For several years, our work as a trust has located around creating a more equitable educational experience for all children, with a particular focus on meeting the needs of children experiencing disadvantage. We have chosen to prioritise this group in terms of monitoring and evaluation, adopting strategies that are known to increase rates of progress and education for similar groups nationally. Over time our methods have become more refined and our understanding has deepened. Our trust wide strategies are deliberately those which add value for all children, but which have proven through research to be particularly valuable for those experiencing disadvantage.

Many of us have years of experience in working with children, families and communities experiencing disadvantage, and experientially and instinctively we will have some ways of thinking and working that attune to the experience of disadvantaged students. In order to move on in our practice as a trust we must notice and address assumptions we might have made to date in our work and put our energy into a gaining an even deeper understanding of the individual journeys of our children.

The concept of knowing children and meeting their needs is the very essence of what it means to teach or to work in a school. By definition, this relies upon being child-led, being relational in approach, and adapting our practice to enable success – on an individual, group, class and cohort basis. When we really get to know and understand our children as people and as learners, we often find that similar strategies meet the needs of several learners. Learning to implement these strategies for groups whilst holding firm to our concern for each child as an individual is our next challenge.

What are the particular needs of children experiencing disadvantage?

Understanding the needs of the children in a cohort is painstaking work. Our understanding is built up over time with connection, assessment, engagement and research. Children and their circumstances are dynamic and as educators it is incumbent upon us to keep up – which means being prepared to suspend our assumptions, to learn our children and families anew, to apply, where helpful, the knowledge we already have but never to assume that because a child has ‘PP’ next to their name on a register, that we know what their life experience involves. We can assume that within the cohort of children with this indicator, some will experience a home life filled with love, attention and support, and while there may be financial challenges at home, they are able to thrive at school without explicit and deliberate intervention. We also have to be alert to the statistical likelihood that they may live in the following circumstances: 

• A home that is not well maintained by their landlord or has issues with damp; 
• Family members who struggle with mental health and/or substance or alcohol use; 
• An overcrowded household; 
• Within a community that has higher rates of violent crime; 
• Without access to a quiet space to work and/or resources to learn; 
• Without working role models or connections within their family; 

• Persistently hungry;
• Persistently cold;  
• Unable to access community facilities, for example swimming pools, libraries, clubs. 

Statistically, it is two times more likely that a child growing up in poverty in the UK will die in childhood than their more affluent peers – and yet we would not make that assumption of the children we are working with day to day. Being alert to a statistical likelihood of a potential barrier is not the same as making assumptions about a child’s life or circumstances, much less whether or not they are able to attain well in school.  

We also make assumptions about children that do not have the PP label on the register, about what they can access or what their living conditions might entail. We may not be alert to the fact that all the above may be just as true for a child in a working family that is living below the poverty line, where sadly 4.3 million (25% of the children in this country) currently sit.  

Assumptions continue to abound when we discuss typical privilege and what ‘middle class children’ can and can’t access, the parenting styles that they are most likely to experience. These assumptions can be just as pernicious and critically no children are well-served by holding them.  

A conscious narrative

We have a choice to reject the pervasive narrative about disadvantage and, without being intentionally blind to the barriers that we construct (consciously or otherwise), we can choose to speak about our children, all our children, as if they are likely to attain highly from the outset, in part because of the support we afford them, but mostly because of the ways in which we enable them to utilise the skills and habits of their lives outside school as currency within.  

How we talk to and about disadvantage affects the choices we make as we design learning experiences and consider the routes of our children through them. The first step may be not to mention disadvantage at all. It may be to focus intentionally, perhaps approaching obsessively, on understanding the lives of all our children choosing to let the PP indicator show us simply where to start.  

At cohort level, we should be deeply interested in disadvantage, and in how our cohorts of PP children are being enabled to perform. At individual level, the concept of disadvantage should cease to have the same currency, as we step through the doorway into knowing the individual child, their interests, their story, their personal narrative, and their shortest path to exceptional success. In this way, there are various cohorts that we may wish to monitor and by whose achievements way may wish to be judged. As a trust with social justice at heart, we will always champion those learners who are socio-economically disadvantaged. Within our values and our trust strategy we preference the concept of equity, of every child getting what they need and in the same breath we hold ourselves to account in serving the needs of all children.  

Seeing our trust through the eyes of children first and recognising our responsibility to all children means that when we adjudge our effectiveness, we will start with particular groups: children experiencing socio-economic disadvantage and children with identified Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. We do so not because we believe these groups to be homogenous, but because we believe them to be the most structurally and societally under-served and under-resourced groups.  

Making strategic choices

We choose strategies at scale that enable us to hone our practice in supporting all children, with an alertness to choosing strategies that enable children who are achieving less well to make more rapid progress than their peers. Where children experiencing disadvantage are performing less strongly, the strategies we have chosen to employ will provide the opportunity for them to achieve well – and because of our commitment to seeing every child achieve, we will chase this and work with each child to secure it. We do this because of a shared commitment to making the difference where it may be needed most, and because we believe in our children and our communities as being the rightful focus of our best efforts.  

There are many ways of talking to and about disadvantage.  

We need to talk about children first: children experiencing [socio-economic] disadvantage; children carrying significant vulnerability; children with special educational needs and disabilities; all children – something advocated by many and perhaps most compellingly in Tom Rees and Ben Newmark’s piece entitled ‘A Good Life’.

Our curriculum is designed to recognise children’s agency and to provide them with the knowledge, skills and understanding to know themselves and their place and influence on the world. Our work focuses on enabling them to know the power of their own voices and when and how to use them to best effect, so that over time they will have the choice and opportunity to invest in and improve their own communities or to choose something different. When we talk to and about our children we need to lead with their strengths. Their socio-economic disadvantage or their special educational need or their particular area of vulnerability may be an important part of their narrative, but it should not lead.

An exemplar

Matt Goodfellow writes about Callum, in his poem of the same name: 

Matt Goodfellow reads ‘Callum’ from Let’s Chase Stars Together (youtube.com)

If Callum were ours, a CLF child in a CLF school, our expectation is that we would know about his socio-economic status and his needs and vulnerabilities. Through carefully curated understanding of him throughout his time in our school(s) we will have built up a strong picture of Callum. When we talk about Callum, we may talk with an awareness of those things, but Callum needs us to talk about his strengths, about his possibilities, about his potential. When he comes to school, he needs us to be mindful of his struggles and vocal about his place with us, his power, his agency. When we measure ourselves, we look at Callum first and check that he is achieving. We look at other children like Callum and expect to be held to account for the hard data that demonstrates whether they are in school enough, whether they are achieving as well as their peers, whether they are themselves reaping the rewards of our trust dividend.  

When we talk about Callum, we talk about a resilient and self-assured young man, who with our support will achieve highly because we removed potential barriers from his path. We celebrate his successes wildly and take time to understand his learning needs so that each lesson is worth his time, energy and commitment. We look him in the eye and give him honest feedback that enables him to take his next steps with confidence and we advocate for him, demonstrating with our words and actions that he belongs with us, that we are proud of him, that his destiny is in his own hands.  

This is what it looks like to meet the needs of disadvantaged children. It looks like ambition and pride and honest conversation. It looks like hard work and connection and communication of value. It looks like knowing Callum first and his challenges second. It’s the ultimate empowerment, and it’s ours to endow.  

As a trust we have been considering more deeply our use of language and its impact upon mindset. Many of us have been reading and discussing Katriona O’Sullivan’s brilliantly poignant and insightful ‘Poor’ and allowing this to challenge us in terms of how we speak to and about disadvantage. When she comes to address our trust later this month, we’ll be working hard to both recognise the extraordinarily challenging realities many of our children face and at the same time avoiding reductive narratives and limiting language. Our words hold huge power as much for those that utter them as those that receive them – by being more intentionally asset based in our language, we treat our children with deserved dignity.