IF YOU HAVEN’T GOT SOCKS…

A point I’ve been making continually in my blogs is that there are huge structural issues that impact how well students do in school and I think the educational community should get more involved politically at trying to change them. This can be seen in the data related to poverty and how harmful it is to the education of those who come from low income backgrounds. The long summer break also has a harmful impact on the poorest in society and to confound all this, we also have a grading system set up whereby a third of those partaking in exams will ‘fail’.

This week I came across this interesting blog by Alex Tabarrok, who is an economist at the Marginal Revolution University. It’s all about the research that shows that air pollution has a huge impact on cognition. My favourite statistics (as Director of Chess) are the ones that show chess players make more mistakes on polluted days and in particular, when they are under timed pressure. It makes for a fascinating read and clearly has huge implications on student learning, as shown by the last study by Heissel et al. There is an argument to be had about whether IQ is a good measure of intelligence and the comments on the blog make for some interesting reading but I’ll leave that for the time being.

A lot of job adverts I see for Economics posts are at private schools and I’m continually amazed by the beauty of some of the places. They seem to have wide open spaces, lots of green and pleasant land, in the countryside, away from the polluted cities and towns. On the other hand I also end up reading articles like this about Ella Kissi-Debrah that are incredibly sad, who died of an asthma attack linked to pollution near her home. Clearly pollution is an issue for Lewisham and it’s interesting to note that 44% of students in the borough did not achieve A*-C grades in English and Maths, which is the worst performance in London.  

Therefore I don’t think it is unfair to make the assumption that the wealthiest students probably have a ‘green’ advantage when it comes to schooling. If pollution really does lead to poor cognition, then over time, you would expect those in the leafier areas to achieve better grades. Going back to the chess study you could argue that if exams are sat on days of high pollution, more mistakes are likely to be made by those sitting them under timed conditions, which disproportionately impacts poorer students. Add this ‘green’ advantage to the all the other numerous ones the wealthiest in society have such as the lack of poverty/scarcity (which can lead to cognitive overload), additional private tutoring, money available for remarks, improved social networks, smaller class sizes and so on, you can see that playing field is uneven as it can be.

I don’t want to drag the people down from the top. I just want to see everyone have the same opportunities and currently we have a society that it is harmful for lots of children before they even enter the educational system. If you have a poor input, then it’s difficult to produce quality output, despite the processes that are put in place. As an old colleague of mine used to say ‘if you haven’t got socks, you can’t pull them up’ and at the moment we have too many people without socks.

General elections give us the opportunity to change things and I find it fascinating that you can vote for a party that has widened inequality to a point that it has to have a fundamental impact on learning. Christian Bokhove (a really interesting educator from the University of Southampton) is discussing it here in this tweet and then makes an interesting counterpoint about addressing inequality through powerful knowledge. But it’s not only about poverty and inequality, it’s also (as shown by the recent evidence) about green issues as well. Which political parties are providing answers to the structural issues in society that have a huge impact on the education of our children? The money they are offering to education is fantastic and I’m sure all schools would appreciate the increase but we need to think wider as educators, much wider.

So during elections, try not to think about who is providing the most money for the sock puller-uppers, think about whether they are actually providing socks in the first place!