Busting Myths on Low Aspirations – it’s not them it’s us!

Raising aspirations is not a means of raising attainment 

The forthcoming Access and Participation guidance from the Office for Students (OfS) will encourage higher education providers to focus on raising attainment in secondary schools. But it will not prescribe how to do it or how to measure it.   

Therefore, we are in familiar territory - looking for answers to a societal problem. A perusal of the websites and strategies of university WP departments and social mobility charities doesn’t yield much. In fact, it reveals ideas that I had thought had died out; namely that the problem is, at least partly, down to low aspirations among the disadvantaged. On one hand, I shouldn’t be surprised. This has been a trope of Government policy for nearly two decades: the 2003 Future of Higher Education White Paper; the 2010 Schools White Paper; the 2014 National strategy for access and student success in higher education; comments in 2018 from Ofsted’s Chief Inspector to last year’s guidance letter to the OfS from the (then) Secretary of State for Education all mention the need to raise aspirations.   

On the other hand, for a sector whose currency is knowledge, it is a shame that despite the fact there is no real evidence for this belief this gets as much visibility and repetition as it does. 

It therefore isn’t a surprise that universities haven’t really found a way to contribute to raising attainment (let us not forget teachers might think this is their role) if we have, or have been led to, misidentify the problem. 

Barriers to good attainment 

What are the barriers to good attainment if low aspiration isn’t one of them? The evidence shows there is a myriad of factors: The type of school, its performance, the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals all matter; a recent OfS Insights Report highlights poverty, special educational needs and ethnicity as among the most important factors in educational disparity; Parental, teacher and community expectations are shown to be linked to children’s school outcomes; cultural capital plays a role as do ‘life skills’ such as confidence, motivation, resilience and communication. These are areas in which universities could look to focus their efforts and there is actually evidence of the effectiveness of some of them. The Education Endowment Foundation and TASO toolkits would be a good place to start. 

It’s a systemic problem 

At Nottingham Trent University, we were struck not only by which factors play a part in this but in the sheer number of factors. And then what else plays a role that isn’t listed here: competing/contradictory government policy, market forces, power imbalances.  For years we have run programmes addressing one or more of these aspects, but what chance do they have, regardless of how well designed and executed they are, if all the features listed above can minimise or negate the impact. This is a system and we are just one part in it - probably a fairly ineffectual part given the range of forces lined up against us. 

New work that NTU is doing in its locality has highlighted this. Mansfield and Ashfield are former mining areas in Nottinghamshire. A legacy of rapid de-industrialisation has led to low levels of social mobility, health inequality and low skills. As part of a much broader programme, NTU is working with local schools and community groups to address this situation. 

Our research identified that poor attainment at secondary school could be traced back to the fact that too many children were going to primary school not ‘ready’ to learn; that is they hadn’t always eaten, couldn’t hold a pencil, on occasion basic hygiene was a problem. Teachers are required to spend their time attending to these issues and not teaching. Understandably this is affecting attainment at Key Stage 1; they then weren’t ready to transition into secondary school and they never caught up. Throw in the other aforementioned factors and what chance did any of our outreach or schools work have when faced with this? How misguided are aspiration-raising activities for young people navigating this kind of disadvantage? Plus, there were already local organisations doing a very good job addressing some of these issues – a university needs to add value, not swoop in and replace. 

Systems work in practice 

If you have a systemic problem, you take a systemic approach. You move away from looking at single issues or programmes and you identify all the actors that touch the issue, explore the relationships among these actors and how these impact on the issue you want to change. This requires convening all these actors and in today’s fragmented ‘post-austerity’ system who has more convening power than a university?   

Working with all these stakeholders (parents, schools, early years providers, employers, community leaders, local change makers, third sector bodies, council officials), we devised the ‘Getting…Ready’ programmes.  This takes an approach rooted in systems thinking called collective impact. It involves working with stakeholders to establish a basic social infrastructure to identify and address the fundamental causes of issues. It then enables these stakeholders to become the key agents supporting their young people in ‘getting ready’ for the next stage of their educational journey.    

The programme works at three life stages; Getting School Ready focuses on the skills early years children need to thrive in primary school. Getting Secondary Ready focuses on the transition from primary to secondary school – a key point in ensuring pupils stay on track and sets the foundations for better attainment and approach. Getting Work Ready will ensure that pupils have the skills and experiences employers need for the modern economy.   

Does it work? 

It is early days and this is slow work. We are convening not overpowering; we need to develop relationships with the right people, earn trust through our actions as well as words and help build a social infrastructure to allow the solutions to come from within. But that is OK because we do have some time. NTU is committed to Mansfield and Ashfield (we have opened a hub site there) and the OfS seem happy to let universities work at the earlier stages of the student lifecycle as long as we can show interim milestones. 

The initial outcomes are positive. A primary school partner involved in the programme is one of the most disadvantaged schools, in one of the most disadvantaged areas, in the country. Results had been “significantly below average” (OfSted report). Over the lifetime of the programme Key Stage 2 results became the highest they have ever been, matching the national average for the first time. The Year 1 phonics pass rate is also the highest it has been, surpassing initial projections. The headteacher stated that “dialogue between home and school has opened up again, parents are engaging with the school and say they feel listened to”. 

We are not claiming this success as NTU’s. Credit must go to the school, the community, and the other stakeholders. But if NTU has successfully brought the assets of the area together, to create infrastructure solutions that are specific to and rooted in the place, then it is an approach worth exploring further.

About the author

David Woolley is the Director of Student and Community Engagement at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and on the Board of Trustees for the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO) and Grit Breakthrough Programmes.

At NTU he is the strategic lead for the agendas of social mobility and widening participation. His department focuses on research and insights into the access and participation agenda; learner analytics; and student and community engagement (outreach) across the student lifecycle. His department’s programmes of activity are centred on the importance of participation in and developing a sense of connectivity to your communities. They use data and research to back purposeful action and provision, underpinned by pedagogical practices.

David’s previous roles include Deputy Head of Widening Participation at the University of Nottingham and a teaching career before that, both abroad and in UK Further Education.