Viewing lessons from the perspective of particular pupils to address educational disadvantage

Educational disadvantage is hard to think about.  It is a horribly complex issue involving the intersection of socioeconomics, class, race, geographic issues and more. 

Thinking about addressing the attainment gap is essentially about whether our society is fair, offering the same opportunities for all.

But another key reason why the disadvantage gap is difficult to think about is that low socioeconomic status is not a learning need.  It is critical to assess, rather than assume, as Marc Rowland would put it.   

Data scrutiny – does it help us identify challenges?

Does scrutinising data by ‘groups’, such as ‘PPG’ (are they a ‘group’? Think about it for a moment.  If ‘they’ are, in what way?) help us identify specific challenges which disadvantaged pupils face? 

It might help us focus on early reading, ensuring that pupils secure their phonic knowledge.  A focus on progress in multiplication tables can create actionable data.  It isn’t the case that all PPG pupils struggle with phonics and times tables of course, but it is critical to ensure all pupils have these fundamentals. 

Beyond that, attainment data can lead to ‘stuck’ places.   A concern over disadvantaged pupils being overrepresented in lower attaining groups for reading, writing and maths.  So what then?  What action to take?  Do reading, writing and maths better?  Weren’t we trying to do that anyway? 

If only ‘PPG’ or ‘disadvantage’ were one thing with one solution.  Then you could apply it to these areas and things would improve. 

Observe the lived experience of your pupils

One approach which sidesteps this thought paralysis is to go and observe lessons through the perspective of pupils.  I recommend you forget about the label PPG and instead focus on pupils whose progress is of concern. 

Chatting with my lovely dad about this, he related a story of when he did an exercise with a group of school leaders and governors at a school, focusing on the lived experience of ‘naughty boys’ who weren’t making good progress.  As they went from lesson to lesson, the only exchange these pupils had with adults was corrective.  All about behaviour and nothing to do with learning content, what sense they had made of learning material, how they felt about the scenario in the novel, how could they summarise a particular chemical reaction.

This gives us actionable data.

If you want to diagnose challenges of your disadvantaged pupils, Watch them in lessons.  See what their lived experience is like.  Are their lessons ‘gap closers’?  Building confidence, rehearsing, consolidating and firming up understanding?  Or ‘gap wideners’ in which they just about get their fingernails on something, or not, and the curriculum moves on rather uncaringly. 

Presume at your peril

Marc Rowland’s ‘four ps’ offers us a great lens to use to consider invisible barriers teachers may be unwittingly creating for pupils in these scenarios:

The presumption of language and oracy: can pupils access the language being used?   Are they getting opportunities to talk?  Are they being heard?

Presumption of background knowledge: do pupils have the knowledge to participate in their lessons?

Presumption of good learning behaviours: do we explicitly ensure that pupils are actively participating in their learning in a group setting, or independently? Do pupils understand the process of learning?

Presumption of positive learning experiences: do we explicitly know that pupils are experiencing success, and have positive interactions with adults and peers?

The four ps – it trips off the tongue and so succinct, characteristic of Marc’s work.  But this encompasses a whole world of daily educational experiences for our pupils which may not be functioning as we thought they were.

This exercise can be both alarming and exciting – alarming because you start to see how learning fails.  Exciting because if we can see where it fails, we can start to do something about it. 

In my experience, this exercise makes it plain where many pupils can be repeatedly falling through the cracks. 

One thing that jumps out at you is that frequently used classroom routines fail certain pupils.  The paired talk never works, for example.  One pupil dominates, having ample opportunity to be ‘the confident and helpful one’, to rehearse and consolidate their ideas through generative self-explanation.  The other pupil sits silently through it.

Despite Dylan Wiliam’s message that hands up is one of the most damaging things which happens in classrooms, driving educational inequality, it is so often the norm that some pupils, especially those experiencing disadvantage, sit through lessons in which the same confident peers repeatedly dominate the classroom discussion, the teacher gratefully accepting their hands up.  Some pupils pass many lessons without saying anything at all.  Some pupils do not have the experience of their teacher taking an interest in what they have understood.  Learning is a game that only some pupils get to play.  We have to get better at this stuff.  It matters too much.   

We can do something about engineering paired talk so that it fulfils the function we intended.  We can think about how to structure tasks so that they rehearse, consolidate and build knowledge so that as many of our learners reach a sense of confidence in the material as possible.  We can consider the expert-novice gap, especially in light of words we use.  We can build a culture of error in which an ordinary and interesting question is ‘What words did you not understand?’

I think an inescapable conclusion from this work is the importance of checking for understanding, formative assessment, AfL or responsive teaching.  The difference between ‘I taught it’ and ‘they learned it’. 

So, go and observe pupils’ lived experience in your school.  The work of PPG leadership is so much to do with seeing it.  And when you see it, you can do something about it.