Fifty years ago, the Coleman Report, regarded as the most important educational study of the twentieth century found that the most powerful predictor of academic achievement is the socio-economic status of a child's family, and the second is the socio-economic status of their classmates.
In other words, being born poor imposes a disadvantage; but attending a school with large numbers of low income classmates presents a second challenge.
There are 24 secondary schools in Northern Ireland with 50 per cent or more pupils on free school meals (FSM), almost 20 per cent of all our secondary schools.
It is these concentrations of poverty that do untold damage. These concentrations of poverty are growing and will only succeed in marginalising more young people.
When it comes to formal schooling some children can access the educational elevator while others because of their disadvantaged backgrounds can only struggle up the stairs. If a child does not do well in school because he is hungry and cannot concentrate in class, it cannot be said that the child does not do well because he is inherently less capable.
Fair competition can be achieved only when the child is given enough food at home through family income support and at school through FSM.
The most effective way to ensure that all children can avail of the educational elevator is to provide high quality early intervention programmes. These involve children spending at least three years in a pre-school setting with high quality staff and a mixture of children from different socio-economic backgrounds.
Of course high poverty schools here can help disadvantaged pupils. I accept that it is a very rough measure but roughly a third of secondary schools that have 50 per cent or more of their children on FSM succeed in hitting the target of at least 40 per cent of pupils achieving 5 or more GCSEs A*-C, including maths and English.
This is a big achievement and is in a large part down to the teachers but still means that two-thirds of these schools fail to meet this target.
I taught for 40 years in classrooms that were grouped by ability and I found that generally for children in the lowest groups it was a case of when in Rome do as the Romans do. Teachers were faced with a multiplicity of problems, poor attendance, poor behaviour and lack of motivation.
In 2004, World Bank economists Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey reported the results of a remarkable experiment. They took 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste 11 to 12 year old boys from scattered rural villages in India, and set them the task of solving mazes. First the boys did the puzzles without being aware of each other's caste.
Under this condition, the low-caste boys did as well as the high caste boys, indeed slightly better. Then, the experiment was repeated, but each boy was asked to confirm his name, village, father's and grandfather's names and caste. After, this public announcement the boys did more mazes, and this time there was a large gap - the performance of the low-caste boys dropped significantly.
This is striking evidence that performance and behaviour in an educational task can be profoundly affected by the way we feel we are seen and judged by others. When we expect to be viewed as inferior, our abilities seem to diminish.
The most rigorous research suggests that socio-economic integration is a far more powerful educational intervention than compensatory education in high poverty schools.
In a carefully controlled study examining families who were randomly assigned to public housing units in Montgomery County, Maryland outside Washington DC, Heather Schwartz found a very large positive effects as a result of living in lower poverty neighbourhoods and attending lower poverty elementary schools.
This research took advantage of a rare opportunity to compare two educational approaches. On the one hand, the Montgomery County school district invested substantial extra resources in its lowest-income schools (red zone). On the other hand, the county had a long standing inclusionary housing policy that allows low income students to live in middle and upper middle class communities and attend fairly affluent schools (green zone).
Thus, Montgomery County offers an interesting experiment: Do low income students perform better in higher poverty schools that receive greater resources, or in more affluent schools with fewer resources?
The results were unmistakable. Low income students attending low poverty elementary schools significantly outperformed low income elementary students who attended higher poverty schools with state of the art educational interventions.
:: Taken from the ATL Annual Lecture by Jim Curran, a retired teacher and leading figure in the UK-wide Reading Reform Foundation.
