For over 20 years I have examined apparent differences in attainment by various social groups, girls and boys, types of schools, regions and countries. I have looked at patterns of participation in education and attainment after the age of 16, in HE, and throughout adult learners’ lives. All of these and more are illustrated in this chapter and those that follow. This chapter presents the simple patterns, and successive chapters present more detail and possible explanations for these patterns. The key message of this chapter is that educational outcomes are clearly stratified by a number of important factors.

Differences linked to family income

One of the best established findings of education research is that students’ social class and their attainment at school are linked. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Students from more prestigious social class backgrounds or higher-income families tend to obtain higher marks and examination grades, and are then more likely to stay on in any education system across the world that celebrates qualifications over equity. Students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to drop out of education (Fernandez-Mellizo and Martinez- Garcia, 2017).

This is evidenced to some extent by consideration of school pupils in England who are known to be eligible for free school meals (FSM). In practice, FSM has referred to any family entitled to Income Support, income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Tax Credit, the first four weeks of Working Tax Credit following unemployment, the guaranteed element of state Pension Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and/or where Part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 applies. FSM-eligibility is widely used in policy and practice in the UK. In England, it influences the level of generic funding for many schools, and forms the main basis on which additional pupil premium funding is allocated to schools. It is also used to compute a pupil premium attainment gap by which school performance is monitored. It is already an important contextual variable used by the school inspection regime Ofsted when conducting statutory inspections of schools. FSM may be the best single indicator of relative disadvantage in education, despite a small number of cases having missing values, as discussed earlier, in Chapter 2.

FSM-eligible pupils have lower attainment than non-eligible pupils at all stages of schooling, and make less progress between Key Stages (see Table 3.1).