Sir Michael Wilshaw is due to step down from his post in December and used a speech last week at the Festival of Education at Wellington College in Berkshire to attack the lack of progress that has been made on narrowing the achievement gap between poor pupils and their better off peers.
He said that, despite a range of initiatives, including the Pupil Premium, no real difference has been made over the last decade.
He said: “The needle has barely moved. In 2005, the attainment gap between free school meal and non-FSM pupils in secondary schools was 28 percentage points. It is still 28 percentage points now.
“Our failure to improve significantly the educational chances of the poor disfigures our school system. It scars our other achievements. It stands as a reproach to us all.”
Sir Michael laid-out five key reasons as to why he believes the gap still persists. These included our continued failure to develop a curriculum pathway for those students wanting to take Apprenticeships and a lack of structure in children’s lives.
He said: “There is nothing wrong in insisting on structure in school. We should be tough on feckless parents who allow their children to break the rules. I appreciate that many of them were let down by the education system. But they need to be reminded – through letters, meetings and sanctions – that the way they bring up their children has profound implications for us all.”
Elsewhere, Sir Michael warned that poor leadership and poor teaching continues to disproportionately affect disadvantaged students.
He highlighted the fact that only six per cent of schools in well-off areas in England have leadership judged as requiring improvement or worse, whereas this figure in the most deprived areas is 23 per cent.
He added: “Unless we resolve to get more of our best leaders into the most challenging schools, then the poor will continue to be short changed.”
On teaching, he said that schools in deprived areas are “more likely to have fewer experienced teachers, more likely to have teachers without formal teaching qualifications, more likely to have teachers without degrees in relevant subjects, and more likely to have higher teacher turnover than schools elsewhere”.
He added: “The lack of a national, strategic approach to teacher training means that there are challenging areas of the country without ready access to the best NQTs. Outstanding schools train and retain the best candidates, leaving schools where the need is greatest to scramble for the rest.
“The government must do more to direct good people into the most challenging areas. There have been some laudable initiatives, but they have been late, small and piecemeal.”
However, Sir Michael reserved perhaps his strongest attack for politicians. He accused both the Left and the Right of allowing ideology to affect young people’s educational outcomes – he said the poor had been “caught in the crossfire” between Left and Right for as long as he could remember. He said: “The Left’s brand of snake oil was very pervasive in the 70s and 80s. They infiltrated scores of local authorities, peddling their anti-academic nonsense and undermining the authority and respect of school leaders.
“Their irresponsible, ideological agenda ruined the education of hundreds of thousands of our poorest children - children now in middle-age whose literacy levels are worse than their parents’ and grandparents’.”
He said that while the middle and upper classes “escaped” to grammar and independent schools, the poor “had no such option”.
“They had to endure the chaos, the indifferent teaching and threadbare curriculum that passed for education in many state schools back then.”
Turning to the Right, he added: “The Right has had a different but no less corrosive impact on the poor. In the 70s and 80s their principal crime was wilful neglect. If a disadvantaged youngster couldn’t get into a grammar school – tough. The 11-plus failures were just useful fodder for factories and shops.”
He also warned today’s Conservative administration that a market-based approach to education won’t solve our problems.
He explained: “Schools will wither on the vine as they did 20 or 30 years ago if a more liberal and autonomous system is not subject to strong central and local intervention when early decline sets in.
“The market will not stop the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker. Teachers and leaders will always gravitate to the places where it is more comfortable, more leafy and easier to work.”
Sir Michael said that his view is borne out by the current teacher training figures.
The prosperous South East region has more than 458 trainee teachers per 100,000 pupils. While the East Midlands has 362 per 100,000 pupils and the East of England 294 per 100,000.
He added: “No wonder these last two regions are poorly performing. Schools in these areas find it more difficult to get good staff. Teacher supply follows well-resourced demand, not educational need.
“Free marketeers forget, or perhaps they never cared to think, that without the semblance of a strategy, without meaningful accountability, or early intervention the system risks repeating all the mistakes of the worst local authorities. They forget that it’s easy to destroy a school and so much harder to build one up. And once again, it is the poor who ultimately pay the price.”