Secondary school

Rising levels of poverty and inequality harm children’s life chances. The odds are unfairly stacked against some people before they’re even born. Socio-economic deprivation leads to educational disadvantage in multiple ways. For example, deprived mothers are much more likely to be depressed or anxious during pregnancy, which harms the baby’s development, and deprived families are less able to afford nutritious food or adequate housing. As a result, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are behind their peers before they even start school, and COVID has made the gap even worse. Children in deprived households are much less likely to get a good education, for a range of reasons that are often outside the control of schools, ranging from home environments that are not conducive to learning, with fewer books and computers and less space, and much less access to out-of-school learning resources and opportunities, to having greater chances of experiencing conflict or having to move house regularly. By the time they leave primary school, disadvantaged pupils are even further behind their peers. By the time they take their GCSEs, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are more than 19 months behind their peers, due to the snowballing impacts of disadvantage on their educational attainment (and genetic differences only have a small impact).