Rich-poor education gap grows for 16-year-olds in almost all of England

8 comments

1. In any study, observation or trend in education always apply the golden rule: adjust for IQ or it’s meaningless

2. My question is what is the underlying issue? Is it their home life? Quality of food? What they do in school holidays? Is it that school is dictated by area and area is dictated by house price so bad schools end up with poorer households? Or is it a mix? Without this information we don’t have the route forward and just need to perform more studies.

3. Tories achieved one of their missions, Tim is now assured of a good job to fail U.K. somewhere!

4. Expert opinion shows intelligence is [49%](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886) heritable.

   Therefore, smarter parents produce smarter kids – on average.

   IQ, obviously, predicts income (Experts believed 45% of SES variance was explained by intelligence and 55% by non-IQ factors.)

   Therefore, rich kids are going to do better at school due to the intelligence gap.

5. What about the gap between boys and girls? That’s far more important but is being largely ignored

6. First, it’s the pandemic, so presumably school closures during the pandemic.

   Second, you’d expect richer parents to value education more highly, and have larger homes where each child could have their own room and their own laptop for Zoom lessons.

   Third, and this is the interesting bit, it is only outside London. So what did London do differently? Possibly one answer is a large immigrant population which might value education more and so made sure their children cracked open a textbook while their schools were closed for Covid, rather than scrolling through TikTok. Except there are other towns that also have large BAME populations, and they were not exceptional.

7. Female and male gap in education grows too.

   Shame noone cares

8. Not surprising, I’ve seen both ends of the scale recently, in that I’ve had rich parents paying me £40 an hour for online after school tutoring while the (deprived area) school where I was working as long term supply was so short of science teachers that the one technician they could afford was teaching GCSE classes (they were limiting practical work anyway because most of the labs were out of action due to unsafe roofs and we were teaching in portakabins) and there were kids going into their GCSEs having had 2 years of supply teachers for science.