A Social Market Foundation report entitled “Educational inequalities in England and Wales” has just been published and it’s available here. It contains a great deal of fascinating information, though quite of a lot of it (as you might expect) is not great news.
The SMF looked at inequalities in educational attainment at ages 11 and 16 and how changes in patterns of inequality have evolved over time, by reference to the influence of region, family income, gender and ethnicity.
Regional inequalities are reported to have “remained stubborn and in some cases worsened”, with London and the South East out-performing the rest of the country in GCSEs. The difference in achievement between the richest and the poorest stayed “persistently large” between the 1980s and the 2000s. Patterns of ethnic inequality have greatly changed but a “similar level of unevenness” between ethnic groups remains. Girls outperform boys, and the gender gap has widened.