In this article I’m going to examine the extent to which national attainment gaps between disadvantaged pupils and their peers varies within and between schools.
In part two I will examine how these vary by region.
The “within school” part of the gap refers to the fact canada rcs data that even in the same school disadvantaged pupils tend to achieve lower outcomes than their peers.
By contrast, the “between school” part of the gap refers to the way disadvantaged (and non-disadvantaged) pupils are shared out between schools, for example if disadvantaged pupils being more likely to attend lower achieving schools.
It is the between school part that could be influenced by the way that disadvantaged pupils are allocated to (or sorted into) schools. For example, if schools’ admissions criteria changed over time to favour disadvantaged pupils, we would expect the between school part to reduce over time.
Some caveats
The analysis I present here, like a lot of analysis of education data, splits pupils into two groups: those who are disadvantaged[1] and those who aren’t. In layman’s terms “poor” and “non-poor”.
Obviously these two groups cover a wide range of individual circumstances. The “non-poor” group, for example, will include pupils from very affluent backgrounds as well as those who are in poverty but who have either not claimed free school meals or not been eligible for some reason.