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Friday, July 12, 2013

Class, the class-room and inequality

Poverty places intelligent but poor boys are around two and a half years behind their rich, clever male classmates in reading, a study has found. Among clever girls, the reading gap between those from the richest and poorest homes was two years and four months.

The report, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, reveals that high-achieving boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to perform poorly on international tests. The study analysed the 2009 scores of 15-year-olds taking part in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) international Pisa reading tests.

It found that bright English boys from the poorest families lagged 30 months behind their high-achieving male classmates from the richest backgrounds. This gap was bigger in England than in every other developed nation apart from Scotland. In countries such as Canada, Denmark, Germany and Finland, the gap was 15 months or less, the study found.

The researchers also looked at the gap in reading skills between children of all abilities. The findings showed that in general, the poorest teenagers in England lagged two years and four months behind their richest classmates in reading. This put England 23rd out of 32 countries who took part in the tests, ahead of countries including the USA and France, but behind others including Norway, Chile and Slovenia.

For capitalists, as Sir Peter Lampl, Sutton Trust chairman, explains the gap in boys' achievement was a "worrying issue". "This matters for two important reasons," he said. "First, it is clearly economically inefficient not to tap into talent wherever it exists. "By not stretching our most able students from all backgrounds, we are not only failing them, we are reducing our ability to compete globally.

For workers, "such under-achievement perpetuates those inequalities which make it so hard for bright children to move up in society."


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