Educational Equity: Pathways to Success

Taking their starting point from the nineteenth-century reformer Robert Owen’s concern to promote the education of the poor, Hopkins (2016) together with the other authors in the volume, investigate the challenges faced within the Scottish education system in achieving sustainable improvements in educational outcomes specifically amongst learners from disadvantaged communities. In terms of data collection and data analysis, the authors take their starting point from Kurt Lewin and make use of a ‘family’ of approaches within the overall tradition of action research. All the authors in the volume are motivated by a concern for greater inclusion, fairness and social justice and the desire to break the link between poor educational achievement and poverty. For Chapman and Ainscow (2022) progress towards greater equity requires new thinking about the barriers preventing participation experienced by some learners, barriers which result in them becoming marginalised because of contextual factors. Focusing on three questions: What can be done to promote equity within education systems? What are the barriers to progress? How might these barriers be overcome? the book tells the story of how an ‘ecology of equity’ can be created by building greater capacity inside and outside schools to tackle short-term and long-term development.

The authors in the book all distance themselves from the neoliberal assumptions that underpin much of the research into education leadership, school improvement and school effectiveness. Learners from poor households are not viewed intrinsically as anomalies, not victims of circumstance or injustice but people who choose to fail, products of personal ignorance and individual failure in need of correction by ‘moral purpose.’ David Hopkins for example who is critical of those authors who view poverty as a determinant of learner outcomes and school performance explains: ‘The critical point is that the elimination of poverty as a determinant is not the result of aspiration, as important as that is rather it is the consequence of deliberate actions by teachers fuelled by moral purpose and facilitated by strategic whole-school planning’ (Hopkins, 2013, p. 86). Hopkins (2016, p. 147) believes that: ‘richer and more profound societal goals be developed and put into practice’ and that this can be achieved by more ‘effective metrics’, ‘assessment data and inspection’. In sharp contrast, Chapman (2022, p. 25) explains: ‘No school strategy can, for example, make a poor area more affluent, or increase the resources available to students’ families, any more than it could create a stable student population, or tackle the global processes underlying migration patterns’.

According to Ainscow school improvement is a social process. Much of a teacher’s understanding of how to teach effectively comes from informal conversations with colleagues about shared experiences, this ‘meaning making’ underpins practice and the negotiation of meaning within social action that underpins many teachers’ day-to-day work. Good practice is then based on teachers’ understanding of what works here rather than on policy initiatives or research findings.

Schools then can be viewed as ‘communities of practice,’ and this helps to shape how schools come to view equity and actions taken to achieve greater equity. Some schools view equity in terms of fixing what is viewed as inadequate in identified groups of learners, while other schools look at contextual factors and attempt to identify barriers to participation. These views influence how schools devise policies and procedures for enhancing greater inclusion.

Taking his lead from Robert Putnam (2000), Ainscow argues that school improvement requires social capital, which he views as the creation of ‘pathways through which expertise and lessons from innovations can spread’ (2022: 52). Ainscow proposes that social capital can be more important than financial capital in generating greater equity. Greater equity can be achieved if school leaders can create a climate that will enhance the social capital within schools.

The book ends on the optimistic note that ‘education can be a key driver for social change remains as relevant as ever’ (183). However, factors that impact negatively on beyond the school gate are listed in non-specific, vague terms such as ‘geographical isolation,’ ‘economic pressures,’ ‘community attitudes,’ ‘local unemployment,’ ‘poverty’ and ‘wellbeing.’ These issues can be addressed by the creation of a ‘forum for tackling wider contextual issues’ (181). Solutions are to be found by people working in education developing new skills, building capacity and networks to create collaborative partnerships that cross borders between individuals who have different professional experiences, and mobilising personal support to deal with pressures by working in teams.

The book is hampered by a lack of attention to the role of theory in explanation building, the variables used in the analysis are often vague and ill-defined (notably the key concepts of ‘equity’ and ‘capacity building’) and there is a lack of attention to the appropriate indicators used to measure ‘equity’ and ‘capacity building.’ The role of theory is to promote high-quality educational research. Their argument would be enhanced by a clear outline of their understanding of equity, the causes of educational underachievement and how inequality or lack of equity beyond the school gates in the wider society is propagated and maintained.

The underpinning assumption of Chapman and Ainscow’s position on equity is that the different treatment of different people is intrinsically unfair. Are Chapman and Ainscow suggesting that ‘everyone has an equal right to education,’ or that ‘everyone has a right to an equal education’? The form and quality of the education each has a right to is not specified. Does everyone have a right to the same education? The concept of opportunity is based upon the assumption that the opportunity to be educated should be equally distributed. No one may justly deprive another of their chance to be educated. Every individual must have as good a chance as everyone else to get an education, but this does not mean that everyone will get the same education.

In the last analysis, although the reader may want to question the construction of Chapman and Ainscow argument; the reader is left in no doubt that Chapman and Ainscow are motivated by a strong moral impulse to use the education system as a vehicle to achieve greater ‘social justice’ and ‘social equity’ and that for them an effective school is one that is focused on maintaining high expectations for student achievement and a belief in equal opportunities.