Letters | 17 August 2017

The education gap

Sir: It is disappointing that Toby Young (‘Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap’, 5 August) conforms to the ‘Close the gap’ mentality that obsesses Ofsted and leftish thinking in state schools. Young deplores ‘the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds in England’. I prefer to get away from the tendentious terms ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘non-disadvantaged’ pupils and stick to the idea of high- and low-attaining pupils.

Left-inclined schools have various ways of closing this gap in attainment. One is to impose limits on how abler pupils can be challenged. Some secondary schools have gone soft on homework, even banning it altogether except for ‘optional’ study, because they think that the performance of more motivated pupils will increase ‘the gap’ between the two extremes of ability if compulsory homework is set to the whole spectrum of students’ ability. These schools realise that those pupils who can’t or won’t do homework — which is so crucial to the development of independent study — will lag further behind their abler peers under a homework-for-all policy. Such cases of ‘levelling down’, which are the enemy of school improvement, help to explain why state education in the UK is so far behind that of the best-performing countries.

A more enlightened view would see this attainment gap widened rather than narrowed. Let there be no limit to the heights to which the ablest can soar. At the same time, let our schools raise the aspirations of less able pupils. An example would be to expect most school leavers to be fluent in another language — something taken for granted in many European countries, but shamefully absent from much of our educational thinking.