I am currently training to be a primary schl teacher and find this particular topic massivley interesting and frightening at the same time (my dissertation is infact on how social status and family income influence attainment).
Firstly the fact that people are responding passionately about this is really relieving as it goes to show that yes there is a problem and yes we are aware of it! People care so thats got to be a good foundation for change?
Experience so far has shown me that there is no single factor to blame or pin point for the attainment divide but it comprises of a few.
1. Teachers: need to be inspiring and persistant in every child matters attitude
2. Governments: need to provide oppertunities(funds) for creating equal oppertunities
3. Parents: v.signiicant! Need to be involved in their child's education,encouraged to develop their own education n told firstly WHY it is so important to develop a good level of education and 2ndly HOW to do this wth support of teachers

Hanna , Kent,

Australia consistently performs in the top ten in literacy, numeracy and science in the world. Partly, this is because of the way our schools are resourced. Class sizes and teaching loads in the UK sound ridiculous to me.

The primary pupil-teacher ratio in my state, Victoria, is now 16.0:1, thanks to our Labor Government, which has been rebuilding the school system since the 1999 election and which has also re-introduced academic disciplines like history after the Liberals (the equivalent to the UK Conservatives) brought in trendy rubbish like Studies of Society and the Environment. The secondary PTR is 11.9:1, still short of what it was under the previous Labor Government’s 10.8:1 in 1992, but an improvement on the previous Liberal Government’s 12.6:1.

I taught from 1974 to 2007. In all that time, there was only one year in which my classes spent the whole year with more than 25 students in them, and that was way back in 1981.

The average class size in Victorian primary schools is 22.3 pupils. In prep it is 19.4. All schools are funded to make 21 the maximum class size in prep to grade 2. The average class size in secondary schools is 21.6 students.

I was the timetabler for Hampton Park Secondary College from 2000 to 2004. I organised that school with a maximum teaching load of just under 18 hours a week (including home groups and covering the classes of absent teachers) and the capacity for decent time allowances (deductions from teaching for demanding leadership positions). The average class teaching load was 15 hours and 45 minutes in 2004. The average class size was 21.3 students. These were the best conditions in the state, but other Victorian schools would have lower teaching loads than in the UK.

Smaller classes and lower teaching loads lead to better education.

Chris Curtis, Hurstbridge, Australia

I managed to enter the grammar/technical school system at 11 years of age after passing the old 11+ (the only one in my elementary school to do so).

After 3 years of a positive academic life but totally unable to keep up with my peers due to the lack of financial clout that my lower working class family enjoyed. Working part time to supplement my families income when I should have been studying/doing homework did nothing to help me in my schooling.

Two years at a comprehensive school to age 16 allowed me to re-attain some form of self respect. Though lacking the academic rigours of the grammar/ technical school, the comprehensive school and its teaching staff made me feel like a human being who counted for something. I left there feeling as though I could achieve my goals, with hard work and perseverance, not hand outs.

College, university and a professional practise now allow me to look back and think of both my old schools in a rather different light.

Malcolm Cottrell, Edmonton, Canada

We know why this is happening. The simple answer is that the poor are too busy trying to survive to even care about education, thus why their children grow up feeling school is useless and irrelevant to earning a living. Seriously. Lack of finance has destroyed many a university student's prospects, but many young people's prospects are destroyed before they even leave primary school due to their economic class.

This is the answer nobody wants to posit. Our country is increasingly shamelessly polarised between rich & poor. If you are struggling to pay your bills, how is analysing Shakespeare going to help you or even seem relevant to you at any age?

I know from personal experience how difficult it is to raise yourself up from a low income background despite ability. I was reading at 3 and have an iq of 146, yet I am 28, still trying to gain my degree via OU. The feeling of estrangement from my true self & capability is the worst, most damaging part of all, & hardest to overcome

Jennifer, North West,

All the midle class are doing is taking responsibility for their children's future. If parents from deprived areas understood this then schools in these areas would do better. Blaming the government and teachers is simply passing the buck. If children arent brought up in a stable, loving and motivated environment then they are going to do less well at school and in later life.

tim, london,

Coursework gives a great advantage to the rich. Either they hire tutors to help their kids or have enough education to give their kids the extra help. Coursework can sometimes account for 50% of the GCSE mark.

Rosalind, London,

I am surprised that nobody has remarked on the cleverness of this government in producing large numbers of uneducated, unemployable children with no ambition in life but to get pregnant early and to draw state benefits. These are tomorrow's voters and you need to have an uneducated underclass to vote Labour in order to stay in power.

Alan, Cobham,

The country is urgently reaching the realisation that it's winners we need if we are to have any hope of catching up in the global economy. We don't have time for loony ideology any more.

More slowly, it's dawning on people that a hundred years of socialism has only seen us move a long way back in the world order.

Ubi, Edinburgh, UK

Children need to be pushed by parents to achieve as well. My parents were poor, but always encouraged me to achieve at school as they wanted me to have a 'better life' than they did.

The Govt should provide the resources so that individuals who want to go further, can do so.

But ultimately, if you're not individually motivated & not encouraged by those around you (such as family), the likelihood of getting out of the poor/uneducated cycle, is unlikely.

LG, London,

Something which always seems to be forgotten in this ongoing debate is that we are currently trialing a vast social experiment: it is the first time in human history that we have ever expected universal education to the age of 16 (and universal literacy as an aspiration is itself a novelty). In order to achieve at this level, children need a complex and subtle combination of skills, some of which are taught at school but many, many more of which are the result of a child's home environment. Genetic inheritance, parental nurture, community, peer-group, influence of the media: all of these occupy far more of a child's day than the 9-3 of school.

"Good" schools vs "bad" schools are just a naive and faux-meritocratic way of saying "class". When working class children left school at 14, they were not compared directly with their peers sitting O-levels. I imagine the results would have been similar to today's crop... Advantaged children achieve better results is, frankly, not news.

Andie, Manchester, UK

While I am not familiar with the British school system, what has been happening in the US system has been the destruction of the public system by enabling parents to either (1) homeschool their children or (2) get McKay scholarships to so-called "private" schools, thereby directing funding away from the public schools, which are slowly being strangled to death by George W. Bush's "Leave No Child Behind," an un-funded mandate which, if not done away with soon will have the school system which once was a great one staggering to its death. Here in Florida, which not only had a Bush as President but another as Governor, we are #49 out of the 50 states. Is there anyone out there who will help us? Gail Dolly from McAlpin, Florida, USA

Gail Dolly, McAlpin, Florida, USA

all children are born equal, all children should receive equal education, all children should have equal opportunuty to learn and grow. rich parents and ambitious parents and ambitious children have right to choose to go to better schools because they have more money or social standard. poor parents, less ambitious parents and children should be helped, encouraged by tthe govt., social welfare that equally good schools are built for poor children and parents and children are motivated to be ambitious to go to good schools and learn equally, so that they could compte later with rich and bright students. poor children should not suffer any form of discrimination, unless they fail in their adult lives on their own fault.

above view is applicable to poor children in every country, especially in india, wher poor children suffer more due negligence from their govt., social and religious leaders and organizations.

Child is the father of a nation.

rama, new orleans, la,usa

Unfortunately there is no simple solution. Better areas = more expensive house prices = higher incomes = better educated parents = better educational support for their children. The crux of the issue is parents valuing education and being able to instill its value in their children. There is no easy way to show a child the maturity needed to advance from the wrong side of the tracks, particularly when that is all you know.

Susan, London,

The Grammar school debate still has a long way to run. It's obvious that the Comprehensive system is one which benefits the children of wealthy parents, whilst the previous system was based upon ability. And it isn't just the present Government which is responsible for the abolition of Grammar schools, Margaret Thatcher did a lot of damage. I struggled for years to understand this, until I realised that the quality of student output from the Grammar schools is on a par with those who have had a private education. Why risk upsetting your best supporters by offering high quality education to everyone?

Derek Power, Uxbridge, UK

Give parents vouchers for their children's education. Stop public funding by other means. Encourage public schools and grammar schools, special needs schools amd allow them to run their own establishments.

Allow selection based on whatever schools want to select on - ability, skin colour, religion or otherwise.

League tables will be redundant, good schools will survive and poor ones will be taken over or shut.

I think it is called the market. However, perhaps most important of all is - keep politicians and politics OUT of schools or education.

Surely everyone by now must understand that this goal of egalitarian opportunity is an LCD too far.

Edwin, Bucharest,

I went to a run down comprehensive filled with middle class teachers that looked down on me i.e. a lower working class boy from a council estate. My parents could not help me with my school work because they could not do it themselves. In the end I left school with no qualifications because I was not given a chance under the current system. Many other people are in the same boat and people that have a better start in life should think carefully before looking down at people less fortunate.

What I noted when I went to my first university was that the middle and upper class students were no more intelligent than the working class students. However, because mummy and daddy helped them out financially they could concentrate on their academic work rather than working and studying at the same time. I passed with a professional first class hons but to do this I had to overcome barriers which many silver-spooners do not. It is not a level playing field and to think otherwise is a mistake.

John, Winsford, Cheshire,

Simple solution. All children should be entitled to a place at a good school. It misses the point badly when people blame parents . Believe it or not, poor parents want their children to do well at school, they just can't get access to places because of being elbowed out by those who can afford homes in good school areas.

jb, London, UK

The rich -or those that make financial sacrifices - have always been able to give their children a better education.

I agree that if the parents don't care about education, it's most likely the children won't. However, if you send children that do care to a school where many uncaring parents send their kids you will also turn your kids into no-hopers. A friend of mine is a comprehensive teacher, she says only around 10% of the children care about their education in her school: swearing, insulting and shouting at teachers are the norm. Very sad.

Spending money on flash buildings and equipment is wasted when the children and sometimes the teachers are just not interested in learning.

I don't know how to deal with the children who don;t want to learn, but we must put all the children that do want to learn in separate schools.

roger, london,

Kids born into uneducated families don't do well at school because the parents don't push them to do well and the teachers have low expectations of them and don't push them either. But education has been dumbed down enough. The A level French exam I took in 2001 and got B for, wasn't as hard as the O level I took in 1978 !!

Fay, London,

Education is always tied to the Ethos of society. Unless we are willing to remove Ideology, prejudice, lack of discipline and bad politics from the schools, there will never be a change.
The problem in this lies with what people today believe to be Ideology, prejudice, discipline and bad politics. I suggest looking at the past (history) for the truth. When did men and women really learn?

M, Milwaukee, USA

Surely this study shows that having parents who care about your education is the single most important factor in how well you will do at school.

You could send the brightest boy or girl in the world to the best school in Britain, but if their parents constantly gave them the impression that education was unimportant and a waste of time, they would struggle to flourish.

AJ, Oxford, UK

For goodness' sake, will people stop twittering on about Grammar Schools. Failing the 11 Plus as a 'top at English but rather slow at Maths' student wrecked my childhood education. Catching-up as an underconfident but, as it turns out, rather academic parent was ultimately satisfying but a lot more difficult and has had a profound effect on my career path. As to the issue of 'failing schools', the problem lies in one area and one only: parents. When the government turns from liberal hand-wringing to supplying a decent, national parent-education programme, we will start to see the change we need. It's time to educate, educate, educate the parents of all these poor, clueless kids. Not all parenting is 'good enough'.

Karen, Hackney, UK

It is only in Britain, one hears the terms 'ambitious parents' referring to the so called middle class parents who have proper jobs and work hard to educate their children. As a parent who was perhaps could be classfied as middle class often wondered why a poor parent can't be ambitious when it comes to education of his/her child.

I would be more than happy to endorse the criticism if it is applied to our politicians like Harriet Harman or Tony Blair who shunned their local schools.

Gary Smith, LONDON,

Robert C of London is wrong, and Stephen from St Ives is right, about the disparity of achievement when grammar schools existed. The difference then was that children from poorer homes were able to join the top-flight groups of achievers - equalling, if not surpassing, anything the independent sector was able to produce. On every measure, social mobility has been drastically reduced by the educational orthodoxies of the past quarter-century. But don't think that the teaching profession, unhindered by government, could put things right: a lot of them are ardent devotees of the creed of equality of outcome, which they absorbed at their training colleges, and which is still the standard dogma.

Neil, Oxford,

I went to a failing comprehensive school in Liverpool in the mid eighties and still gained a PhD in physics. Neither of my parents are 'educated' and never earned much money, but unfortunately, people like Steven Beeching still believe that money and intelligence are linked. After many years in university and industrial research I now teach at an expensive private school and can categorically state that being thick is not the sole privilege of the poor.

Lee, Nottingham, UK

I think that this actually suggests something very positive; if it's important to you that your kids get a good education, in Britain you can do something about it!

We should be more concerned with why so much onus is placed on somewhat arbitrary academic achievement rather than actual preparation for life & work.

Richard, London, UK

It really is a pity that, for this government, 'closing the attainment gap' means reducing the level of achievement of the most able, rather than increasing the level for the less able.
I'm sure they don't actively mean that to happen, but as is so often the case with their half-baked, dogmatic, centralised, 'we know what's best for you' policy, the effects are often the exact opposite of what's intended. They have proved that they themselves, perhaps as products of their own education system, are just not able enough to get it right.

Mike, Guildford,

A child of poor parents on a council estate, I went to the local grammar school and thence to university. My lessons were not disrupted by children with learning and/or behavioural difficulties needing special treatment who could barely read and write. My teachers had authority because we pupils didn't have rights without responsibilities. Just throwing money at the problem is no answer; scrap the Children Act, select by ability, open special schools, create apprenticeships and value education.

Andy, Whitchurch,

The comment by Steven Beeching of Camberley in Surrey, is not only repugnant but ignorant in the extreme, it explains why the notion that ignorance is the prerogative of the poor persists and is, probably, typical of people who live in his neck of the woods. Education should define as the process of removing ignorance and as a means of bringing about social change by raising the general level of intelligence and ability of the population as a whole. Herbert Spencer, (1820 - 1903), writing in 'Social Statistics' suggested that "Education has for its object the formation of Character"; it is not character which produces a sound economic platform, based on employment opportunities and a motivated workforce, but education and training which helps to stop the decline; education that can help us understand and negotiate with other nations; and work-related training and experience throughout our working life which can raise the level of confidence and belief in our ability to succeed.

Kenneth Armitage, Suffolk, England

I don’t see why there is always this despair about children from underprivileged economic backgrounds underachieving, don’t people ever stop to think that the reason their parents are unable to improve their own financial standing is because they are mostly unintelligent, and therefore unable to hold down a decent job? Stupid is their genetic inheritance. We always need dustmen?

Steven Beeching, Camberley, Surrey

Stephen from St Ives has obviously put his brain in back to front this morning. "If the government hadn't abolished grammar schools, we wouldn't have this disparity in achievement." When was there ever greater disparity than when they existed? The real problem in poorer families is the lack of wider learning culture beyond the school gates, not the schools themselves. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

Robert C, London, UK

Very possibly the rich are rich because they are more able, certainly more able to work whatever system is in place. If government got out of the way and let schools be run by teachers, in the way the law is run by solicitors managing their own training & discipline and owning their own practices, education would improve for all,

John Ledbury, Kings Lynn, England

Spending more and more money on deprived areas isn't going to help. The 'good' school are good because they are out of the reach of the deprived areas. The goverment blames the schools, the teachers for low achievement but the kids and their parents are to 'blame'. Why would they want to achieve more? If you get pregnat at the age of sixteen you're likely to get a coucil house, benefits... And also, high achivemets at school does not always mean happy and 'succesfull' life. We need builders, plummers etc.! Not anyone can have Phd.

Sonia, Budapest,

This analysis of data is very poor. Shame it came from the Shadow Education Secretary.

Isn't it obvious that the only difference in education comes from the pupil's parental skills. No money can buy that. The link with the middle class here is that they probably have a good family tradition of giving good education to their children.

L Yanovic, Reading, UK

you will find that the sharp-elbowed middle-class parents get access to excellent schools, but those trapped in deprived areas do not,” he said.

They are only good schools because they are out of the reach of the deprived areas - and the children from them. Can't you see that it is the children that are unequal, not the schools?

kris, pass,

The current situation cries out for a full return to Grammar School type education. Rather than equalising opportunity the comprehensive system serves to limit it. The system deprives children living in poor areas, served by inadequate schools of what may be their one chance of a good quality education.

Instead we have a situation where receiving quality education depends on parents' abilities to pay the price of housing within preferred school catchment areas.

What more damning criticism of a government can there be if its education policy discriminates against the poorest members of society.

Archer, Sharjah, UAE

Archer, Sharjah, UAE

it is disingenuous to pretend that the schools are colonised. they are only good because they are attended by pupils from homes where the parents look after and discipline and are involved with their children. What do you mean good schools? A school isn't inherently good or bad. They are only as good as the pupils, parents and teachers make them. If criminals and delinquents were allowed into them in any great numbers they would cease to be good overnight.

Pensky, twickenham,

Labour have had nearly eleven years, countless billions of taxpayers' pounds, the catchy Blair soundbite, Education,education,education and they STILL fail to deliver.

Let's get this incompetent, sleaze-ridden government out before the gap is simply too enormous to bridge.

Richard , Greater London, England

Perhaps if the Government hadn't abolished Grammar Schools we wouldn't have this disparity in achievement.

Stephen, St. Ives, England