Much of the political talk about education and achievement focuses on the question of improving the quality of schooling. This is an important issue of course, but a wider sociological question concerns the impact poverty has on educational performance. This is usually measured in educational terms by the proportion of state school pupils who receive free school meals. Generally speaking, levels of literacy and numeracy of 11-year-olds in state schools in England are much higher than a decade ago. The number of failing students is falling in all schools, including among those students with high levels of deprivation (Figure 1).
But pupils from more deprived backgrounds are still around twice as likely as other pupils not to achieve basic standards of literacy and numeracy. When one factors gender into the equation, it also becomes clear that it is poorer boys who do least well of all in literacy. In fact, deprivation seems to be a crucial factor in predicting performance in both maths and English, but gender seems important only in literacy (Figure 2).
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