Macro-curriculum — Is there a relationship with economic disadvantage?
Following on from my short series of blogs on ‘macro-curriculum’ decisions from earlier this year, I recently wrote a follow-up analysis that explored the relationships between these decisions and apparent school performance.
Given the known influence of economic disadvantage on student outcome measures, I decided to adjust my analysis to mitigate this effect. This involved segmenting schools based on their levels of economic disadvantage, analysing each segment separately, then aggregating the results back together again. I felt comfortable only publishing the final aggregated trends because the same patterns were visible within each segment. However, this is not to say that each segment was identical. This final blog will therefore explore the differences I’ve observed between these segments.
Reminder — Performance quintiles
I previously defined different performance quintiles for each disadvantage segment. I will re-use these quintiles for this analysis to help us separate out the relationships between macro-curriculum decisions, apparent school performance and economic disadvantage.
Once again, it’s worth pausing for a moment to recognise the extent of the differences between these thresholds, which illustrates how punitive raw ‘league tables’ are against schools that serve our most disadvantaged communities (and how much they potentially flatter schools serving more affluent communities!).
Student entitlement
Do schools with fewer economically disadvantaged students have higher average number of entries of GCSEs or Non-GCSEs per student?
High and mid prior attainers from our most disadvantaged communities are entering ~1 fewer GCSE on average than their peers from our least disadvantaged communities. This gap is smaller for low prior attainers, especially at higher performing schools.
Meanwhile, students from our most economically disadvantaged schools are entering ~0.5 more Non-GCSEs on average than their most advantaged peers.
Are schools with fewer economically disadvantaged students more likely to enter students into Sciences, Humanities and/or Languages?
High and mid prior attainers at our most economically advantaged schools are a lot more likely to enter all areas of the EBacc than their peers within all other disadvantage quintiles. However, the same cannot be said for low prior attainers, where schools serving our most economically disadvantaged communities are actually entering slightly more students for the full EBacc.
Differences in Science entries are very small, but do correlate with economic disadvantage levels. These differences are then a bit larger for Humanities, while still mostly tracking economic disadvantage levels. MFL entries are where we see the biggest gaps emerge, with even the lowest performing high advantage schools out-entering almost all schools from all other disadvantage quintiles.
School breadth
Do schools with with fewer economically disadvantaged students more likely to enter some subjects than at other schools?
Students at high advantage schools are more than twice as likely to be Triple Scientists than their peers in our most economically disadvantaged communities. Perhaps more surprisingly, the same is true for PE and Business Studies GCSE entrants (although the reverse trend is seen for Sports BTEC). Drama and Music entries also follow similar trends, as do RE entries.
Lesson context
Given all the disadvantage-related differences we have already observed between schools’ entry patterns, it seems inevitable that there could also be stark differences in terms of timetabling, setting and content-alignment decision making. Unfortunately, I cannot yet test this hypothesis, since this kind of data is not currently collected at a national level.
In the meantime, I would encourage all school leaders to discuss these questions with their peers at other schools. Not just schools with similar levels of economic disadvantage, but those with very different intake demographics as well. At Ark, we facilitate these discussions via our annual macro-curriculum reviews, but we too are at risk of seeing too narrow a picture because most of our schools serve highly disadvantaged communities.
Ultimately, the more our schools understand what they are doing differently and why these differences make sense for their students, the more confident they can be that they are making the right macro-curriculum decisions.
So what?
It’s clear from this analysis that we don’t just have an achievement gap in this country, but a macro-curriculum gap as well. And in all likelihood, these two gaps will keep mutually reinforcing each other as long as they persist.
While it’s not for me to say what the universal ‘right’ answers are to any of the macro-curriculum questions posed above, I do feel fairly confident in saying that the right answer for any given school or student should not be determined by their level of economic disadvantage.
When coming up with titles to describe each section of our macro-curriculum review, we landed on ‘student entitlement’ to cover the first few questions around entry rates etc. However, the truth is that all of the questions posed across all three sections are fundamentally about what our students are entitled to.
I recognise that there are no quick fixes to addressing this macro-curriculum gap. After all, schools will have made the decisions they have based on various constraints — both in terms of supply of finances/staff and demand for subjects/qualifications, not to mention the implicit incentives that derive from our accountability system.
But I hope that by encouraging school leaders to ask themselves and their teams the questions I’ve posed throughout this series, we can start to challenge these constraints and help provide more students with access to the subjects and qualifications that they are entitled to.
