Differential Achievement: The Raw and the Cooked

“Gap in GCSE results between private and state schools widens at highest level”
New figures highlighting the results gap between different school types have sparked fresh concerns about education inequalities.

The Independent: August 2024
 

This newspaper headline is fairly indicative of how exam results in England and Wales are generally reported – the raw (unadjusted) numbers of exam grades showing a picture of successful private schools (teaching around 7% of GCSE students and 12% of sixth-form pupils) wildly out-performing their struggling state school counterparts.

The Independent goes on to add that “The figures have sparked fresh concerns among social mobility experts about inequalities in the education system and widening attainment gaps between rich and poor youngsters”.

And while these concerns about the impact of social and economic inequalities are both real and important, a new study by Anders et al (2024) suggests that the educational picture in England and Wales, as it relates to socio-economic class, is a little more nuanced than simply looking at raw IGCSE / GCSE results and drawing appropriate conclusions – whether these conclusions relate to ideas about innate / inherited intelligence, the effects of social and economic environments or some combination of the two..

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study the researchers looked at “the relationship between GCSE performance and social factors like family income and parental occupation”. More-specifically, they looked at GCSE performance between private and state school students once these variables (proxy indicators of socio-economic class) were controlled.

What they found has interesting implications:

Core GCSE Subjects (Maths, English and Science)

When they controlled for the impact of different socio-economic statuses the achievement differences between private and state school pupils disappeared in terms of the “core academic subjects” at GCSE level.

In other words, once socio-economic factors were equalised there was no measurable difference between the academic achievement of each group in these subjects – a finding that has interesting implications for discussions about the relative impact of inherited and environmental inequalities and their relationship to differential educational achievement.

In the real world, of course, these differences are uncontrolled and private school pupils generally out-perform their state school counterparts, which suggests the influence of factors like parental income and occupation are crucial variables in determining levels of educational achievement. This is confirmed by Anders et al when they note “the overall differences in GCSE performance in 2016 between state and private school pupils are associated with differences in pupils’ socio-economic status”.

Given the economic premium paid by parents of the privately-educated, this shouldn’t be too surprising. The basic costs of providing a child with a private education, for example, are well-beyond the means of most parents in England and Wales:

• Day school fees average around £16,000 a year – although if you want to get one-up on the merely rich it’ll set you back the best part of £45,000 to attend one of the most prestigious Public Schools.

• Boarding school fees cost, on average, £37,000 a year – although you won’t be getting any change out of £60,000 per annum if you want to board your child at one of the highest status schools.

Non-Core (Arts) GCSE Subjects

This difference is compounded when we look at the “non-core subjects” that encompass a range of Arts-based GCSEs (such as Art and Design, Dance, Drama, Theatre Studies, Performing Arts, Film Studies and Music). Here, “differences in favour of private school pupils’ performance in Arts subjects are more pronounced and remain in the same direction even when adjusting for background characteristics”.

In other words, private school pupils have significantly greater achievement levels in Arts subjects than their state educated counterparts in terms of both raw achievement and when variables such as parental occupation are controlled. This, Ashton and Ashton (2023) argue, “reflects a wider curriculum and greater available resourcing for these subjects” in private schools which, in turn, has wider socio-economic consequences outside the classroom. As Brook et al (2020) argue:

“This gap is concerning for the ability of young people who attend state schools to have a level playing field with those who attend private schools in subsequent access to opportunities necessary to pursue a career in the creative sector. The gap has the potential to perpetuate, or worsen, the domination of creative sectors by those from high socioeconomic status backgrounds”.

Takeaways?

Privately-educated students gain an important real-world advantage over their state-school counterparts in terms of both higher raw exam grades (that, according to Anders et al’s research, is the outcome of underlying socio-economic advantages rather than real differences in academic ability), and greater access to creative industry (Arts-based) post-school careers

The ability of state-school students to invest the time and effort to compete with their privately-educated peers in core GCSE subjects comes at a high cost in the sense that time and effort spent on non-core subjects is consequently curtailed.

In this respect, while the educational focus over the past 10 years in state schools in England and Wales on the core subjects of Maths, English and Science has had some success in narrowing – but not eliminating – the gap between the privately and publicly educated, this has been at the expense of widening the gap in non-core subjects.

And while this may or may not seem significant, there’s a strong argument to be made that the relative neglect of non-core subjects in state schools not only deprives students of valuable cultural experiences, it also seriously restricts their ability to enter into creative industries that, according to the Centre for Economics and Business (2022), employed 2.5 million people and generated £126 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the economy.

References

“Private school pupils’ performance in GCSEs (and IGCSEs)”: Anders, J; Green, F; Henderson, M and Henseke, G: Cambridge Journal of Education (2024)

Ashton, H., and Ashton, D. “Creativity and the curriculum: Educational apartheid in 21st Century England, a European outlier?” International Journal of Cultural Policy (2023)

Brook, O., O’Brien, D., and Taylor, M. “Culture is bad for you”: Manchester University Press (2020)