Why School Doesn’t Work for Every Child

When I started writing Why School Doesn’t Work for Every Child in the spring of 2024, I did so out of anger and frustration.

In the UK, where I live and work, 4.3 million children were living in relative poverty – the highest number on record. 3.6 million children were living in absolute poverty, 2.2 million children were living in ‘food insecure’ households, and 820,000 were living in households that had resorted to using foodbanks. 400,000 children had no beds of their own. Mental illness was on the rise with 1 in 4 young people at the age of 17 having a mental illness, whilst 250,000 children had been denied help for mental health issues. Victorian diseases like malnutrition were returning and life expectancy was falling. With 3.2 million people estimated to be in hygiene poverty, too many parents were facing the impossible daily decision of whether to deny their children food, heating or hygiene.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gap in attainment between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children had widened, and schools across the country were worried about a deterioration in learner attendance and behaviour.

Added to which, schools were experiencing an acute staff recruitment and retention crisis. A Department for Education report on the working lives of teachers and leaders published in spring 2022 showed that 56% of school staff thought their workload was unacceptable and that they did not have sufficient control over it, 25% said they were thinking of leaving the sector in the next 12 months for reasons other than retirement, and 61% were dissatisfied with their salary. Teacher wellbeing was lower than equivalent wellbeing scores for the UK population.

Over the course of the previous decade or so, I had seen my country become more divided. I had seen the gap between rich and poor grow, and the life chances of children from working class backgrounds dwindle. For proof of this, just look at The Times Rich List. When the first rich list was compiled in 1989, a rich person had 6,000 times the average person. In 2024, it was 18,000 times .

In fact, the chargesheet against the UK government of 2010-2024 makes for painful reading:

On jobs, workers in the UK suffered the longest and harshest pay squeeze in modern history . They were £11,000 worse off a year after 15 years of “almost completely unprecedented” wage stagnation.

On housing, in 2000, a home cost four times the average salary; by 2021 it had risen to eight times the average salary. Average monthly rental payments were 40% higher in 2024 than they were 10 years earlier, while typical mortgage payments for the same properties were up 13%.

On transport, spending on subsidies for bus and rail routes – where they are required to support ‘socially necessary’ routes – fell by 48% in real terms between 2009/10 and 2019/20 and spending on concessionary bus fares – a statutory duty that local authorities cannot ration – fell by 14%. More than one in four bus services in England had been cut in the decade to 2024 and almost 5,000 bus routes have been axed since 2012, with the north-west and east of England the two regions worst affected. In the decade to 2024, rail fares increased by 30%.

On health, the NHS was chronically underfunded with the worst funding settlements in its history. The NHS was suffering the worse staffing crisis in its history with nearly 112,000 full time equivalent staff vacancies including over 40,000 nurses. NHS waiting lists to start elective care was at record levels in England – exceeding 7.4m – the highest since records began (August 2007). Nearly five million patients each month in England had to wait more than a fortnight for a GP appointment.

On energy, weekly road fuel prices had almost doubled since 2016 and National Energy Action (NEA) calculated that 6.7 million people were living in fuel poverty.

On Social Security, £14bn had been taken out of the welfare system since 2010/11. For out-of-work families with two children, benefits covered less than half their costs – (48% for a couple, 49% for a lone parent) compared to more than 60% in 2012. Working families had also lost out, with a £460 reduction compared to if the 2010 benefits system was in place. In 2016, the Welfare Reform and Work Act abolished the Child Poverty Act, including the targets to reduce poverty. Between 2013 and 2022, the basic rate of unemployment benefits had lost value, leaving it at a 35-year low in real terms.

Between 2008/09 and 2020/21, the number of foodbank users increased every year, from just under 26,000 to more than 2.56 million. In 2022/23, approximately 2.99 million people used a foodbank in the United Kingdom. 4.2 million children (or 29% of children) in the UK were living in poverty.

On Local Authorities, the UK government reduced grants to local authorities by £18.6bn (in 2019/20 prices) between 2009/10 and 2019/20, a 63% reduction in real terms. Public spending cuts led to the closure of almost 800 libraries in the decade to 2024 – a fifth of the UK’s total, and spending on libraries in 2009 was at £1 billion, but by 2019 it had declined by a quarter. Freedom of Information requests to UK councils revealed 65 pools had closed, either temporarily or permanently, in the three years to March 2022. Official figures show that 1,342 children’s centres have closed over the last decade. Local authority spending on youth services in England experienced a £1.1 billion cut in a decade.

And finally, on education, school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms between 2009–10 and 2019–20, the largest cut in over 40 years. The 2011 cut to the Educational Maintenance Allowance saw up to £30 a week taken away from 603,000 students from the poorest socio-economic groups.

Perhaps now you’ll understand why I began writing this book in anger. I came from a poor, working-class background. Were it not for my schoolteachers, access to local library and leisure facilities, a fairer system of social security, and a full government grant to pay for my university tuition fees and living expenses, I would not have succeeded at school, university, or in life. Knowing I was lucky, I have dedicated much of my working life to teaching in, leading, and now supporting schools in disadvantaged areas and to helping highlight and address inequalities in education. This book has been a lifetime in the making.

I must admit, I’m feeling more optimistic now, post-General Election, than I was when I started writing the book because the goal of equity seems more achievable under a new administration. The new UK government which was elected on 4 July 2024 quickly acknowledged the need to transform the education system so that young people got the opportunities they deserved. At the time of writing, it is too early to say if the government’s actions will match their words and the journey will be long and arduous, but, in an open letter to the sector, the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, said that “background should be no barrier to getting on” and thus she committed to building a fairer society “that delivers the best life chances for every child”.

Phillipson expressed the view that “life shouldn’t come down to luck” and yet, now, “too many people simply don’t have the opportunities to succeed”. Having grown up on a council street and been in receipt of free school meals, Phillipson said “that’s what motivates me and that’s why we will work tirelessly to deliver on our opportunity mission, tackling barriers like inadequate housing and child poverty that undermine family security and make it so hard for children to learn”.

There is now hope. But, together, we must convert hope into action.

I’m chair of a campaign called Building Equity in Education which seeks to do just that. Our mission is “to use education as a lever for social justice by doing more for those who start with less to ensure a child’s birth is not also their destiny”.

The big question I’ve tried to answer in this book is ‘how?’

I want this book to be a practical guide to achieving equity in education and a set of strategies that schools can adopt to close the attainment gaps that have widened in recent years and to ensure reserve social injustices.

You can pre-order the book now and it is published on 1 May by Routledge. Click here to find out more.