Ravi Gurumurthy: Hello and welcome to The Mission. This is the podcast to listen to if you’re interested in mission driven innovation. My name is Ravi Gurumurthy and I’m the Chief Executive of Nesta, the innovation foundation. And on this podcast we’re going to be talking to practitioners, academics and policymakers about how to tackle society’s intractable challenges.

Today we’re talking to Becky Francis who’s the Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, a team that was set up in 2013, one of the nine What Works Centres in the UK and one that I think has had the biggest impact on transforming the evidence base in education and promoting rigorous research. Our mission today is how we break the link between growing up in poverty and disadvantage and good educational achievement. We’ll be discussing what drives the gap, how COVID has made it worse, but most of all what we can do about it.

Becky, welcome to The Mission.

Becky Francis: Thanks Ravi.

RG: So first Becky, before we dive into the detail of the issue at hand, can you just say a little bit about yourself and what’s driven your own personal educational research interest and now your role and purpose at EEF?

BF: Thanks, Ravi. I’ve come from a research background, balancing a sort of portfolio career, primarily academic, but also having worked in various think tanks, because I’ve been very keen to see the impact of research, driven always in my own research in a focus on social inequality in education, starting my career with a focus on gender inequality but then quickly broadening out to ethnicity and socio-economic background, and really wanting to see the impact of that research influencing policy and practice. And so from my point of view I couldn’t be in a better place and I feel very privileged to be leading the Education Endowment Foundation, which as you’ve said, is focussed on addressing that current attainment gap for educational attainment in relation to social background, and that’s something that I feel very passionately about.

RG: So let’s just talk about the problem that we’re trying to grapple with at the moment. First of all, can you try and give us a sense of the degree to which children from a poor background now go on to achieve less either at five or 11 or 16 or later in life, and also, you know, what have been the trends? I know things in some ways have been getting better, but COVID is set to potentially reverse that, so can you just give a bit of a sense of how things are changing?

BF: Yeah. So social background in terms of, you know, whether you want to look at it from a social class angle or an economic wealth angle, we have a particularly strong relationship in the UK between family wealth and educational outcomes, and that is the strongest predictor of educational outcomes in the UK context. So it’s really fundamental and it’s really long standing as well. In the last decade of course there’s been a very strong policy focus on this, both driven by an interest in social mobility and the present social immobility that we see in the UK, and a drive towards social justice and equalising life chances. And through a range of efforts, notably from the school teaching profession and policies like the pupil premium, we have seen a slight narrowing of the gap, showing particularly in primary education over the last decade as a whole. But EPI research is showing that in the last couple of years that unfortunately is tailing off and their analysis is highlighting the particular challenge with the most disadvantaged young people in the UK, those persistently categorised as free school meals kids rather than, and the broader group that may fluctuate in and out of free school meals over a six-year period, those we would count as ‘ever FSM’ as a technical category. And so the real challenge, I guess, around child poverty, persistent disadvantage and how to address educational attainment for the hardest to reach young people.

RG: You’ve done some research recently about how potentially COVID could open up an even bigger gap. Can you just tell us what are the headline findings from that and how d’you even work that out? How can you project the kind of gap that will open up as a result of the school closures?

BF: Yeah, unfortunately, when I talk about that slight narrowing that we’ve seen over the last decade, our analysis of the potential gap resulting from the lockdown of schooling during the pandemic is that we will see at least a reversal of that narrowing and unfortunately our analysis suggests that the gap at primary could widen by up to 75%. Now our early analysis was based on the literature around summer learning loss, but also other forms of school closure and learning loss around absence and school closure due to disasters: flooding and so on. It’s the literature on summer learning loss that’s the strongest and of course you could rightly say that the COVID lockdown is very different circumstance, it’s different of course partly because most kids were accessing some kind of learning over the period. But here is exactly where we would expect of course that gap to be exacerbated because we know that disadvantaged young people were less likely to be able to access, you know, they were less likely to have broadband support, access to devices and then less likely to be spending time and have resources in the home that will enable their learning compared to their more advantaged peers. So these hypotheses have been very much supported now by the polling of organisations like the Sutton Trust, the IFS, EPI and academics like UCL and so forth. And those hypotheses have been borne out, we have the evidence on the lack of access to devices among particularly disadvantaged families and these other issues which of course, sure enough, are showing that some families, typically more affluent families, have engaged better and more effectively with remote learning during the period. So really profound impacts on that inequality and the scale of the gap as schools reopen this term and we at the EEF have been very keen to find ways to support schools and in turn support kids as they return to their education.

RG: It’s interesting. When I’ve spoken to local authority chief executives and others in the health service, for instance, a lot of them have talked about how innovative frontline practitioners have been, for instance, triaging really difficult children’s social care cases during COVID. But the general story on education has been a bit more pessimistic and people have basically criticised schools for failing to open and provide enough services during the lockdown. I’m interested on your reflections on, you know, whether you think that’s true, whether that’s a fair assessment, but also what are the outliers? Are there really good examples of people bucking the trend and what can we learn from those who have?

BF: Yeah, I mean on the one hand I think the sector and school leaders and teachers particularly have been incredibly responsive. I mean it’s been a Herculean task with a rollercoaster of challenges and continuing challenges along the way, even now the logistics as we’re seeing sort of partial lockdowns and so forth continue and they’re really profound. So from that point of view I think teachers and school leaders have done an amazing job and it’s really important to recognise that and to congratulate them as well. But clearly, the diversity and provision during lockdown, and indeed some of the crises that have happened in the meantime, whether that’s exams and so forth or others, indicate a lack of preparedness around sort of contingency planning and so forth in the event of a pandemic. I think that there have been, you know, things are easy to say retrospectively, and there’s been a real challenge when we think about organisations like the What Works Centres, like the Education Endowment Foundation and so forth, there is of course a lack of evidence on the logistical elements about how to provide education effectively within a pandemic circumstance, including for example, there was relatively scant evidence on effective remote learning practices, and that’s something that we have taken at least an early step to address with a rapid evidence review on remote learning, and that’s a guidance report we’ve released in the interim, but there is so much more to do there in terms of practical support for schools. Of course UK schools weren’t particularly advanced as a sector with digital provision compared to some other countries, or in terms of sort of comprehensive provision in homes in terms of broadband and devices and so forth. And we know that there have been challenges there with the, you know, great efforts to supply both schools and families, but that has been a difficult job for government and still some issues outstanding. And I think that although clearly schools have responded very quickly, and immediately actually, in the face of lockdown, actually there’s been much less clear direction in terms of shared learning on good practice with remote learning that will help equalise these offers in what has clearly been sort of quite patchy provision in many cases over the duration. We’re already seeing a kind of stereotypical picture emerging with this notion that, you know, independent schools are able to provide synchronous digital provision and state schools have, you know, apparently typically struggled to realise that kind of independent or bespoke outreach. Now, I think that that dichotomy is overstated, but nevertheless I think there’s much more that we can do to support remote learning and that will require a collective effort. So I think we need to be much more forward thinking and to be ensuring the contingency planning going forward.

RG: And we’ll get into some of the kind of solutions that you’re working on, including the National Tutoring Programme, a bit later, but before we do can we just understand a little bit more about the problem and when to intervene. Because I think a big debate, when you’re thinking about how to equalise life chances, is whether to intervene in the very earliest years or in primary school or secondary school, and there’s been lots of debate and controversy over this. There was the famous James Heckman Curve that I think was published in 2006 in the ‘Science’ journal, which was making a strong case for very early investment, which has now I think been challenged quite a lot. How do you think about this question about when is best to intervene? Do you think there are very differential returns depending on the age of the child?

BF: Yeah, it’s a great question and it certainly does seem to be the case, even from the EEF’s own RCT research, that we see the biggest effects and the most consistent effects with some of our early primary interventions, typically around particularly literacy and reading and writing. So yeah, I think the evidence is pretty clear on the necessity of early intervention, and indeed the effectiveness there, so in relation to the returns as you’re saying. And of course that’s what drove the stronger funding for pupil premium in the primary years, and I think that that’s well supported. Equally of course, we know that in the present system and as kids progressed through their schooling, you know, many can fall through the cracks at different times and that need for bespoke support and support in different ways, even at later stages of young people’s lives remains vital, I think. You know, we can’t write young people off simply because, you know, they’ve gone beyond primary school. So I think a careful balance, but definitely a weighting towards primary in the early years is sensible.

RG: And I guess the other question that obviously crops up in this question about how to narrow gaps is what difference can school make versus family background or peer influences or other factors in the sort of thought experiment whereby every single school in the country was carefully imbibing EEF research and was doing all the practices that you think are evidence based, how much actual difference could that make to the ultimate outcome?

BF: Well, that’s a brilliant research question to test isn’t it? Nevertheless, of course we can say various things about this. On the one hand, clearly schools exist within society rather than outside it and the challenges that kids bring to school, the scale of the gap that they exhibit even as they start their early years provision and move into primary school is very well evidenced. So to expect schools to be the one force compensating, whether it’s child poverty or kind of multiple issues about the lesser resources that disadvantaged young people bring to their educational situations, we clearly can’t expect schools alone to be remediating those issues. However, it’s also important to remind that the gap grows rather than narrows as kids move through schooling. You know, the gap in secondary, in lower secondary is wider than in primary and the gap in upper secondary is even larger. So quite counter to narrowing and compensating, at the moment, you know, that gap widens as kids go through their school lives. So there is lots that schools can do and of course again, the success of some of our most successful schools, multi-academy trusts and local authorities in bucking those trends is really profound and gives us illustration of what can be achieved across the system.

RG: And when you look at the research that EEF’s done over the last seven years are there particular areas that you think were counter-intuitive or surprising to the profession?

BF: Yeah, we have a couple of examples here. One of course was the findings around teaching assistants where the initial research suggested that the use of teaching assistants with disadvantaged pupils might actually not be so productive and even lead to negative impacts on attainment, whereas I think obviously the expectation more broadly across the profession was that this was a strongly supportive element. Since those initial findings the EEF has done a lot of work and further trialling showing that of course, used well and with, you know, expert teaching assistants, this can actually be really productive and supportive to disadvantaged learners. But the principles about teaching assistants supporting the classroom teacher and particularly avoiding scenarios where the most hard to reach kids or groups of lower attaining pupils are left for support simply from the teaching assistant were strongly warned against. Again and again the findings from EEF research, and indeed in the broader international literature, are that teaching quality is what makes the biggest difference in relation to learning gain and that that’s particularly true for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. So that focus on support for high quality professional practice, high quality professional development and so forth is what we try to foreground systematically.

RG: And so we have a sense of what potentially can drive teaching quality improvements? I know some of the literature more probably from an international developing world context and there’s some quite interesting experiments, for instance, from Indonesia that show that raising pay substantially doesn’t necessarily make the difference to learning outcomes that you might imagine. So, do we have a sense, for instance, about what continuous professional development or types of teacher training intervention can make the biggest difference?

BF: Yeah, and one of the things that we’re doing at the moment is beginning a systematic review of continuing professional development and what is effective for teachers here, because although there’s a very large-scale literature behind this question, there has been much less experimental work and so still a lot of contestation around what exemplary CPD and most effective CPD looks like, and that’s something that we would really like to make a contribution to. Of course, experience makes a difference and one of my colleagues has just released a blog today looking at the impact of professional life course. There was previously a strong view in the research that it’s really the first five years of a teacher’s profession or career where the biggest professional gains in terms of quality pedagogic practice are made, but actually a new study in the United States shows that there is further gain across a teacher’s career, albeit it may not be so sharp as in the initial years of practice. So that’s really encouraging as well, that teachers do continue to improve as they continue through their careers, and of course great quality CPD will support that further. And then of course, Ravi, there’s the issue about recruitment into the profession and being selective rather than fully, you know, most widely inclusive. And of course we’re moving rapidly from a long period where teacher recruitment has been a real struggle, both into schools themselves, but also into initial teacher training, and of course the economic climate has seen a recent reversal of that, enabling a greater selectivity. We can see from cases such as Finland that this really can make a difference in relation to being able to both select teachers into the profession and give them then high quality support once they arrive, but also in some of those long-standing challenging areas such as maths and physics, and being able to recruit in sufficient numbers.

RG: So what exactly did Finland do that we can draw on?

BF: So Finland are in a very privileged position where they are able to select, I think I’m right to remember, that there are eight applicants for every teacher training place in Finland and of course they also train teachers to Masters level. So it’s a highly desirable profession with over-supply into teacher training which means that they can be very selective. I just want to make a remark as well about supporting teachers in their early careers, because of course we also know that in the UK case there’s high dropout and retention has been an issue. And one of the pieces of work at the EEF that I feel very proud of has been our support for the early careers framework that the government are providing to entitle new teachers and NQTs to particular levels and modes of CPD in the early years to make sure that they have that high quality support. As we see of course in other great professions. So I think both in terms of supporting teaching quality and that ongoing important professionalisation, this is a really strong move and I’m very glad that we’ve played a part in that.

RG: And when you look across the evidence base are there areas where you think the evidence is strong, but we need innovation in how we apply that, scale it, and that’s something that we need to focus on? Or areas where you think there’s an evidence gap and we actually need to figure out more in terms of intervention design?

BF: Yeah, it’s a great question and I pause because there are unfortunately so many remaining gaps. For example, we seem to know much more about literacy than we do numeracy support. We know more, as I’ve said, about effective support in the early years and primary than we do later on in education, and there is still a challenge, I think, to discriminate between what is effective for all pupils and what is effective particularly for disadvantaged young people, because that often isn’t a measure that is specifically focussed on in the broader literature. So there’s a lot of work to do in regard to supplying the evidence. This being said, there are some really strong findings and ways that we can support schools, whether that’s in effectively using their pupil premium spending to support disadvantaged young people, or indeed, in the situation that we face now with addressing the gap that will have materialised even further through the COVID crisis. And one of those exemplars is around small group and one-to-one tuition, if I can say a few words about that. Because the evidence there is very strongly supportive that tuition, high quality tuition it must be said, is a productive way to support young people’s learning and of course it offers that bespoke support that I think will be particularly necessary post the pandemic to be able to focus for different individual young people or small groups of pupils around the learning loss and the gaps that will have resulted from the months of remote learning. So we’re really glad to have been able to supply that evidence to the sector and to government and now to see that being taken very seriously by government in relation to the COVID catch-up funding that’s been announced and our role in the provision of the national tutoring programme that has been launched and will be supporting schools and young people from the second part of this term.

RG: And I think that’s a really good example of how a rapid analysis and good evidence that’s been built up over some years was used to inform policy in a really effective and quick way, and that’s a huge testimony to your own personal leadership on the matter. Can I just ask something about the actual evidence itself, so when you say it can have an effect, so catch-up tuition can have an effect, can you give any sense of scale? Because I think many people when they see effect sizes, it’s quite hard to translate that into what that means for the child who’s maybe had a few months out of education.

BF: Yeah. So one-to-one tuition is shown in our Education Endowment Foundation toolkit, which people can access online, that one-to-one tuition makes five months’ progress difference in terms of that learning support. So that’s really strong support for catch-up there. And small group tuition is slightly less impactful, but nevertheless significant, showing an effect size of three months’ progress. And the evidence broadly is that the higher the quality of the provision in terms of tutor expertise, the greater the impact, and also that the smaller the tuition group, again, the greater the impact. It seems that the balance comes about group size of about five or six kids where the effect size tails off dramatically. But of course, there’s the issue about balancing with cost, as usual. The other key finding is that high quality tuition needs to involve teachers. Of course there need to be those diagnostics. Classroom teachers are best placed to instruct and identify where young people will most benefit from tuition and how that can be approached. So a really key feature of the National Tuition Programme is that working in partnership with schools and classroom teachers in supporting young people.

RG: And one aspect that Nesta’s actually working with you on is the online tuition aspect. And I just want to ask you what problem do you think online tuition potentially solves? Is it simply about being able to match tutors wherever they are to pupils wherever they are, or does it have other benefits?

BF: Yeah. I think it’s really important in the current circumstances, Ravi, and it’s been fantastic that we’ve been able to engage what’s a very innovative programme, I think, because there’s, as you know, very little evidence around remote tuition provision, as I’ve already said, you know, there’s generally a lack of evidence, experimental evidence on remote learning. So it’s great that we’re able to test that, because of course, as part of the National Tuition Programme and the scale-up here, that remote provision will be very necessary for two key reasons, I guess. One is the danger, whether it’s of further local lockdowns or even another national lockdown, in which case that support would need to be remote. But secondly it addresses the potential of geographic gaps, because we seem to have issues about potential supply and demand, the tuition market and established tuition providers are much more developed in some areas of the country than others. And of course remote provision means that potentially if there’s an excess capacity in some areas and insufficient capacity in others, that there will be able to be a bit of sharing with tutors reaching young people in other parts of the country where necessary. So I think that that’s a real opportunity going forward.

RG: And do you have a sense of the capacity of the tutoring market and actually how many people could actually be reached in that context, and also just how affordable it would be?

BF: Some of this is yet to be tested. It does seem that there are many affordable tuition offers and that that doesn’t necessarily need to compromise quality. So as a promising way to spend pupil premium funding, this seems to be a really good one and as I’ve said, strongly evidence based. In terms of the issues about capacity and the join-up between supply and demand, some of this is yet to be tested. We’re currently running the recruitment round for high quality tuition providers and the appetite looks really encouragingly strong, but of course the proof will be in the pie in terms of, you know, the assessment process that we’ll be applying to that. We’ve also got plans to be able to support further scale-up and join-up to be able to address some of those kind of geographic capacity issues, because we’ve anticipated some of those challenges. But overall I think that there is, you know, clearly our modelling shows that we’ve reason to be optimistic about both the supply and the demand. I’m really hopeful about the idea that we’ll be able to show success, which might then lead to further support in outer years because something that’s becoming, you know, painfully obvious, is that there won’t be any sticking plaster solution to the effects of the COVID crisis in terms of educational impact, you know, this is going to be a very long haul and we’re going to need support in the system for a long time and that’s going to need to be collaborative.

RG: And you mentioned earlier, Becky, that the evidence, particularly on the online tutoring side, is pretty weak. Do you see the opportunity to build rigorous evidence during this National Tutoring Programme rollout or is it going to be challenging given the timescales involved?

BF: We certainly do anticipate being able to provide and build the evidence and I guess that’s sort of fundamental to our model and our mission. That being said, of course logistically things are incredibly challenging in terms of timeframe and so forth, and also of course we need to be very, very careful about over-burdening schools at the present time, you know, given the challenges that they’re presently facing. So that’s a careful balance and a bit of a logistical challenge as well. So I guess that our evaluation processes through the rollout of the National Tuition Programme are perhaps if I can couch them as a little bit more rough and ready than we would typically expect, so that of course in terms of the sort of baseline and outcome measures, they’re more indicative as well, but we feel that we’re going to have a great deal of really important data that we’ll be able to feed in to the wider literature here and that building of the evidence, as I say, is a fundamental both opportunity and, but also really important to be able to further then build the offer as it develops.

RG: One of the things that I think EEF does incredibly well is distils evidence into really readable compelling summaries that include, for instance, how many months you might lose in terms of learning, what the cost effectiveness is, and it’s very accessible information. But it’s obviously incredibly difficult to still get evidence translating into action and get people to actually consume and use that evidence and shift practice. I know from our previous conversations it’s something that interests you a lot about how you focus on translating the great evidence you’ve got into behaviour change. What’s your thinking on this now and how much effort is EEF going to be placing into that?

BF: Yeah, you’re absolutely right Ravi, it’s a key challenge I think for all of us in the What Works Centres and really trying to learn around behaviour change is fundamental to this as well. Also, thinking about implementation, it’s certainly in the school setting how interventions and good practice is implemented is shown to be at least as important as the actual intervention itself. So very mindful of all of that and one of my sort of driving objectives is to improve even further the innovations in the way that we can reach not just the usual schools that are engaged and the usual professionals who are engaged with our work already conducting good practice and so forth, and really engaged with research, but rather the harder to reach schools and teachers. And a real issue, I think, with a profession that of course is vocationally motivated, you know, people wanting to change lives, often messages that would reach hearts as well as minds, really important, and I think that the EEF has been very good at the minds-focussed messaging but not always so much focussed on the hearts and the combination of those two I think is particularly impactful. So I think to quickly summarise, I mean we have five ways that we try to ensure impact. There’s our resources, as I say, I think our guidance reports are becoming increasingly engaging and we have good feedback on those, but I’m sure there’s more that can be done in relation to the ways that people can access our work and findings, and those resources of course include the toolkit, as you’ve mentioned. Then there’s our policy work, because in terms of reach, of course a national policy, you know, you can’t be more impactful from that. And I’ve talked a little bit about our work supporting the early careers framework, we’re really keen to continue to support the government and its programme on support in teaching quality and we’ll be doing that, but also those wide-scale policy evaluations and the feed-in in the way that we’ve done, for example with tuition support and so forth. Then there’s, very importantly, our regional schools network. We have 40 research schools who are working in a kind of hubs and spokes model regionally doing that link-up work with local schools networks and providing CPD and support with resources, enabling that work around high quality implementation of our research recommendations. So that’s absolutely fundamental. And the Research Schools Network is also important, Ravi, in informing our work because there’s always a risk that we can become esoteric, we can become removed from practice and the needs of teachers. So our Research Schools Network gives us a brilliant forum to feed back and drive some of our thinking about what research questions are most challenging to teachers. And we’ve launched a research programme titled Teacher Choices that seeks to address precisely those questions. And then of course finally, we have our support to scale, whether that’s supporting scale-up of particular interventions like just for example, the Nuffield Early Language Intervention, which is now supporting work in the early years, or stepping in to be able to kind of put our money where our mouth is, as it were, in regard to supporting evidence-led approaches in the system such as our work with the National Tutoring Programme. So I guess those are the five key ways that we’re seeking to address this, but always looking for more innovation and of course organisations like Nesta are absolutely key to supporting us with that as well.

RG: I guess the other question that I sometimes wonder about when I look at all the fantastic work you do is whether you feel ever constrained by just focussing on, in effect, school and education, because if you think about what drives some of these outcomes, I’m assuming that family and parenting has a huge impact. Is that something that you conduct research in or want to get involved in?

BF: Yeah, so principles first. Clearly, as I’ve said, schools don’t operate in isolation from the rest of society, so from that point of view, perhaps it might be seen as frustrating that we don’t work more broadly across different social institutions. Likewise we might also point out that socio-economic inequality is by no means the only inequality. We know about the importance of intersectionality and those other issues of identity and social variables, whether it’s race, gender, sexuality, religion and so forth, that these interact and are really important in young people’s outcomes. This being said, perhaps exactly for those reasons, I think it’s very helpful organisationally that we do have a very specific mission and remit to focus on schooling, although I say schooling, you know, that’s three to 18, so that does take in both the early years and elements of continuing and further education too. But that we’re focussed on education and that we are focussed on socio-economic inequality, but of course we as an organisation, and I personally am very keen to be mindful of those other factors and to work with other organisations, whether it’s other What Works Centres or whether it’s other charities and educational bodies focussed on these other issues to make sure that we are not, you know, missing key issues in the work that we do. Coming back to the issue about family engagement in education, Ravi, which was another element of your question, of course that engagement with families who often have had negative experiences themselves with the education system, who feel disenfranchised, who haven’t been high achievers and so forth, who would typify the parents of many of the young people that we’re attempting to impact, that liaison has been shown in research to be incredibly important and effective where it’s done well, but also incredibly hard to achieve, partly for the reasons that I’ve mentioned. So really, that continues to be another sort of golden chalice, many of the interventions in this area have been shown to be ineffective but effective, sympathetic and engaging interaction with families of disadvantaged pupils is shown to be very important, so that’s another area where we’d like to do further work.

RG: And is there stuff that we can learn from how certain black and minority ethnic pupils on free school meals are doing incredibly well? So I think I read a few years ago that Chinese children on free school meals are six times likely to achieve good GCSEs than their white counterparts. I think for Bangladeshis it was three times as likely as kids on free school meals. What can we learn from that variation and also the general progress that’s been seen on black and minority ethnic achievement in the last ten, 15 years?

BF: Yeah, it’s really interesting the different identity variables and then different outcomes for different BME groups within the education system. And this is something that I’ve been involved academically in tracking for a long time. I have particular expertise around the case of the British Chinese. I guess one of the things that we need to be mindful of when we talk about Chinese attainment in the British education system is that they are a tiny group in relation to some other BME groups and they have a particular diasporic experience as well with around a third located in London and then based on the trajectory through the catering industry, which is how migration was formed back in the fifties and sixties, many British Chinese live in sort of relative ethnic isolation in, for example, rural villages across the country. So they are quite a specific case. Nevertheless, you know, there are a range of interesting issues that we as a research team showed to support their education, including very high aspirations, particular practices around, for example, complementary schooling supporting broader educations outcomes and so forth. So a very interesting minority ethnic case. Overall, it’s both encouraging to see that some BME groups have made real attainment gains over the last 20 years, you mentioned Bangladeshi heritage young people, for example. But other areas of frustration, including Caribbean heritage young people and particularly black boys, and some disturbing findings in the literature around unconscious bias, for example, in entry to exam tiers, placements in set groups and ability streams and so forth. So again, I think in some ways this conversation is really highlighting the importance of intersectionality, the important work that is being done by some academics and some charities in focussing on these issues and that intersection between, in this case, ethnicity and social class background, but obviously we’ve also mentioned gender and so forth as well.

RG: Well Becky, I could carry on asking you a lot more questions. I just want to ask you one final one though, which is you started off on a fairly pessimistic note about how COVID is widening disparities quite severely, if you imagine us in 2030 and EEF has done even more amazing work, how ambitious do you think we should be in closing the attainment gap and what is the most sort of ambitious but realistic goal you think we could be actually striving for?

BF: We are largely a comprehensive system that impressively educates all young people on similar track to age 16 and that’s actually not all that common internationally, but is shown by the OECD’s analyses to be most effective in relation to social equity, this comprehensive approach to 16 with a shared curriculum. So there are some really encouraging things about our system, but this correlation and relationship that I’ve mentioned between family wealth and educational outcomes is going to be very hard to crack. And one of the key reasons for that, I think, is the patchiness, the notorious patchiness of the British education system where we have exemplars of absolutely best practice, but also areas where, whether it’s schools or young people, are really struggling. We need to work much more collaboratively and systematically, I think, to spread the best practice and support those locations and those schools where capacity is weakest. One of the ways that we can do that, as I’ve mentioned of course, is by supporting systemically high quality teaching and from that point of view I think the work on supporting teachers in the early part of their careers is terrifically important. In terms of eradicating the gap altogether, as I’ve said, you know, schools don’t stand in isolation from society and I’m not naïve enough to think that that could be achieved without other areas of social policy changing too, but there is, as I’ve said, a huge way that we can move forward to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and ensure that there is much better equality of opportunity than we see at present in our education system. So, again, to reiterate prior messages, what’s so important is that not only is this movement forward evidence based, and that’s where of course the Education Endowment Foundation has a really strong role, but also that it’s properly collaborative and in that sense we need to be not just a disseminating but also a listening organisation working with our other partners across the sector, and of course including Nesta, to really galvanise and ensure the greatest impact across the system.

RG: Becky Francis, thank you so much for joining us.

BF: Thanks Ravi.

RG: Cheers.

[ends]