Is poverty just an excuse?

Progressive educators and teachers must stop blaming poor pupil attainment on poverty and admit the failure of their ideology. This was the key idea expressed in a highly readable report from teacher and education researcher Robert Peal (with support from think-tank Civitas).

Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas in education argues that progressive teaching methods, characterised by child-centred learning, a focus on skills over education, and the belief that strict discipline is oppressive, have given us “decades of chaotic schools, disenchanted teachers and pupil failure”.

Rather than accept the failings of the progressive approach, he says teachers and policy-makers have used poverty and inequality as an “excuse” for the poor attainment of pupils. Peal cites data that contradicts this truism, showing that countries such as Japan, Canada and Poland have worse poverty than the UK, yet out-perform us in PISA data on student achievement.