Educational disadvantage is hard to think about.  It is a horribly complex issue involving the intersection of socioeconomics, class, race, geographic issues and more.  Thinking about addressing the attainment gap invites us to think about no less than our society, its unequal structure, our current multi system degradation and the cost of living crisis.

For busy school leaders, this complexity is bewildering.  And if you are a PPG lead and position your role as ‘fixing’ the attainment gap, please let the rest of us know how you intend to do it.  We’d love to know.

Positioning the role of PPG lead as such is disabling.  Much better to recognise the enormity of the issue and to see the leadership role as my wonderful colleague Kathryn Kashyap would say, are we heading in the right direction?  Are we turning the tanker ship?  I’m yet to meet a PPG lead who isn’t interested in making a difference to pupils experiencing disadvantage – I don’t think anyone is going to become lazy about the role simply because we recognise that we are not omnipotent!

Data scrutiny – does it help us identify challenges?

Many PPG leads scrutinise data in their school in the search for specific challenges which disadvantaged pupils face.  A useful outcome of this is often a close focus on early reading, ensuring that the pupils secure their phonic knowledge.  Likewise, a close focus on pupils progress in learning their multiplication tables can create some actionable data.  It isn’t the case that all PPG pupils struggle with phonics and times tables of course, but it is helpful to make sure that we don’t further disadvantage pupils by not ensuring they secure these fundamentals. 

Beyond that, attainment data can lead to unhelpful places.   A concern over disadvantaged pupils being overrepresented in lower attaining groups for reading, writing and maths.  So what then?  What action to take?  Do reading, writing and maths better?  Weren’t we trying to do that anyway? 

If only ‘PPG’ or ‘disadvantage’ were one thing with one solution.  Then you could apply it to these areas and things would improve. 

Observe the lived experience of your pupils

One approach which sidesteps this thought paralysis is to go and observe lessons through the perspective of particular pupils.  I recommend you forget about the label PPG for a while and instead focus on pupils whose progress is of concern.  They may also be pupils you consider to be experiencing educational disadvantage. 

Watch them in lessons.  See what their lived experience is like.  Are their lessons ‘gap closers’?  Building confidence, rehearsing, consolidating and firming up understanding?  Or ‘gap wideners’ in which they just about get their fingernails on something, or not, and the curriculum moves on rather uncaringly. 

Presume at your peril

Marc Rowland’s ‘four ps’ offers us a great lens to use to consider invisible barriers teachers may be unwittingly creating for pupils in these scenarios:

The presumption of language and oracy: can pupils access the language being used?   Are they getting opportunities to talk?  Are they being heard?

Presumption of background knowledge: do pupils have the knowledge to participate in their lessons?

Presumption of good learning behaviours: do we explicitly ensure that pupils are actively participating in their learning in a group setting, or independently? Do pupils understand the process of learning?

Presumption of positive learning experiences: do we explicitly know that pupils are experiencing success, and have positive interactions with adults and peers?

The four ps – it trips so lightly off the tongue and looks so succinct, characteristic of Marc’s work.  But this encompasses a whole world of daily educational experiences for our pupils which may not be functioning as we thought they were.

This exercise can be both alarming and exciting – alarming because you start to see how learning fails.  Exciting because if we can see where it fails, we can start to do something about it. 

In my experience, this exercise makes it plain where many pupils can be repeatedly falling through the cracks. 

One thing that jumps out at you is that frequently used classroom routines fail certain pupils.  The paired talk never works, for example.  One pupil dominates, having ample opportunity to be ‘the confident and helpful one’, to rehearse and consolidate their ideas through generative self-explanation.  The other pupil sits silently through it.

Despite Dylan Wiliam’s message that hands up is one of the most damaging things which happens in classrooms, driving educational inequality, it is so often the norm that some pupils, especially those experiencing disadvantage, sit through lessons in which the same confident peers repeatedly dominate the classroom discussion, the teacher gratefully accepting their hands up.  Some pupils pass many lessons without saying anything at all.  Some pupils do not have the experience of their teacher taking an interest in what they have understood.  Learning is a game that only some pupils get to play.  We have to get better at this stuff.  It matters too much.   

All of this rich information about the moment to moment successful or unsuccessful learning experiences of our pupils is helpful because it is actionable.  We can do something about engineering paired talk so that it fulfils the function we intended.  We can think about how to structure tasks so that they rehearse, consolidate and build knowledge so that more of our learners reach a sense of confidence in the material.  We can consider the expert-novice gap, especially in light of words we use.  We can build a culture of error in which an ordinary and interesting question is ‘What words did you not understand?’

I think an inescapable conclusion from this work is the importance of checking for understanding, formative assessment, AfL or responsive teaching.  The difference between ‘I taught it’ and ‘they learned it’. 

So, go and observe pupils’ lived experience in your school.  The work of PPG leadership is so much to do with seeing it.  And when you see it, you can do something about it.