Poverty and Educational Performance



Poverty and Educational Performance

Introduction

Child poverty and unequal educational opportunities are inextricably linked. Children's educational prospects reflect the disadvantages of their families. Those who are poor, whose parents have low qualifications and no or low-status jobs, who live in inadequate housing and in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, are less likely to gain good qualifications themselves at school. The joining up of responsibility for schools, children and families in a single ministry shows a new government commitment to tackling poverty and educational disadvantage together(Duncan, and, Brooks-Gunn, 2000). This requires, on the one hand, a direct assault on problems such as low income and poor housing, and, on the other, a narrowing of the 'poverty gap' in education: the extent to which poor children have worse educational prospects. 

Poverty and Education

This is the secret that everyone knows: the children of poor families are far less likely to do well in school than those whose parents are affluent. For the last ten years, this has been almost buried in denial. "Poverty is no excuse," according to the Department for Education. Neverthless, it is the key. As everyone knows.

The ministers and pundits who want to deny or diminish the link are keen to present it as the invention of soft-focus lefties trying to justify a socialist theory of education or to excuse incompetent teachers. However, the clearest and most persuasive recent evidence for the link was produced earlier this year, not by a teacher's union or a liberal academic - but by the Treasury, in its fourth report on the modernisation of Britain's tax and benefit system(Rist, 2000).

Reviewing nearly 30 years of research, the Treasury of US reported that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are much less likely to succeed in education. On 'difficult to let' estates, one in four children gain no GCSEs (the national average is one in twenty) and rates of truancy are four times the national average. There is considerable evidence that growing up in a family which has experienced financial difficulties, damages children's educational performance. (Radcliffe, Jones, Ragan, Chisolm, Rhoads, 2001)

The differences between advantaged and disadvantaged children are apparent from a very early age. At 22 months, children whose parents are in social classes one or two are already fourteen percentage points higher up the educational-development distribution than children whose parents are in social class four or five. The data from the National Child Development Survey show that there is a strong relationship between children's performace in maths and readings tests between the ages of six and eight, and their parents' earnings, with the children of higher earning parents performing better. If one father's earnings are double the level of another, his son's maths test score is on average five percentile points higher than the other's... Going to school does not reduce the differences in early development between advantaged and disadvantaged children.

Human Capital theory

Human Capital Theory draws links between education and poverty in terms of education as a means of poverty reduction; another significant linkage runs the other way - i.e. the effect of macro- and micro-level poverty on levels of ...