Schools in the poorest areas struggle to recruit teachers, are forced to spend more money on supply teachers and are having to pay out more for basic supplies for pupils, new analysis that reveals the full scale of the challenge for leaders running disadvantaged schools has found.
And many of these gaps have worsened as schools with the poorest pupils are hit hardest by the Covid pandemic fall out, SchoolDash analysis found.
But the government’s area-based intervention to provide more support to schools in deprived areas, called Education Investment Areas, is “too blunt”.
“Disadvantage is one of the most analysed and discussed characteristics of England’s education system,” said SchoolDash founder Timo Hannay.
But he added: “Tackling disadvantage-driven disparities in educational outcomes requires more attention on ‘upstream’ factors such as the difficulty of recruiting suitably experienced teachers.”
Schools Week investigates …
Disadvantaged school recruitment gap widens
Secondary school vacancy rates have risen in all English regions since pre-pandemic.
But schools in the poorest areas are now struggling the most.
In 2018-19, schools with ‘low’ numbers of pupils of free school meals (classed as fewer than 20 per cent) posted 150 job adverts per 1,000 teachers.
For schools with ‘high’ FSM rates (more than 35 per cent), this was 169 – a gap of 19.
However, that gap widened to 31 in 2023-24 as adverts rose to 200 per 1,000 teachers in schools with the most poor pupils, and to just 169 for those with the fewest.
Vic Goddard, chief executive of Passmores Cooperative Learning Community, which runs five academies with high levels of deprivation in Harlow, Essex, said they regularly advertise a job four times to get “one decent applicant”.
“By that stage, if they’ve got a pulse and converse in English, we’re probably going to take them anyway – because you get to that stage of desperation where you have children that need a teacher,” he said.
The number of pupils eligible for free school meals rose to 2.1 million in January, nearly 25 per cent of all pupils. This is up from under 15 per cent of all pupils pre-Covid.
Free school meals are available to students whose parents claim certain benefits; such as those in receipt of Universal Credit, if they have an annual net earned income of no more than £7,400.
Poorer schools also tend to have higher headteacher turnover and higher levels of teacher sickness absence, SchoolDash found.
Primary and secondary schools where more than 35 per cent of students were eligible for FSM lost 5.8 days to sickness per teacher last year, up from 4.4 in 2018-2019.
In contrast, schools with low levels of deprivation lost 5.2 days per teacher last year.
“An obvious consequence is that policymakers should consider how to better recognise and reward teachers who take on these roles,” said Hannay.
More money on supply teachers …
And worsening recruitment woes is also leading to a bigger budget hit at schools in poorer areas.
The least deprived schools spent £2,248 per their total number of teachers last year, compared to £1,649 in 2018-19 – a 36 per cent rise.
But for the most deprived schools, costs shot up 45 per cent – from £2,877 pre-pandemic to £4,173 last year.
Emma Cook, headteacher at Micklefield Church of England Primary Academy, near Leeds, said struggled to recruit an early years teacher last year, and filled the role only after advertising again on the upper, rather than main, pay range.
“We’re a small school with a high number of pupil premium children and our budget is stretched anyway, so just trying to get high quality staff can be a struggle and that comes at a premium.”
It means schools teaching in the poorest areas have to rely on younger, and essentially cheaper, staff.
Around 62 per cent of teachers in the poorest primary schools were under 40 in 2018, compared to around 55 per cent in the most affluent schools.
By 2024, these proportions had fallen to around 59 per cent and 52 per cent, respectively, but the “gap remained roughly constant”, analysis found.
But at secondary, where recruitment struggles have been most acute, the gap is larger.
In 2024, around 59 per cent of teachers at poorer schools were under 40, compared to about 48 per cent at the most affluent schools.
This change in numbers is driving by struggles to recruit new teachers, SchoolDash said – meaning the average age of the workforce is gradually getting older.
… and dealing with poverty
Poorer schools are also facing bigger budget hits from dealing with increased poverty levels, which rose by 21 per cent between 2012 and 2021, a Unicef study found.
Last year’s PISA study showed about one in 10 UK youngsters skipped meals at least once a week because they didn’t have enough money.
This is on par with countries including Mexico and Moldova, and above the OECD average of 8.2 per cent.
A Teach First-commissioned survey this week revealed 60 per cent of leaders working in the most disadvantaged schools are using their budgets to buy extra food for hungry pupils – double that of the most affluent schools.
Similar pattern is seen across buying school uniforms for pupils (68 per cent versus 40 per cent), sanitary wear (46 per cent versus 27 per cent) and toothbrushes (18 per cent to 5 per cent).
“Particularly since the pandemic, we’re seeing a growing and urgent necessity to provide basic needs for our most vulnerable students,” said Mark Avoth, Principal of The Bourne Academy, Bournemouth.
“Recently we supplied numerous sets of uniform to students who were rain-soaked whilst walking to school without appropriate coats.”
Colin Lofthouse, CEO of Smart Multi-Academy Trust, said most of its 11 academies in Newcastle and Gateshead “serve particularly disadvantaged” communities, including a primary school where more than 80 per cent of students are eligible for FSM.
“We see that disadvantage coming through in schools with high levels of pupils joining without good communicational language, without being toilet trained, without having socialisation skills that they traditionally had, and so we’re picking up the burden of that,” he said.
Russell Hobby, CEO of Teach First, added: “Child poverty is eroding our children’s futures. Schools and teachers are stepping up, of course, but this shouldn’t be their job.
“Ending child poverty is not only morally right, it is the key to higher standards and prosperity for all.”
Teachers are also grappling with the increase in child mental health issues, high levels of anxiety and emotional dysregulation and the explosion in kids with SEND, Lofthouse said.
“It’s not easy, dealing with all of that and trying to teach as well. It’s this idea of schools being the fourth emergency service,” he said.
“We do tend to find that the attrition on staff is high, burnout is high, because we’re having to do all of that.”
But no Ofsted let up
Ofsted analysis has long shown schools serving poorer cohorts are likely to have worse Ofsted grades.
SchoolDash looked at the relative incidence of selected topics in Ofsted reports published between January 2006, to June 2024.
For primary and secondary schools with high FSM, the reports more frequently cited topics including exclusions, absences, British values and behaviour.
Whereas, reports for schools with lower FSM eligibility more frequently cited topics such as wellbeing, individual subject areas and personal development.
“This provides objective evidence of the common anecdotal observation that life is qualitatively different in ways that are not fully reflected in narrow measures of academic outcomes,” Hannay added.
Research from the Education Policy Institute previously found that, after a bad Ofsted grade, the intake of a school also tends to become more disadvantaged and teacher turnover increases.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the ASCL leaders’ union, said accountability metrics correlate closely with factors largely outside of a school’s control – and agreed with the education committee’s recent conclusion that disadvantage is not sufficiently taken into account by Ofsted.
“The impact of all this is to actively discourage people from working in more disadvantaged areas, in the very schools where we most need our strongest teachers and leaders,” he added.
New school report cards due to be rolled out in September will focus on schools’ context, their inclusivity and axe “unnecessarily negative terminology like ‘inadequate’”, Ofsted has said.
Jonny Uttley, CEO at The Education Alliance academy trust and visiting fellow at Centre for Young Lives, said reforming accountability to recognise some schools are much more challenging may also “remove some of the disincentives to leading in the most disadvantaged communities which right now are big and toxic”.
Education Investment Areas ‘too blunt’
The Conservative government’s levelling up white paper in 2022 set out plans to “drive further school improvement through 55 new Education Investment Areas (EIAs) in places where educational attainment is currently weakest”.
But Hannay said while they can “provide a useful lens through which to view geographical disparities, they are too blunt to be used for targeting interventions”.
This is because the EIA-level averages “hide even greater variation within in each area”.
The study found “whether a school is located inside or outside an EIA is a very weak predictor of its level of disadvantage”.
The “most effective level at which to intervene and support is the individual school,” he added.
Hannay also said pupil premium as an indicator of disadvantage has “significant limitations” because it’s binary and related solely to family income, rather than wider societal factors.
Liz Robinson, CEO at the Big Education trust, said alternative measures such as the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index are useful for analysing the broader picture.
But it’s also vital that teachers build trusting relationships with parents and students, so they tell them what their actual situation is, she said.
She told how the behaviour of a Year 6 student, who wasn’t eligible for free school meals, at one of the schools “suddenly deteriorated”, before his teacher managed to get him to open up.
“He’s like, Oh, well, we were made homeless last week, and we’re sleeping on the floor of the church. They didn’t have any bedding or any mattresses,” she said.
The school bought them blow up beds that day.
Cook added she had “bought a family the shopping for the week because they didn’t have enough money or anything in the house to support them until mum next got paid”.
“And that is a family who doesn’t have any children classed as disadvantaged.”
Hannay added pupil premium eligibility “is not the only measure of disadvantage, and educational outcomes are not the only way in which less fortunate pupils and schools fall behind”.
He said “with a wide a range of analyses now at our disposal and a new centre-left government in charge, it seems like an good time to review things… [with] potentially important implications for developing effective solutions to the perennial inequalities in our education system.”
