Could do better: report hits out at education inequality
Disadvantage: response has 'treated symptons not causes'
Little progress has been made in tackling educational disadvantage among the less well-off, because the official response to the problem has tended to treat the symptoms rather than the causes, according to a new report.
It identifies wider inequality in society as the root cause and says the solution is to address the education system itself, rather than merely targeting the individuals who are "failing" within it.
Although there have been significant educational gains by those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, they are outpaced by the better-off who continue to "raise the bar" to protect their advantage, the report states.
It refers to how right wing style market forces operate in the Irish education system, with parents choosing where to send their children, which can lead to segregation.
The report calls for a radical new response, to include some form of centralised or regional applications and school place allocation system at primary and second-level to create a level playing pitch in terms of who goes where.
It says that parents could still "buy" their way out of such a public education system, but it would at least mean that the taxpayer was not facilitating and funding the promotion of inequalities.
Education is one of a number of subjects tackled in the Welfare Policy and Poverty report being launched today by the Combat Poverty Agency, and written by Roland Tormey of the Centre for Educational Disadvantage Research (CEDR) at the Mary Immaculate teacher training college, Limerick.
The publication marks the 20th anniversary of two milestones in the struggle to eradicate poverty and social exclusion -- the report of the Commission on Social Welfare and the establishment of the Combat Poverty Agency.
It draws on a range of previously published papers and says those from poor and working class backgrounds fare worst in the education system; despite 40 years of governmental attempts to address this, a strong association between poverty and low educational attainment persisted.
The report notes that while attainment levels and participation of working-class and poor young people in education have improved significantly, so too had the learning attainment of those from middle classes backgrounds.
The proportion of school leavers form backgrounds of unemployment who went on to further study rose from 12pc in 1999 to 26pc in 2004, but that compared with 69pc by those from professional backgrounds, 63pc from managerial/employer and over 50pc from farming.
This "ensures that whatever learning gains young people from poor backgrounds made, they continued to be outpaced by their more advantaged counterparts".
It pinpoints the crux of the problem: "As long as there are those who can mobilise their resources to do better than others, there must, by definition, be others who do worse than them.
"And, as long as the educational attainment of poor or working class pupils improves, the advantaged either raise the bar or seek to fund alternative routes to ensuring their advantage."
It states that targets set in relation to educational disadvantage have peen politically conservative, focused on setting minimum standards of attainment for the disadvantaged, while ignoring the role that the advantaged play in the creation and perpetuation of inequality in educational attainment and life chances.
Pupils from middle-class or professional backgrounds raised their own levels of attainment and participation as necessary in order to protect their competitive advantage, or found alternative routes of conferring advantage on themselves, such as the use of social networks.
What was needed was a "comparative measure" approach, which would seek to identify systematic differences between social groups in participation or attainment.
Addressing inequalities in the system should probably involve some move towards a centralised or regional applications and allocations system for primary and second-level education.
The report also resurrects the idea of regional education boards, proposed under former Labour Minister for Education Niamh Bhreathnach, to promote equality of education access at local level.
- Katherine Donnelly
