though its legacy lives on in some schools and academies.

More recently, Sir Michael Wilshaw, as chief schools inspector, reported annually on how schools were catering for their more-able students. Ofsted inspectors now ask about the progress of high-attainers. But we are still grappling with many of the issues we faced nearly two decades ago – and we need to ask, are we doing enough through accountability to encourage schools to support high-attainers?

This summer, parents and businesses will learn that GCSE results are no longer as easy as ABC. Grading results on a 9-to-1 scale is the last in a series of steps that could have a profound effect on accountability in secondary schools. But whether the changes also help stretch able students as much as they support those with poorer test scores aged 11 remains an open question. There is a good case for addressing their needs more directly.

The debate around how to ensure that less-advantaged pupils of high ability fulfil their potential is not uncontroversial. Some say a focus on top test scorers at 11 – those in the top 10 to 20 per cent – means missing out on others with the potential to be just as successful. Others want the focus to be much more on low-attainers – those who don’t get the expected standards in English and maths – and argue that the £2.5 billion pupil premium should be entirely directed at them.

But this cannot be about pitching groups of students against each other. The Sutton Trust’s Missing Talent research showed that over a third of disadvantaged boys and a quarter of disadvantaged girls, who were in the top 10 per cent of pupils at age 11, were outside the top 25 per cent in their GCSEs. Meeting their needs was an argument for Progress 8 – the new GCSE school-success measure – in that every grade is now credited, so getting a student from a 2 to a 3 is rewarded as much as getting from a 3 to a 4 or a 6 to a 7 in the new grading scale. The system has its teething problems, but its intentions have been good. However, recent arguments about whether a 4 or a 5 is equivalent to a C grade, and the continued importance of floor targets, suggest that border lines haven’t disappeared.

I was never as convinced of the evils of the C-D border line as some were. For employers or sixth-form admissions, a C proved to be far more valuable than a D. Focusing there did more than improve a school’s league-table scores. But the old system failed to accredit schools properly for getting students As rather than Bs, limiting opportunities for higher-achieving students to access Russell Group universities including Oxbridge.

As our Chain Effects 2017 report highlighted, there is still much to do. Sponsored academies are good at improving results for low-attaining disadvantaged pupils, but are weaker with their high-attainers. Given that these academies often serve the poorest communities, this disparity should be of concern.

All this matters to social mobility. The Office for Fair Access reported recently that disadvantaged young people remain far less likely to get to our best universities – and from there to access good professional and well-paid jobs – than those from better-off backgrounds.

The gap is still as much as 10:1 on some measures, though it has been wider. That isn’t just bad for those individuals, it is bad for society and bad for our economy to waste so much talent.

Before the election, the government saw an increase in grammar schools as the answer. But while grammars often do a good job for the disadvantaged students on their rolls, our research has shown that far too few such pupils are admitted in the first place.

Indeed, there is a gradient linked to income in grammar school admissions, not just a gap. Moreover, the evidence is that highly able pupils in the best-performing comprehensives do just as well.

Now that new grammar schools are on the policy back burner, policymakers must not forget the needs of able students from less-advantaged backgrounds. In fact, there is a real opportunity here for comprehensives to live up to their mission to cater for the needs of students of all abilities.

Three important steps could help: the first is to encourage fairer admissions to the most successful comprehensives – the top 500, based on GCSE results; these schools only take half the proportion of poorer pupils that live in their catchment.

Randomly allocating half the places in successful urban comprehensives – backed by outreach and travel support – could open such schools up to those who can’t afford the house-price premium attached to these schools.

The second is to excite and engage more able students with a curriculum with greater enrichment, as well as access to more demanding lessons and lectures – in partnership both with other schools and universities. The Sutton Trust has moved from working only with sixth formers to supporting able 12- to 15-year-olds through its Sutton Scholars programme. And the government should support schools and universities in trialling what is most effective for highly able students.

Finally, we need to look again at how schools report their results, and how their success is judged by Ofsted and regional schools commissioners. We shouldn’t just report the overall Progress 8 and Attainment 8 scores, but we should specifically report on the results and progress for high-attaining students.

We could then see exactly how the best comprehensives perform – encouraging others to emulate them – and how they compare with grammars on a fair measure. Ofsted and regional schools commissioners would look at these results alongside the main scores. But more importantly, this could do a lot to improve social mobility, too.