30 April 2021
Disadvantage begins in housing
Liz Atkins
Professor of Vocational Education and Social Justice
There is considerable evidence that poverty and the poor housing conditions that invariably go with having barely sufficient money to live on have a dire impact on the educational chances of young people.
One study by Stephen Ball and colleagues, for example, found that insecure housing was one of the key issues that led to young people and their families being shunted back and forth between stability and crisis, sometimes also leading to a need for complex social services involvement. They argued that this was a key risk factor for wider social exclusion.
Similarly, my own research has looked at students in further education; the figures show that a high proportion of the lowest attaining students came from backgrounds characterised by poverty and other forms of social and educational exclusion. Diane Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge, clearly identifies the quality of housing as a key issue in underachievement.
These young people become, by definition, people who cannot afford independent housing. And so the problem perpetuates through another generation
She refers in particular to the impoverishment of working households – note, those households where adults have work, and yet are still struggling to get by; and also to the added pressure placed on so many low income families by the chronic lack of affordable housing. She points to the evidence give to Parliament’s Select Committee on Education in 2014 with linked underachievement at school to ‘factors outside the school gate’, many of which are associated with poverty. Poor housing is integral to that.
My own research around low attainment continues, and currently finds nothing to suggest that anything is changing for the better. We still have significant numbers of young people leaving school every year with few qualifications and at increased risk of becoming NEET – not in education, employment or training.
If they escape that fate, then they are often churning between low pay, low skilled work and claiming benefits. Whichever category they fall into, they become, by definition, people who cannot afford independent housing. And so the problem perpetuates through another generation.
We are not talking about a tiny proportion of school leavers. About 10% of over-16s leaving school each year go into a college programme at below level 2 – broadly equivalent to GCSE. In raw numbers, this is about 50,000 young people; the evidence of recent years tells us that more than 20% of them – around 10,000 – will fall through the cracks. The evidence also tells us that young people who find themselves in this social position are quite unable to see any other future other than the life they are living
Contrary to much rhetoric around disadvantaged youth, they do have aspirations that are very much like those of their higher attaining peers.
However, I want to stress that, contrary to much rhetoric around disadvantaged youth, they do have aspirations that are very much like those of their higher attaining peers (follow these links to read some of that evidence: Bathmaker, 2001; Atkins, 2017, Atkins and Flint, 2015; Esmond and Atkins, 2020). But they also know they are unlikely to achieve those aspirations because life experience tells them that the jobs they dream of are unlikely for ‘people like them’.
They hope for good jobs and decent housing; and they do not expect to achieve these things.
Poor and insecure housing is also a norm that many of these young people accept as a natural and normal aspect of life, because this has been their only experience. Examples from my own work include Paris, a student who dropped out of her Level 1 course because she was expected to work to repay her parents’ debts – failure to do so would have resulted in her being thrown out of the family home. I also encountered Hero, estranged from her parents and sleeping on a relative’s sofa in an overcrowded house.
The stories FE college staff hear regularly include young people who are homeless, who are lodging with distant relatives, living in hostels or with friends and family who are engaged in criminality, and alongside people addicted to drugs and alcohol. Given the circumstances in which they live, it is amazing that these young people get themselves to a college at any point; and it’s no surprise that despite their best intentions, many don’t get the high marks they need to break out of their situation.
While huge sums of money are spent each year to address educational disadvantage, the focus is always on the students who have made it to a school or a college. This money rarely reaches those who have dropped out of the system, and for those it does reach, it’s often too late.
What they really needed, much earlier in life, was a secure, good quality home that their family could afford; somewhere they could put down roots, align with a community, and have a sense of being included instead of constantly excluded.
In other words, poor educational attainment is not a problem that sits in its own self-contained silo. It is inextricably linked to deeply ingrained issues of social disadvantage and exclusion.
There will be much public poring over the ‘results’ awarded to this year’s cohort of GCSE and A Level students. But we need to spare a thought for the students for whom the disruption of the pandemic was a relatively small blip in a childhood marred by poverty, poor housing and endemic insecurity, blighting their life chances long before COVID-19 arrived.
And then we need to do better.