The context for Education: England's structure before and after the pandemic

England has been a country with extremes of social inequality for some time (Dorling, 2015). These have been developing over many years and had not been created due to the pandemic, though they have been worsened. We have known for some time (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) that relative advantages and disadvantages among populations tend to ‘cluster’ (my word): in communities with relatively low or high levels of income, their corresponding levels of physical and mental health, life expectancy, economic opportunities and educational outcomes will also be low or high. Schools and teaching can be part of the problem and can help reproduce and maintain difference rather than modify unequal structures and opportunities. But they can help. Inequalities are kept in place through a variety of social, economic and other mechanisms, all of which can be a focus for policy and targeted intervention, some by schools. The more unequal, the more difficult it is a for a society to develop and improve overall (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), and the greater the hurdles to rise up the social ladder.

While overall being a ‘prosperous’ country with high levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (US Census Bureau, 2021), the UK as a whole has a low Gini coefficient of 34.3 (a measure of the steepness of inequality scored from 0 to 100, where 100 is perfect). In illustration of life in the ‘bottom’ of this hierarchy, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF, 2020) has estimated that before the pandemic more than 2.4 million households were living in destitution: the inability to put food on the table and clothe themselves and put a roof over their families’ heads. This involved 550,000 children at that time. All of this had been worsening, especially in the north of England.

Prosperous England rests on a very perilous base. Overall, GDP per person fell from $48,513 in 2019 to $44,916 in 2020 (World Bank, 2021), again before the pandemic. Because of the inequality in income distribution represented by the Gini coefficient, this will have been experienced differently.