Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Education Endowment Foundation and of the Sutton Trust, welcomed today’s Education Select Committee report on white working class boys and girls. He said:

“It is vital that we narrow these attainment gaps that so perpetuate educational inequality. There are unacceptable gaps at every stage of children’s development – from school readiness to GCSE results and university entry. These now affect the white working class communities more than any other community, and we must do all we can to narrow them.

“The committee is absolutely right to say that good schools and great teaching are the answer. It is also vital that schools make more use of evidence of what works, including the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit, so that they make the most of their pupil premium funding. Young people also need to know that there will be enough good apprenticeships as well as university courses for those who do well at school.”

Click here to view the EEF submission on Underachievement in Education by White Working Class Children

NOTES TO EDITORS

  1. The Sutton Trust is a foundation set up in 1997, dedicated to improving social mobility through education. It has published over 140 research studies and funded and evaluated programmes that have helped hundreds of thousands of young people of all ages, from early years through to access to the professions.
  2. The Education Endowment Foundation is a charity set up in 2011 by the Sutton Trust as lead foundation in partnership with Impetus Trust, with a Department for Education grant of £125m. It is dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement through evidence-based research. Since its launch the EEF has awarded £41 million to 78 projects working with over 560,000 pupils in over 2,900 schools across England.
  3. Polling by The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in March 2014 found that 45% of senior leaders – heads, assistant heads and deputies – say they use the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit to find effective ways to spend their pupil premium funding. This is up from 36% in 2013 and 11% in 2012. The proportion rises to 54% among secondary leaders
  4. A Sutton Trust report by researchers at the London School of Economics found that for pupils from poor backgrounds having a highly effective teacher versus a poorly performing teacher can make a whole year’s worth of difference to their attainment. For further information see Improving the impact of teachers on pupil achievement in the UK
  5. Details of the Sutton Trust and Education Endowment Foundation’s submission to the Select Committee can be found here.

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