Foreword & executive summary

Foreword 

 

This year’s annual report on the disadvantage gap in England reveals the enduring and, in some areas, worsening disparities faced by disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils.  

Almost half a decade on, and we see precious few signs of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps that is because the pandemic struck an education system that was already struggling to cope against a backdrop of real terms funding cuts to schools and wider children’s services, rising child poverty and a shortage of teachers, particularly in some of the poorest areas of the country. 

As this report demonstrates, we are making little progress in closing the gap between vulnerable groups of pupils and their peers. And the most concerning area is in the early years, where we have seen a widening of the gap since 2019 (and, indeed earlier), particularly for economically disadvantaged young children and those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Previous EPI research has shown that 40 per cent of the gap at age 16 has already emerged by age 5 and so this is a crucial opportunity to tackle later life inequalities. Without urgent action, we will have a generation of young people at risk of leaving education without the skills and qualifications they need to thrive. 

Early intervention is key, but is only part of the solution. Indeed, more action is also needed towards the end of compulsory education to combat the widening disadvantage gap among 16–19-year-olds, alongside falling participation in post-16 education. We must urgently ask why so many young people are stepping away from education entirely, and how we can re-engage them to prevent entrenched cycles of poverty. 

This report is clear that we face a set of complex challenges where poverty, ethnicity, place and gender all interact to compromise the life chances of some of the country’s most vulnerable children. We set out clear, evidence-based recommendations to policymakers: from ensuring adequate and well-targeted funding for disadvantaged pupils in every phase, to addressing the structural drivers of poverty and absence, and prioritising SEND reforms. These are not marginal adjustments but essential steps if the government is to deliver on its Opportunity Mission – ensuring that no child’s outcomes are determined by their circumstances of birth. 

We hope the findings and recommendations in this report will galvanise urgent action from leaders across government, education, and wider society. Closing these gaps is not simply an educational priority; it is a moral and economic necessity. 

Natalie Perera, Chief Executive, Education Policy Institute 

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Executive Summary 

 

This report marks our latest assessment of the attainment gap for disadvantaged students and other vulnerable groups across compulsory phases of education in the 2023/24 academic year. This is the second year following the return of pre-pandemic grading standards, meaning national results were broadly similar to 2023 and benchmarked against grade boundaries used in 2019. In the intervening years, we saw grade inflation under centre and teacher assessed grades in 2020 and 2021, and though exams returned in 2022, grading was more generous in that year due to government decisions to stagger the return to pre-pandemic standards.  

In this report we focus on comparing attainment gaps in 2024 with the previous year (2023) and changes since 2019, noting that this post-pandemic period has been affected not only by the staggered transition to pre-pandemic arrangements but other major challenges: an absence epidemic, a crisis in SEND provision, a reported decline in young people’s mental health and rising child poverty. Whilst many of these have long roots established prior to the pandemic, the pandemic has generally exacerbated these trends meaning that, four years on, many of the gaps we report on remain well above pre-pandemic levels and in some cases, at all-time highs. 

 

Disadvantage  

 

In 2019, the year before the pandemic’s onset, progress in closing the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers had already stalled. Having made good progress in gap-narrowing until around 2017, we then saw signs of the gap starting to widen in reception year, key stage 2 and key stage 4 even prior to the pandemic.

The widening of the disadvantage gap accelerated during and after the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2024, the gap widened across all phases, including the 16-19 phase. Whilst the patterns vary across phases when comparing to the previous year (2023), the big picture is one of disadvantaged students falling further behind their peers since the pandemic. Our groundbreaking report ‘Breaking down the gap’, published earlier this year, found that the increase in the disadvantage gap since 2019 can largely be explained by the higher levels of absence among disadvantaged pupils.

As the table below shows, in 2024, there was a mixed picture for the disadvantage gap compared to 2023. We see a fall in the gap at key stage 2 (from 10.3 months in 2023 to 10.0 months in 2024) and a slight decrease at key stage 4 (from 19.2 months to 19.1 months), but it is too soon to tell if this will be sustained. In any case, these gaps remain up to one month larger than their pre-pandemic lows and we continue to have erased a decade of progress.

Meanwhile the gap in early years continued to rise in 2024 (reaching 4.7 months, up slightly from 4.6 months in 2023) and, as we discuss later in this summary and throughout, the trends in the early years gap should be a significant concern for policymakers.

Likewise, the 16-19 gap widened in 2024, with disadvantaged students 3.3 grades behind their peers, up from 3.1 grades in 2023. Perhaps more worrying still is that more than 1 in 5 disadvantaged 16 year olds are not studying towards any substantial qualifications or an apprenticeship, meaning that the participation gap in 16-19 education has also widened (from 10.2 percentage points in 2017 to 12.5 percentage points in the most recent year).

Change in disadvantage gaps since before the pandemic