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School of Social Policy - Department of Social Policy, Sociology and

Criminology

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MA Social Policy Mode

I, Year 1

Module Title LM Poverty, Wealth and Inequality Word Count 1,066

Assignment Name /Title Summative Assessment 1 – 1,000 Word Blog (33%)

Hand in date 02/11/2023 Extension date

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‘Set In Stone’: Children Born into Poverty are at an Educational Disadvantage before School Starts

The mythic belief in meritocracy is pervasive through British culture. The idea that those who succeed

in education and life do so through their inherent merit belies a faith in determination and ability

autonomous from social structures. Yet ‘by the time children enter school, their levels of cognitive,

socioemotional and physical development are already vastly unequal’ (Cattan, et al., 2022, p. 4), due

only to the lottery of the socio-economic status of the family they are born into. 40% of the education

attainment gap is ‘set in stone’ before children even start school (Ferguson, 2022). There can be no

serious discussion of educational meritocracy when children born into poverty are at a steeply unequal

disadvantage before they even start school.

Figure 1: Educational Attainment Gap throughout School Graph ( (Farquharson, et al., 2022, p. 41)

From the first educational attainment assessment, poor children are at a significant disadvantage. This

inequality is not levelled out throughout the course of the education system, but is instead

exacerbated. Figure 1 shows the attainment gap between students who are and are not eligible for free

school meals (FSM) in England, at different stages of educational assessment. Eligibility for FSM is a

useful and common proxy for recognising children living in poverty, as eligibility requires a

household income of relative poverty. Figure 1 shows how only 57% of FSM-eligible children

achieve a good level of development at age five, compared to 74% of other children (Farquharson, et

al., 2022, p. 41). This graph also shows how the attainment gap widens, with only 35% of FSM-

eligible students gaining 2 or more A levels by age 19, compared to 60% of students not FSM-eligible

(Farquharson, et al., 2022, p. 41). Educational inequalities begin before children even start school, but

there is systemic failure at every stage of education to lessen the attainment gap.

For decades, consecutive neoliberal governments have sought to place the blame for children in

poverty starting school at a disadvantage as solely the fault of parenting. This approach essentially

condemns poorer parents as failing to adequately raise their children. It is true that parenting is a

major determinant of cognitive growth and socio-emotional regulation, especially in the early years,

making good parenting a core feature of educational success (Cattan, et al., 2022, p. 14). However,

reducing parenting to individualistic decisions, like a middle-class parent choosing to read to their

child every evening whilst a poorer parent does not, entirely disregards the wider social structures that

causally effect how and why someone parents their young child the way they do.

Most parents care deeply about their child’s education from an early age – low-income families do not

possess a ‘poverty of aspirations’ that limits their child’s development (Sullivan, et al., 2013, p. 1189).

However, living in poverty fundamentally shapes parenting, in a way that comparatively

disadvantages children. The majority of children living in poverty have a parent in work (Department

for Work & Pensions, 2023); lower-income jobs tend to be more physical and with longer hours,

leaving parents working in poverty with less time and energy to devote to their child’s education. The

2022 IFS report details a high correlation between increased maternal psychological distress and a

low-income economic background, which indicates higher likelihood of emotional destabilisation for

children living in poverty, due to the financial stress their parents face (Cattan, et al., 2022, p. 15).

Children in poverty are more likely to live in one-parent families, meaning the single parent

undertakes more labour daily than two-parent families who can split the burden (Cattan, et al., 2022,

p. 15). Simply, being tired, being stressed, being poor effects a person’s parenting. It may make a

parent less proactive, less involved in their child’s education, but it’s not because they don’t care, or

are inherently worse parents. It is because they have fewer resources.

Parenting alone cannot answer to the inequality in educational attainment between poor children and

those better off (Sullivan, et al., 2013, p. 1187). ‘An emphasis on parenting can feed into a crude

deficit view in which low-income parents are to blame for their children’s failures’ (Sullivan, et al.,

2013, p. 1191), whilst disregarding the impact of material resources on developmental growth. The

material environment in which a child is raised is a vital factor of their attainment; 80% of the poorest

quintile of children live in rented housing, compared to 10% of the richest quintile (Cattan, et al.,

2022, p. 17). Housing tenure is a measurable proxy for material environment, and living in rented

housing ‘is negatively associated with cognition and positively associated with socio-emotional

difficulties’ (Cattan, et al., 2022, p. 25). Over half of poor children live in large families, so scarce

resources are spread thinly, and overcrowding is far more likely, which is also negatively correlated

with cognitive progression (Oppenheim, 2022, p. 28) (Cattan, et al., 2022, p. 25). Direct poverty

reduction measures alleviating material deprivation tangibly improve the quality of children’s

educational and emotional environments, by ‘allowing them to live in more stable conditions’ (Cattan,

et al., 2022, p. 27).

There is an essential critique to be made about the assessment of attainment itself. ‘It is worth

emphasising that most families who are living in poverty do a good job of bringing up their children’

despite material deprivation (Oppenheim, 2022, p. 17), but when they enter school, they are marked

down because they cannot access the specific resources necessary for high educational attainment.

Educational attainment rewards adherence to middle-class British habitus, disregarding the rich

experiences children from many different background come to school with; as Dr Sarah Leaney

(2023) argues, ‘Children’s everyday lives on council estates are full of many of the things that we

value in terms of children’s lives – full of friendships, full of support’ but the ‘lack of fit between their

experiences so far and what’s expected at school positions their childhood as having lacked in some

way.’ (Leaney, 2023). As Burman writes, ideas of attainment ‘become enshrined within an apparatus

of collective measurement and evaluation that constructs its own world of abstract autonomous

babies; of norms, deviation from which is typically only acknowledged in the form of a deficit’

(Burman, 2001, p. 6). The rich experiences of children who have grown up in poverty are disregarded,

with focus only on what they lack compared to middle-class children.

The material deprivation faced by children in poverty tangibly educationally disadvantages them

before they even start school. This is a growing issue, with rates of child poverty increasing (Stewart

& Reader, 2021). The UK already had ‘one of the steepest socio-economic gradients among similar

countries’ (Hirsch, 2007, p. 3), yet the educational attainment gap is now widening across all stages of

education (Hutchinson, et al., 2020). There is no possible justification for the life of a child born into

poverty to be set in stone, and so there can be no justification for the continuation of child poverty.

Policy must focus on material, financial alleviation, and that will, in turn, close the educational

attainment gap. So long as there are children in poverty, there is no meritocracy, and the education

gap between rich and poor children will remain.

Bibliography

Burman, E., 2001. Beyond the Baby and the Bathwater: Postdualistic Developmental Psychologies for

Diverse Childhoods. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 9(1), pp. 5-22.

Cattan, S. et al., 2022. Early Childhood Inequalities, London: IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities.

Department for Work & Pensions, 2023. Households Below Average Income: an Analysis of the UK

Income Distribution, London: UK Government.

Farquharson, C., McNally, S. & Tahir, I., 2022. Education Inequalities, London: IFS Deaton Review

of Inequalities.

Ferguson, D., 2022. Mary Bousted on Tory Education: 'To destroy children's hope is wicked. We do it

on a grand scale'. The Guardian, 9 April.

Hirsch, D., 2007. Experiences of Poverty and Educational Disadvantage, London: Joseph Rowntree

Foundation.

Hutchinson, J., Reader, M. & Akhal, A., 2020. Education in England: Annual Report 2020, London:

Education Policy Institute.

Leaney, S., 2023. Class Divide: Episode 1 - The Early Years [Interview] (1 March 2023).

Oppenheim, C., 2022. Bringing Up the Next Generation: from Research to Policy, London: Nuffield

Foundation.

Stewart, K. & Reader, M., 2021. Prioritise Early Years to Reduce Childhood Inequalities. [Online]

Available at: https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/politics/prioritise-early-years-to-

reduce-childhood-inequalities-1

[Accessed 1 November 2023].

Sullivan, A., Ketende, S. & Joshi, H., 2013. Social Class and Inequalities in Early Cognitive Scores.

Sociology, 47(6), pp. 1187-1206.