Developing a ‘poverty strategy’
Child poverty is a key issue for us as educators. We see it in the media but we also see it at our school gates and in our classrooms. If you work in school leadership and education then the chances are you’ll have frontline expertise at the heart of the community that gives you knowledge and authority to shout about child poverty and try to influence national strategies that may reduce it long term – I’d encourage you to do that as much as you can but this post isn’t about that. It’s about finding accessible strategies for change that work on a local level within the restrictions of limited time and budgets. I had two decades of school leadership experience in areas of high deprivation so I understand the restrictions school leaders face in resources and time, I’ve been there – this post is about what we can do practically, as a school leader, a governor, a teacher in your setting with your limited time and resources to help respond to the levels of poverty we see in the communities we serve.
I think it is a big enough issue with big enough influence on the outcomes in our school communities that we should be strategic in how we deal with it. That we should think through carefully a strategy to support our children in poverty. If you’ve been working in schools over the last decade or so and through the austerity years and post-covid you’ll have seen how schools have become the frontline workers in terms of social support for many families. We are, in many cases, the only professionals in regular and close contact with needy families, and in many cases the only professionals families trust and their first port of call when they need help. We are needing to reach and support in many more ways than we used to.
So, these are the statistics. The most recent data from the Child Poverty Action Group puts the number of children living in poverty in the UK at 4.5 million. 2.5 million of these access free school meals. You’ll notice that these numbers aren’t the same and therefore there must be some, a significant number of children living in poverty and not accessing free school meals. Note that your strategies need to be wider than the pupil premium or free school meals labels.
More extreme than mere poverty, the Food Foundation tell us that 20% of households with children are in food poverty and Joseph Rowntree Trust tell us that 1 million children are destitute in the UK, that’s lacking necessities like clothing, heating, shelter or food. This number is triple that from 2017.
Disadvantaged pupils are 19.2 months behind their peers. The NEU have calculated that 9 out of every 30 children in your average classroom are living in poverty, that number will be as high as 20/30 in some areas of high deprivation. I could also have shared statistics about the increasing levels of food bank use, families living in temporary accommodation being at a record high and lots of other markers which tell us the current situation is increasingly difficult for the families we work with.
It's a pretty depressing situation if we just look at the figures. The truth is though, as educators we can bring hope. Development and aid charities talk about three stages to poverty support, relief – where we meet an immediate crisis point need – the foodbank is an example, then rehabilitation where we help people get back to where they were before the crisis and then development where we empower those we’ve helped to move past their original situation. We know that a good education is life-changing, that it gives children the power to move on from a situation of poverty to move past their original situation and develop. If we get our job right and young people succeed in school then they’ll have the power to never be in poverty again.
We also know that, in line with Maslow’s hierarchy, unless we address the basic needs children face, unless we make sure our pupils have eaten, slept, are sheltered and feel safe their brains will struggle to move to the higher levels of learning. You can have all the cognitive science, retrieval practice and Rosenshine’s principles you like but without this foundation our pupils will find it much harder to reach their potential. We have a chance to shift children in poverty to development and a long term chance to get out of poverty in a way a foodbank or homeless shelter can’t but to get to that we also need to address some of those relief needs. Let me make this clear at this point, I’m not dismissing the need for excellent classroom practice, it is key. I’m not saying a good equitable curriculum isn’t vital. We need all the ammunition we can get to close the gap and this bottom layer is needed for the excellence at the top to reach its potential.
So, how practically, can we, with stretched resources and time go about addressing poverty and building a strategy for it in our settings? I want to share some simple steps I think are doable by everyone, accessible without large budget outlay and yet can still have an impact on some of those key foundations that support strong learning.
1) Understand the barriers
2) Audit your practice
3) Train your staff
4) Develop support
The first part of developing your poverty strategy is to understand the barriers your young people and their families face.
In your setting – what barriers do the ‘disadvantaged’ pupils and their families face?
How do you know? And I mean – how do you actually know, we can make presumptions or we can hear information from other staff but what have we actually checked? What hard data underpins our understanding?
I regularly work with schools and hear PP leads talk about the barriers in their context, I’ve found that the barriers they quote are similar, often quite generalising stereotypes about pupils from a different socio-economic group – quotes like ‘we’ve identified the barriers as a poverty of parenting’ or ‘it’s mainly low aspirations’ or ‘parents just aren’t bothered’ even ‘they never eat together as a family’ or ‘the TV is always on’.
Without really knowing the barriers our young people face and being sure of them we can’t bring in effective strategies to address them. That makes sense I’m sure. The majority of teachers come from a background without, fortunately, a lived experience of poverty and most come from a comfortable middle-class background. We need to work hard to understand the barriers our pupils come with.
Here’s an example: ‘Poor parental aspirations’ is a regular barrier I hear but I’m not convinced. The Flaxmere project was a New Zealand initiative that looked to improve education and community engagement their research found that two thirds of their parents had aspirations for degrees or diploma for their children at the beginning of primary school. By the end of primary their aspirations were mainly around their children ’getting a job’. Yes, that is research from another country and situation but it is interesting and significant enough for me to raise questions about my context - For me that throws up all sorts of questions and challenges - Is aspiration really the barrier? Do parents of disadvantaged pupils actually lack aspiration? Is it something we do as educators? At least – that we need to look further.
Every context we see is different, I visit plenty of schools, even those working in the same towns and cities, even those at different ends of the same roads have very different contexts and cohorts. So how do we go about discovering or confirming the barriers our young disadvantaged people face?
Here’s a few ways I think are helpful in understanding those barriers.
Firstly, we can look at the socio-economic data available. For every postcode across the country there is a wealth of information, mainly from the most recent census but also from more recent information like crime figures. We can see how many people live in temporary housing, have a disabled member of their household or even how likely it is for people to share a bedroom or how many households own a car. It is possible to map where your disadvantaged students live, the deprivation for each postcode and a whole host of other information.
It’s important that this isn’t just information for informations sake. Not just for the introduction part of your SEF – almost put to demonstrate how hard we need to work compared with others - It needs to be focussed on what this means for barriers for our families and students.
The key is the questions that this data pushes you to ask:
Are there students living in highly deprived postcodes who don’t claim FSM’s?
Are there areas of the catchment where students live in temporary housing? How does this affect security, ability to study, sleep?
Is health an area of high deprivation – how can we bring greater contact with the school nurse or local health services for students and families?
Do our families have low car ownership – how does this affect attendance to parents evenings and extra-curricular events? Can we make this easier?
What are the prevalent crimes in the catchment area does the PSHE and safeguarding curriculum link to the highest risks for your area?
The socio-economic data gives a starting point and can throw up some interesting questions for leadership teams to discuss. The most important stage probably comes next – intentionally get pupil and parent voice around barriers. Don’t rely on the obvious parents and the engaged parents. Listen to those who are disengaged, who you have to visit at home to speak to, those who your pastoral and safeguarding teams regularly have to engage with. Set up parent events where you listen more than you speak – I’ve thought a lot about how I could have done things better in my school leadership – I don’t remember one event in 20 years of school leadership where parents came and we, the school listened more than we spoke – not even close.
Send questionnaires. Be strategic about getting information, use every tool you have to really try to understand your families experiences. These have thrown up some interesting things. One school realised that their cashless system was causing problems for parents working in the cash economy whose bank accounts were often in arrears. These parents couldn’t pay for anything in school for their children.
Another example was enabling FSM pupils to access their food at breaktime rather than have to wait till a late lunch spot. Their peers ate at break, the FSM children were really hungry by lunch but also having to take the choice to eat and miss out on social time or go hungry and stay with friends.
Thirdly, interrogate your in school data. You’ll also have clues to barriers in your data. Progress data will flag up bigger gaps in some subjects than others, attendance and behavioural data will show other barriers. One interesting piece of analysis comes from mapping attendance geographically and looking at it in terms of your PP maps. Are there particular areas that struggle with attendance? Is there a reason for this – is transport poor? Could you put the school minibus on a run for a pick up in these areas?
Finally, speak to staff - Speak to your safeguarding team. Safeguarding teams are often great at working in a silo, brilliantly protecting others from carrying the weight of what they are supporting pupils with. At the same time that intelligence around the barriers families are facing is gold dust. I remember moving from leading progress to taking on safeguarding when our DSL was ill. This probably evidences my stupidity but until I became DSL I hadn’t properly realised that those students who were the ones I was struggling to make academic progress with were also those with a history of safeguarding concerns. No one had really told me enough for me to link them up.
There are also often staff members who live in the local community, sometimes dinner staff or cleaners or support staff but valuable people to speak to so you can understand the local issues and dynamics. We have to acknowledge that most teachers are coming from a middle class background and travel in from elsewhere to our schools. We can’t presume to understand what it is like to live in our catchment areas unless we really listen and investigate.
There are other ways you can build this understanding too – home visits, tracking and shadowing pupils, spending time visiting the catchment area – all help us understand and build the intelligence picture to make sure our responses actually reduce the barriers that exist not the ones we think do. Unless our responses to barriers come from a place of secure understanding we could be putting our effort and resources into entirely the wrong area.
The next part of building our strategy and response is to look at what we do in school through the lens of poverty. Not just classroom and subject practice but how our processes and practices affect you if you’re living in poverty.
If you haven’t seen the tools and resources available through Poverty Proofing UK then take a look. It helps support you to look at your school year and where the costs come for families. It’s helpful to map them – what do you ask for contributions to school events, is there an expectation to buy outfits for world book day or red jumpers for comic relief. Do you have non-uniform days? Is there a drop in attendance across any of these days? Do you know how much it costs a family to provide uniform and equipment at the beginning of the year?
We provided everyone of our families with a rucksack and school equipment. We had a different colour rucksack for each year group. Previous to that we had a large group of students who would never bring a bag to school and never have equipment. It helped us in managing school routines and quickly identifying students on duty – orange bags were year 9 for example. It also made sure no one was struggling for bags and equipment. Suprisingly, maybe, it worked more smoothly than we expected.
It isn’t just financial implications to checking practice and process though. For example, how does your behaviour policy relate to a child in poverty?
If your clothing is kept in a bin bag on the floor of your temporary accomodation, if you’ve only got one shirt or, as my son regularly does, you’ve left an item of PE kit at school and you can’t afford spares – how will the school behaviour policy feel to you?
Will you stay at home rather than come in for isolation or detentions? Will you face the wrath of 5 separate teachers across the day because you don’t have a green pen? Will you be forced to wear a smelly unwashed spare football kit two sizes too small some PE teacher has pulled out of a bin to make sure you learn not to forget it again?
What are your free school meals like? – again, I’ve got two teenage boys, I know what they and their friends need to eat – I shop for the week, friends come round and the fridge is nearly empty – I’m shopping again! I’ve also seen free school meals that are a slice of pizza and a Radnor splash – not enough to keep the smallest year 7 going. How does your school food measure up if you’ve not eaten the rest of the day?
Think through this scenario:
‘When he gets up there is no food in the fridge for breakfast.
He searches through the clothes on the floor for his uniform, it is dirty, but he only owns one shirt.
His trainers are broken so he pulls his PE kit into his bag without them.
His green pen went missing yesterday but he only owned one.
He has no money for bus fare, so he walks the couple of miles to school hoping he won’t be late.’
What would his experience be like that day at your school?
We’ve got an audit of practice you can have to use through your school. You can download it here.
By the time you’ve explored the barriers and audited your practice you should begin to be developing ideas of ways and strategies to reduce those barriers and help your students. The next step is to prepare your staff.
Staff CPD is a great lever for change but doesn’t often concentrate on poverty – there are a few areas I think are key in relation to reducing the barriers of poverty.
1) Poverty awareness
If I can put it bluntly – most teachers are working with students who have a really different life experience to their own, most teachers are middle class and have grown up in relative affluence. There are teachers who grew up on deprived council estates and I actually met one who had previously served time in prison last week but this is the exception rather than the norm. It feels uncomfortable to say it but the cultures of class are different – we band the word ‘poverty’ around, we understand the principles but don’t really understand or appreciate the context our young people are growing up in. I think that without lived experience it is always going to be hard to fully understand but we can help our staff understand more. Do you encourage all staff to take on a home visit? Do you take new staff on a tour of the catchment area during their induction? Do you share stories of some of the backgrounds and home situations of your pupils with staff?
How do you feel when that pupil puts his head on the desk again, just at the key part of the lesson, the bit you spent ages planning last night, the key feedback that will directly impact them in the test tomorrow, the test you know will help them improve their life-chances.
Now how do you feel if you know that it could be the fact that that the students family are all sharing a bedsit or they couldn’t sleep after going to bed hungry the night before.
If we are to communicate clearly and support our most disadvantaged students we need to at least try and understand their experience.
My second area of important CPD is unconscious bias
There is a lot of strong research that talks about unconscious bias for teachers when they teach ‘disadvantaged pupils’ or pupils from a lower socio-economic status.
The institutional bias in education against pupils from a lower socio-economic status is well known. We know that test papers and curriculum are written against ‘middle-class’ expectations. English papers that ask for written pieces around travel, hotels or a foreign holiday have been recent examples. Most teachers come from middle-class backgrounds, as do the examiners and the curriculum planners. That already stacks the odds against a working-class pupil. If you want to think more about this have a read of ‘Equity in Education’ by Lee Elliot Major and Emily Briant, it’s a great book for those looking to level the playing field for your students.
We all hold biases that reflect what we expect people to be like, based on our own experience as well as what we learn from others, the media and society as a whole. In a classroom of 30 young people our brains are continually making quick, instinctive actions and reflexive shortcuts, it’s the only way to keep the plates spinning. I’m just speaking here about biases around socio-economic backgrounds there is also research about biases involving race, gender and other characteristics all of which are worth thinking about.
Here's some research headlines:
Pre-school teachers are less likely to call on lower social economic status pupils and have shorter interactions with them (Goudeau et al 2023) – that’s pre-school, now multiply that effect across every classroom and year of school. Even a small difference mounts up in comparison with their more affluent peers.
Teachers treat identical work differently depending on where it comes from (Doyle et al 2023)
Teachers show less warmth, give less eye contact and give lower quality feedback to children from a lower SES (Olczyk et al 2022)
I don’t know how those of you who are teachers feel when you see this. A reaction I often hear is, it’s not me, I’m not like that. The next piece of research is interesting:
Teachers are more likely to perceive that unconscious bias is a problem for others than themselves. (Doyle et al 2023).
You may have heard the statistic that 90% of drivers consider themselves to be better than average – it is a similar thing. But remember, the bias is real but it is unconscious, we don’t do it intentionally, we don’t realise it is there.
Our ‘disadvantaged’ pupils already have huge barriers to overcome in terms of the pressures of living in poverty (and almost a third of our students live beneath the poverty line). They already have barriers in terms of the institutional biases, the vocabulary they have been exposed to, their access to books and resources, their housing, their health and lots more. Getting a poorer diet of support and interaction from teachers in the classroom is making things worse.
Again, the solution is research led – it is not easily combatted but it can be - your teachers need:
1) An awareness of the bias
2) A concern about the consequences
3) A knowledge of how best to replace the bias
1) An awareness of the bias
We’ve talked about this – teachers need to understand that this is real and it affects them –if as a teacher you are still not convinced then maybe video yourselves teaching a few times – analyse the amount of questions you give, the time you spend on individual interactions and the feedback you share.
2) A concern about the consequences
The disadvantage gap is well publicised, as is the fact that it stubbornly refuses to close despite the pupil premium funding being thrown at it. It grows across a pupils educational journey and is now 19.2 months by the end of secondary school. As well as the national picture, how do these figures reflect in your context? I’d say, in terms of the schools I work with there is a consistent gap in progress and attainment and disadvantaged pupils are over-represented in absence, suspension and exclusion statistics. Get staff to understand the potential consequences of unconscious bias across your setting?
3) A knowledge of how best to replace the bias
I think there are two areas to look at here – the system practices that a leader could put in place and the personal practices you could work on as teacher. There are a lot of things we could do to improve this – too much for any detail now but here are a few:
Equitable grading practices, Data Analysis, High expectations for all, Relational practice, Challenge stereotypes
As a teacher: Look for feedback, Analyse yourself, Use specific Classroom techniques, Mixed groups, Apply rules consistently etc. I’m sure there are others you could think of.
My third key area of CPD is Trauma-informed approaches
This seems to be a controversial area in education. I keep seeing articles and posts from education ‘behaviourists’ dismissing trauma-informed practice as some sort of ‘quack’ science. It’s not, it is well respected and used across most other spheres – health, social care and the charity sector. There is lots of research that backs up the effect of ACE – adverse childhood experiences, things like physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect, domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness in the home and parental separation and abuse - on the way the brain works. The brain is develops differently, is more likely to react to non-threatening situations like they are a threat and children are more likely to be in situations of high-alert or dysregulation when they are supposed to be learning.
The University of London’s research suggests that children whose parents are in poverty are 9 times more likely to experience ACE’s. 67% of us have at least one ACE and the numbers increase for those living in multiple disadvantages. UCL research says you are 9 times more likely to have ACEs if you grow up in poverty.
Meta-analysis by the medical review the Lancet – over 2000 research articles, a quarter of a million participants across a range of countries including the UK shows those 4+ ACEs (16%) more than twice as likely to be heavy smokers and drinkers, 6 times as likely to be alcoholic, substantially more likely to have respiratory disease, cancer, heart disease.
If you have ACEs then you are far more likely not to feel safe enough to learn – do your staff know about ACE’s, most school staff do now – but, more crucially, do they know how to regulate a dysregulated student? Do they know how to bring a sense of safety to their classroom? Do they understand how to use their body language and communication to manage learning in a non-confrontation way? Do they understand that before they repair or reason around behaviour they need to regulate and relate? Have they got tools in their armoury to do this?
The last area I think is important and often missed for staff CPD is parental engagement.
Research tells us that effective relationships between schools and parents improve pupil progress (Coe et al. 2014) and that the home environment has a significant effect on pupil outcomes (Hattie 2009). The EEF talk about parental engagement improving outcomes by 4 months additional progress, more than setting or streaming, mentoring, reduced class sizes or even extending school time. Other research (Deforges 2003) talks about parental effects having a bigger impact than the quality of school.
When you think about the effort and investment that goes in to increasing school quality compared with that of working with and supporting parents it’s definitely an area, we can invest more heavily in developing and should be a key part of strategies for improving pupil outcomes.
It comes up in a lot of conversations around pupil premium and inclusion. ‘We just can’t get parents to engage’ or ‘It’s really about poor parenting’. A lot of the barriers to engagement are greater for parents living in poverty and the importance of improving outcomes is greater for the young people in these homes - so, what could work? Is there anything we can do better to engage our ‘hard to reach’ parents?
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a school reception waiting for a meeting with the Head. I watched the Gran of a pupil as she waited for a meeting, she was pacing up and down showing all the signs of anxiety you may see with candidates for an important interview. It reminded me how nervous some people feel about coming into and engaging with schools. Parents and carers who had negative experiences in their own schooling may feel real barriers when coming into school themselves. For some families, their experience of professionals has been a difficult situation with social care or landlords, and they harbour a suspicion of anyone in authority. For others the experience may trigger feelings of failure or fear from their memories of the education system.
Some parents may feel like they lack the skills to support their child properly. You might feel embarrassed or blamed for your child’s behaviour or lack of progress. School communication can also feel like a one-way process without much value being placed on the parental voice and input. Dr Janet Goodall has researched around the topic of parental engagement and makes this statement ‘parents that are hard to reach often see school as hard to reach’ that’s a powerful phrase to reflect on. I obviously do a lot of communicating with schools, some are open and helpful, for others getting an email through to the right person is like breaking into the Bank of England.
Recent survey data suggested that only 10% of school staff had ever received training in parental engagement. Staff are busy and not always skilled in building relationship and communicating or understanding parents. The majority of school staff come from a middle-class background and can carry unconscious biases and have a lack of understanding of the situations of the families they work with. They also don’t always have the time available or prioritised for building relationships and only get to communicate during ‘crisis’ points with parents. How can we make them feel more confident and skilled? I’ve come across very experienced and confident teachers who will do everything they can to avoid phoning home. Do we need scripts, structures or support around parental engagement? Do teachers need to understand you’re your school communication strategy (do you have one?) and to have some guidelines around where they fit in this?
So, you’ve explored and understood the barriers, audited your practice and trained your staff. Before you make your strategy and deliver there is one more area I think can be helpful.
Developing local support.
In the middle of covid we realised that some of our families at school didn’t have support networks around them. I’m sure you can remember, particularly at the beginning of the epidemic, people were really fearful, everyone with a medical problem was isolating – as a school we had a number of families trying to isolate, without support networks and who previously worked zero hours contracts which had stopped with Covid - they had no money coming in and no support other than us. At first we sent a group of staff to line up at the local Tesco in the spaced queues to buy shopping trolleys of food, we then packaged it up and got it to our families. It was effective but took hours of precious staff time and resources. I sat down and did some research and within half an hour I’d found a local faith group who offered food support. We set up a referral pathway and from then on if any of our team contacted them with an address a box of food would be delivered by the end of the day.
In every community, actually, particularly the ones with high deprivation there are community organisations and faith communities and charities who are willing and ready to help. There are experts in housing and domestic violence and benefits and health who you can source to help support your staff. Before we understood this I’d had DSL’s sitting filling in emergency housing applications for hours with parents when actually they knew no more about housing than the parent themselves.
What community assets can you link with? Who exists to support families in your area? Where can we bring resource in? I’ve just done an interesting piece of work with the Church of England looking at partnerships between churches and schools in deprived areas, I’ve heard of partnerships with local commercial sponsors who pay from community funds to fund hunger initiatives – in our busy school leadership world it is hard to find the time to research and broker these arrangements but some investment in this area can be really effective in increasing our impact as a school.
So – we’ve understood barriers, audited our practice, trained staff and developed our local networks. The next bit is yours. Each context is different, every action plan and strategy following from these things will be slightly different but if you’ve done these things then this is when you can action plan directly to mitigate the barriers you know your cohort face. You can do this with confidence knowing that you and your staff are picking the right barriers and you’ll understand enough about them to address them well.
If you would like any support around aspects of this then do get in touch.
