Summertime Blues – closing the attainment gap

One of the most interesting things about the use of evidence in education is the selective way that we use evidence in education. A few years back I attended a Wellcome Trust event that was looking to fund research projects that would explore ways of boosting educational attainment. For example, there were people there who wanted to run trials linked to mindfulness. I remember one person talking about the need to remove stripped fluorescent lights in classroom. One of the takeaways from the event though was the appreciation from most attendees that one of the real ways that we could improve student attainment was to start school later and yet we all knew that collectively that was very unlikely to happen, even though some areas have started to do this.

Obviously structural changes in education are very difficult to achieve and this can be seen with an issue like starting the school day later. Our society is based around a 9-5 culture and therefore it is inconvenient for adults if we change school times that would best suite teenage brains. However, given that schools are set up to improve the lives of children, then maybe it is something worth considering and this gets me onto the issue of the long summer holiday.

Just over a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book ‘Outliers – The Story of Success’ and it is probably best remembered for the (now) controversial claim that at least 10,000 hours was needed in order to become a ‘genius’ in your chosen field. Over time this number has been argued about and it has created some fascinating discussions about the genetic influence on success, the importance of deliberate practice and the role of luck. However, for me, this isn’t the chapter that stuck with me, although I have been engaged in many discussions about the 10,000 hours rule.

In Chapter 9 he discusses research that showed that the long summer holiday is bad for the poorest students in society. He quotes data from John Hopkins University that showed that across all socio-economic groups, test performances improve from one year to the next but those in the High Class out-perform those in the Low Class and over fiver years, the cumulative impact is quite vast. However, when the data gets broken down, the Low Class improvement is better during the academic year and much of the original gap occurs during the long summer holiday. He points out (which is a relief to all teachers) that school works!!! Karl Alexander (the head researcher at John Hopkins University at the time) calls this the ‘summer slide’ and you can hear him speaking about it here.

Clearly it’s an uncomfortable truth for teachers but if we genuinely care about those students from the poorest backgrounds, we should cut down our long summer holiday and get back into the classroom.

In my Economics GCSE class, I show a documentary called ‘Poor Kids‘ and it is a real eye opener for the many middle-class students I teach. Imagine, I ask them, what it must be like to spend 6 weeks without any money. For the majority of my students, they will continue to learn and gain ‘cultural capital’ over the summer as they’ll be taken to faraway places or they’ll visit museums and cinemas and the such like. Recently my daughter went to Thorpe Park and including her entry fee, transport and the price of food, the day was easily in excess of £60. If you think that Child Benefit is £20.70 a week and Job Seekers Allowance is a maximum of £73.10 a week, you can see how taking a child to one of these places (if your main source of income is benefits) can wipe out your weekly budget in no time. It’s easy to turn around and say that there are free activities for poorer children to do in the summer holidays but if you read a book like ‘Poverty Safari‘ by Darren McGarvey, you’ll soon discover how austerity has closed down community centres and there has been a huge decline in the number of libraries across the UK. We should also remember the phrase ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’ and you can appreciate how easy it is for poorer students to get into trouble out of sheer boredom, that could ultimately have long-term repercussions.

On the day it was announced that the attainment gap at GCSE is getting wider for disadvantaged students, it is worth reflecting what we can do from a structural point of view (based on evidence) that could help these students. No teacher wants to hear that their summer holiday should be shortened but ultimately, if we care about all students, then it must be done.