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This paper presents an analysis of the extent to which poor pupils in England are clustered in schools with others like them. It is based on a segregation index of pupils eligible for free school meals for every year for which official national data is available. The trend over time has been published before up to 2019, and this paper extends the analysis to 2021, covering both the COVID-19 era so far and the beginning of transitional arrangements for Universal Credit, which have led to a substantial increase in the number of pupils eligible for free school meals. Results show that the segregation of poor pupils between secondary schools has continued to decline annually -- a decline that started with the onset of Pupil Premium funding. This decline in segregation has not occurred for other possible indicators of disadvantage, such as pupils having a special educational need or disability, which are not addressed by Pupil Premium funding. Clustering disadvantaged pupils together in parts of a national school system has been linked to worse pupil outcomes overall, lower aspirations, less ethnic cohesion, and reduced trust in society by students. So, this ongoing reduction is encouraging, and is likely to lead to a lower poverty attainment gap in academic outcomes. However, the reduction in 2020 and 2021 is "false" to some extent, based mostly on a sudden increase in the number of pupils officially classed as poor, rather than an improvement in their distribution or evenness. It is, therefore, important to retain Pupil Premium funding or something like it for the time being to see what happens to the attainment gap. And the apparent success of this funding scheme could have implications for school systems worldwide that value fairness in the provision of national opportunities for education.

This paper presents an evaluation of "Literacy for Life" (LfL) -- a whole-school literacy programme, implemented in five secondary schools in England. The aims of LfL were to improve literacy attainment and to promote positive attitudes to reading and writing. However, when compared to other schools, there is little or no evidence that being in a LfL school, had any differential benefit for pupils' attainment. In LfL schools, the gap for disadvantaged pupils and those with SEN grew in the early years of the intervention. There is also no evidence from repeated surveys that pupils' attitudes to and enjoyment of reading showed any improvement. As such, LfL did not achieve its intended objectives. This matters because, despite limited evidence in its favour, schools continue to use it and programmes similar to it. We argue that programmes such as LfL, which are implemented on a whole-school level, need to be based upon evidence-informed approaches.

This paper presents the results of a large-scale survey of undergraduates in England, concerning their envisaged career choices and how they made them. This gives a more complete account of those who do and do not want to be teachers than usual in the existing literature based primarily on prospective/existing teacher accounts. The paper looks at the issue of shortages, the reasons why people might be deterred from teaching, and summarises the methods used in our new study, followed by the results. The results cover descriptive analyses, and a comparison of responses from those who considered being a teacher (or not), those who had applied to train as a teacher (or not), and those intending to teach. These results are put together in two logistic regression models, one predicting/explaining who considered teaching, and the second explaining who then intends to become a teacher. Conclusions are drawn in the final section.

This paper examines the link between the clustering of long-term disadvantaged students within schools, and the attainment gap at age 11 between these disadvantaged students and the rest. The data comes from the National Pupil Database for England from 2006 to 2019. The analysis focuses on students who would go on to be officially recognised as living in relative poverty for all 11 years from when they arrived at primary school up until age 16. This subset of disadvantaged students is a stable proportion of around 4.4% of each age cohort. They would have attracted Pupil Premium funding for their schools in any year, if it had been available, and despite any legal or economic changes over time. Comparing the educational outcomes for this group in comparison to their peers therefore provides a fair test of the impact of the Pupil Premium funding policy on the clustering of the poorest children, and their attainment relative to their peers. The segregation of long-term disadvantaged students between primary schools declined nationally after the policy was introduced. This happened in all economic regions, especially in areas with higher proportions of such pupils, for all ethnic groups, and for students with a special educational need or disability. This drop is strongly correlated over time and place with a corresponding decline in the attainment gap at age 11. It provides potentially strong evidence of the benefit of a targeted additional funding scheme like the Pupil Premium, with implications for how such funds are best used worldwide.

Robust indicators are important for identifying disadvantaged pupils in education, and for ensuring that they are rightly receiving relevant state-funded assistance. This paper compares the quality and completeness of data from England on student eligibility for free school meals (FSM) based on an administrative census, with more all-encompassing household income measures, from a smaller sample of young people. The first measure comes from the National Pupil Database (NPD), and the second from Next Steps (NS). The two datasets are linked at the individual student level. In this restricted group, FSM data is more complete (97%) than household income (47%). The bias created by missing data on income in NS calls into question its more general usefulness for analysts. FSM cannot be read neatly from income, such as referring to an income below a certain level, and vice versa. Many reportedly low-income children are not listed as FSM-eligible. However, the two values are linked, while each also provides unique information. Both measures predict attainment at school, to some extent. The paper concludes that FSM is the more practical measure at present, but also considers how access to limited income data could be made more widespread while maintaining individual data rights.

This paper is a discussion of the challenges to equity faced by the education and training systems of the 28 EU countries (at time of writing), based on secondary sources and official reports by individual countries. The data are descriptive and simply summarised for this paper. The systems of all countries are fairly similar, modelled on those set up to deal with challenges of early industrialisation, and all now face several similar problems and opportunities. There is a clear correlation between family background, average attainment, and subsequent participation in education and training. All 28 countries show some signs of progress over time, both in terms of the absolute level of attainment, and in terms of reduced gaps between social and economic groups. These trends are historical, and thus hard to link to specific policies. However, looking at the common characteristics of countries with similar levels of equity can produce a tentative guide to its determinants. Some of the main suggestions are: More countries to set up monitoring systems for school intakes and outcomes; more robust evaluations of policy interventions; fair funding and opportunities for all students; extra funding for students facing challenges; no selection by ability or anything else; all taught in mainstream settings; no tracking or grade retention; more recognition of prior experience and learning; respectful interaction with all students; and use of context when allocating places in higher education, or simply more open access.

Background: A raft of initiatives and reforms have been introduced in many countries to attract and recruit school teachers, many of which do not have a clear evidence base, so their effectiveness remains unclear. Prior research has been largely correlational in design. This paper describes a rigorous and comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesising the findings of some of the strongest empirical work so far. Methods: The review synthesises a total of 120 pieces of research from 13 electronic databases, Google/Google scholar and other sources. Each study is weighted by strength of evidence. Results: The strongest evidence suggests that targeted money can encourage people into teaching but does not necessarily keep them in the teaching profession. The money needs to be large enough to compensate for the disadvantages of working in certain schools and areas, and competitive enough to offset the opportunity costs of not being in more lucrative occupations, and its effect is only short-term. Conclusions: Continuing professional development (CPD) and early career support could be promising approaches for retaining teachers in the profession, but the evidence for them is weak. There is no evidence that any other approaches work, largely because of the lack of robust studies.

The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness. Instead, they are being asked to move towards what we term the meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students' qualifications should be judged in light of the socioeconomic circumstances in which these were obtained to enhance distributive fairness, a practice known in the UK as contextualised admissions. In this paper, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base, drawing together for the first time insights from our ESRC and Nuffield Foundation funded studies of fair access to highly academically selective universities in England. We argue that reconceptualising fair access in terms of distributive fairness rather than procedural fairness offers a more socially just set of principles on which to allocate valuable but scarce places at the most academically selective universities in England, unless or until such time as the vertical stratification of higher education institutions is reduced or eliminated entirely.

The use of targeted additional funding for school-age education, intended to improve student attainment, is a widespread phenomenon internationally. It is slightly rarer that the funding is used to improve attainment specifically for the most disadvantaged students -- often via trying to attract teachers to poorer areas, or encouraging families to send their children to school. It is even rarer that funding is used to try and reduce the attainment gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers, and almost unheard for the funding to be intended to change the nature of school intakes by making disadvantaged students more attractive to schools. These last two were the objectives set for Pupil Premium funding to schools in England. The funding started in 2011, for all state-funded schools at the same time, so there is no easy counterfactual to help assess how effective it has been. The funding is a considerable investment every year and it is therefore important to know whether it works as intended. This paper presents a time series analysis of all students at secondary school in England from 2006, well before the funding started, until 2019, the most recent year for which there are attainment figures. It overcomes concerns that the official attainment gap between students labelled disadvantaged and the rest is sensitive to demographic, economic, legal and other concurrent policy changes. It does this by looking at a stable group of long-term disadvantaged students. It is argued that this group would have attracted Pupil Premium funding if it had existed in any year and under any economic conditions. After 2010, these long-term disadvantaged pupils became substantially less clustered in specific schools in their first year and throughout their remaining school life. This improvement cannot be explained by economic or other factors used in this paper, and so it looks as though the Pupil Premium has been effective here. The picture for the attainment gap at age 16 is more mixed. It is partly confused by changes in the grading of assessments in 2014 and again from 2016. The reasons why the improvements are less clear than at primary school are discussed, and they involve the nature of evidence available to secondary schools to help them improve the attainment of their most disadvantaged students.

While education technology has been widely used in classrooms, and considerable investments have been made to support its use in the UK, the evidence base for many such rapidly changing technologies is weak, and their efficacy is unclear. The aim of this paper is to systematically review and synthesise empirical research on the use of technology in formative assessment, to identify approaches that are effective in improving pupils' learning outcomes. The review involved a search of 11 major databases, and included 55 eligible studies. The results suggest promising evidence that digitally delivered formative assessment could facilitate the learning of maths and reading for young children, but there is no good evidence that it is effective for other subjects, or for older children, or that it is any more effective than formative assessment without technology. The review found no good evidence that learner response systems work in enhancing children's academic attainment, and there is no evidence supporting the effectiveness of such technologies that embed gaming features. Much research in this area is of poor quality. More rigorous studies using causal designs are thus urgently needed. Meantime, there should be no rush to use technology on the basis of improving attainment.

Pupil Premium funding has been provided to schools in England since 2011, to reduce socio-economic segregation, and the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. There is little evidence it works. Some stakeholders are now considering whether funding should cease, or have a new objective. Evaluating the impact of such a funding policy is not easy because the relevant outcomes are sensitive to demographic, economic and other concurrent policy changes. These issues are addressed using the National Pupil Database, comparing the poverty gap in primary schools from 2006 to 2019, focusing on pupils who would have attracted Pupil Premium funding, if it existed, in any year and under any economic conditions. After 2010, the segregation of long-term disadvantaged pupils and their peers reduced in Years 1 and 6, and their attainment improved relative to their peers at ages 7 and 11. However, assessments changed after 2014 and this complicates the pattern. A regression model suggests that relative attainment for poor pupils improved markedly in the Pupil Premium era, even in regions like the North of England which have faced criticism for apparently "failing" their poor pupils. We argue for retaining the Pupil Premium policy.

This paper describes an independently evaluated randomised controlled trial of a self-affirmation intervention, replicating earlier studies, mostly conducted in the US with ethnic minority students. Self-affirmation theory suggests that some stigmatised groups, such as those from ethnic minority or poor families, face stereotype threats which undermine their academic performance. Engaging in value affirmation writing activities when such threats are most salient can give individuals a positive sense of value, negating harmful feelings, and fostering academic learning. The present study, involving 10,807 pupils aged 14 to 16 in England showed that the intervention can be successfully replicated with children from low socioeconomic backgrounds in England. The analysis showed positive effects for the intervention group. Pupils who completed more exercises also performed better. The findings are worth consideration given that it costs virtually nothing and does no harm.

This paper evaluates a range of measures commonly used to target and measure the success of efforts to widen access to higher education. We demonstrate empirically that the area-level widening access metrics advocated by England's Office for Students, POLAR and TUNDRA, are unfit for purpose because they yield unacceptably high rates of false positives (individuals identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged when they are not). We argue that these and other demonstrably flawed area-level and school-level metrics should be replaced by officially verified individual-level indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage which yield few false positives, most notably receipt of free school meals. Unless and until this change is made, widen access efforts will be inefficient at best and counterproductive at worst, and associated statistics will give a misleading picture of how much progress is being made on widening access.

The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness. Instead, they are being asked to move towards what we term the meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students' qualifications should be judged in light of the socioeconomic circumstances in which these were obtained to enhance distributive fairness, a practice known in the UK as contextualised admissions. In this paper, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base, drawing together for the first time insights from our ESRC and Nuffield Foundation funded studies of fair access to highly academically selective universities in England. We argue that reconceptualising fair access in terms of distributive fairness rather than procedural fairness offers a more socially just set of principles on which to allocate valuable but scarce places at the most academically selective universities in England, unless or until such time as the vertical stratification of higher education institutions is reduced or eliminated entirely., Author(s): Vikki Boliver [sup.1] , Pallavi Banerjee [sup.2] , Stephen Gorard [sup.3] , Mandy Powell [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.8250.f, 0000 0000 8700 0572, Department of Sociology, Durham University, , [...]

This paper looks at the National Pupil Database for England in terms of variables that could be used by universities to help them assess undergraduate applications. Where a young person is obviously disadvantaged, this can be taken into account in contextualised admissions. Of the indicators available, which give the most accurate assessment of that context--singly or in combination? This paper looks at missing data, and what is known about students for whom data is missing. It looks at changes in indicators of potential disadvantage over time. And it looks at the relationship between all indicators and student attainment and progress at school. The safest and clearest indicators are the sex (male) and age in year (summer born) of a student but neither of these is currently considered in widening participation. Otherwise, the best general indicator is eligibility for free school meals (poverty), and this is best computed as the number of years a student has been known to be eligible. Having a special educational need is also a promising indicator, but doubts are raised about its validity and it anyway covers a wide range of factors, some of which are already dealt with by the education system. Very few students registered as living in care continue in education post-16, and this indicator could be used safely and to advantage. The rest, including area measures, school type, performance relative to school, ethnicity and first language are generally not safe to use.

Pupil Premium funding has been provided to schools in England since 2011, to help overcome socio-economic segregation between schools, and reduce the poverty attainment gap. Yet there is little evidence such an approach is effective. Some important stakeholders are considering whether Pupil Premium should stop or be re-routed. It is therefore essential to know whether the policy has helped in the eight years since its inception. Evaluating the impact of such a funding policy is fraught with difficulties because of changes over time in the economy, legal definitions, prevalence of disadvantage, and metrics used. Previous research has generally ignored these, and the role of length and depth of disadvantage. Hence, previous estimates of the attainment gap are insecure. This paper introduces a new analysis, based on the National Pupil Database that considers changes in the prevalence of FSM-eligibility, private school attendance, GDP and the duration of individual poverty. Net of such factors, the results show that segregation has declined unexpectedly since 2011, suggesting that the Pupil Premium may be working. The policy should continue, while research looks at the long-term impact on the poverty gap. Meanwhile, the funding could be re-calibrated to be fairer to areas with longer-term disadvantage.

This paper reports on the findings of an ESRC funded project that contributes to the evidence base underpinning contextualised approaches to undergraduate admissions in England. We show that the bolder use of reduced entry requirements for disadvantaged learners is necessary if ambitious new widening access targets set by the Office for Students (OfS) are to be achieved. We demonstrate empirically that academic entry requirements for disadvantaged learners can be reduced substantially without setting these students up to fail at university. We also show that the use of area level measures to identify contextually disadvantaged learners -- including the OfS's preferred measure, POLAR -- runs a high risk of failure to reach the intended beneficiaries of contextualised admissions policies. We argue strongly in favour of the use of administratively verified individual level metrics to identify contextually disadvantaged learners, most notably receipt of free school meals and low household income.

It is estimated that only approximately 20 percent of adult European Roma have attained higher than primary education. Scholars have identified different potential causes of the unfavourable school outcomes achieved by Roma students. Cultural differences between the (traditional) way of life in Roma families and the values professed by the mainstream society are often blamed for high dropout rates and the low educational attainment of Roma. Yet there is also a group of researchers who disagree with this, and suggest that it is more to do with economic and other differences. Our empirical study is based on a large representative sample of UNDP/WB/EC Regional Roma Survey conducted in twelve European countries. We show that, on average, Roma respondents (in comparison to non-Roma) express remarkably lower levels of educational aspirations for children. However, these differences diminish considerably when controlling for common individual and household characteristics, and again when including culture proxies. Consequently, our study contributes to questioning one of the negative stereotypes about the distinctiveness of Roma and their culture in relation to education.

Some attempts to address the worldwide shortage of teachers focus on raising the prestige of teaching, and making the occupation more appealing. Teacher job satisfaction and well-being have been identified as important factors linked to the status of teachers, with school leadership reportedly playing a key role. This paper is part of a larger review of 96 studies about teacher retention. Here we present the findings from 28 studies on effective leadership practices and attributes relevant to teacher well-being. These studies were identified via a systematic search of five large databases and other sources, and their results synthesised in terms of the strength of the evidence. There is some consensus that “effective” leaders share a combination of attributes - supportive, empowering and creating a positive teaching and learning environment. However, research in this field is replete with methodological flaws, almost all is correctional at best, making it difficult to make any causal claims. There is no clear and consistent definition of “effective” leadership. “Effective” school leaders are believed to exhibit a combination of various characteristics. What these characteristics are is difficult to define as the same label can be given to different constructs and different labels for similar constructs. The outcome measures (well-being and job satisfaction) are also rather nebulous, with multiple components. Most of these measures are based on respondents’ subjective assessment. In conclusion, it is far from clear how to make leaders more effective in promoting teacher well-being, and even what effective leaders look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher workload is an important policy concern in many education systems around the world, often considered a contributory factor in teacher attrition. One aspect of workload that could be addressed is reducing the amount of written marking and feedback that teachers do. This article reports on the results of an evaluation of FLASH Marking, an intervention aimed at reducing teachers' marking workload. FLASH Marking is a code-based feedback approach involving peer- and self-assessment, reducing the need to use alphanumeric grading while promoting the use of students' metacognitive skills. The study involved a single cohort of 18,500 Key Stage 4 pupils (aged 14/15 at the start of the trial) and their English teachers (n = 990) in 103 secondary schools in England. The impact of the intervention was estimated as the difference in before and after measures of teacher workload, comparing teachers in 52 intervention schools and those in 51 control schools. The results suggest that the intervention had the effect of lessening teachers' workload by reducing their working hours (effect size 0.16), including hours spent on marking and feedback (0.17). The intervention was largely implemented as designed and teachers were generally positive about the potential impact of FLASH on pupils' learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, as elsewhere, the use of "contextual" data has been strongly advocated in order to inform undergraduate admissions decision-making. More than a third of UK universities currently take the socioeconomic or other background context of undergraduate applicants' attainment into account when deciding whom to shortlist, interview, make standard or reduced offers to, or accept at confirmation or clearing. Even more universities plan to do so in the future. Contextualised admissions policies are considered by many commentators to be intrinsically fairer, and to represent a potentially powerful means of addressing the persistent under-representation of HE students from less advantaged backgrounds, but their impact has not yet been rigorously evaluated. In order to be effective, the indicators must be accurate, appropriate, and complete, and policies for their use must demonstrably widen participation, presumably without compromising student achievement. This paper reviews the indicators available for judging context, and the existing evidence base on how contextually-identified students perform in higher education. It illustrates the considerable difficulties of using any available indicators, alone or in combination, in terms of trustworthiness. And it explains how their use could introduce new injustices while tackling merely the symptoms of stratified participation in HE. This is far from a counsel of despair. We need to widen participation and the use of context stills shows considerable promise. The paper therefore presents the case for a new study by the authors, looking at which of the available contextual indicators are best in practice, and what difference their use would really make to widening participation at HE.

For decades there have been calls by concerned stakeholders to improve the quality of education research, and some progress has been made towards creating a more secure evidence base in some areas. More programmes and approaches that have a reasonable evidence base are now also being used in schools (but not in policy, and not necessarily because they have a reasonable evidence base). However, there has been no equivalent improvement in secure knowledge about how best to get that evidence into use, or even what difference it makes when such evidence is used. This paper looks at what little is already known about the different ways to get research evidence into use in education by summarising the results of a large-scale review of the literature. A total of 323 of the most relevant studies were looked at across all areas of public policy, and judged for quality and contribution. Very few (33) were of the appropriate design and quality needed to make robust causal claims about evidence-into-use, and even fewer of these concerned education. This means that despite over 20 years of modest improvement in research on what works in education policy and practice, the evidence on how best to deploy these findings is still very weak. We consider studies in terms of several issues, including whether they look at changes in user knowledge and behaviour, or student outcomes, and how evidence is best modified before use. Providing access to raw research evidence or even slightly simplified evidence is not generally an effective way of getting it used, even if that evidence is presented to users by knowledge-brokers, in short courses or similar. What is more likely to work for both policy and practice is the engineering of high quality evidence into a more usable format and presenting it actively or iteratively via a respected and trusted conduit, or through population measures such as legislation. Having the users actually do the research is another promising approach. Expecting each individual study they fund to have an impact is not the way forward, as this may encourage widespread use of ineffective or even harmful interventions. Publicly-funded users, including policy-makers, should be required to use evidence-led programmes from those libraries providing them and which are appropriate and relevant to their aims. Research funders should support these approaches, and help to build up libraries of successfully tested programmes. Researchers need to be scrupulous, looking at their new evidence in the context of what is already known and not looking to obtain 'impact' from single studies. More and better research is needed on the best routes for evidence-into-use. However, the improvements required of all parties are as much ethical in nature as they are technical or scientific.

In this response to John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," Stephen Gorard questions whether Raven's claims that researchers have created a serious threat to the entire earth, perhaps all of science, the process of education, and the field of psychology due to a lack of logic and scepticism in research should be taken seriously. Gorard states that, based on the lack of coherent argument or evidence, Raven's paper contributes nothing to the improvement of education research. [For "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," see EJ1248321.]