Life, work and education present additional challenges to disadvantaged pupils. There are wide gaps in early years outcomes, performance in key stage 2 SATs and at GCSE between pupils entitled to free school meals and their more affluent peers. These gaps widen as pupils get older. The attainment gap is 20% at age 5, 22% at age 11, and 27% by age 16. It’s not surprising that poverty at home affects outcomes at school, but it’s worrying that things get worse rather than better over time at school.

In computing, there are big issues around access to teaching and qualifications. In the 20% of most affluent areas, 93% of schools offer GCSE in computer science, but in the 20% least affluent areas, it’s just 67%. 16% of pupils in those affluent areas take GCSE computer science, but in the poorest areas it’s less than 11%. The average GCSE computer science grade drops from 5.3 in the richest postcodes to 4.2 in the poorest.

The disadvantage gap in provision, uptake and attainment for GCSE computing is particularly worrying as computing is a relatively meritocratic field. Getting on and doing well in the IT industry is much less about accident of birth, what ones parents do or about a private education, but more about an interest in technology, perseverance when things get tricky and a love of problem solving. Yet, if we don’t even provide access to the qualifications, or make these accessible and engaging for all kids, then access to apprenticeships or HE, and subsequently to IT professions, will deny these opportunities for social mobility to many.

There are a number of ways to tackle this. Some of these are about national policy, but there’s also lots that can be done at school level.

Pupil Premium funding for disadvantaged pupils, and accountability to Ofsted for how this was spent, did help, with the attainment gap narrowing slowly but steadily year on year from 2010 up until the 2019-20 academic year. The good that was done was reversed during lockdowns and home learning in 2020-21, and has been worsening since. Schools receiving Pupil Premium now have a limited catalogue of things on which it can be spent, with most of these being interventions that boost the quality of provision for all. This isn’t a bad thing, but it no longer addresses the need to improve progress specifically for the most disadvantaged.

For computing, I’m hopeful that the ongoing curriculum and assessment review might recommend replacing ‘narrow, dull and hard’ GCSE computer science with a new GCSE covering all of computing, which should make it more practical for schools in less advantaged areas to offer, and would make it appealing to a much broader pupil demographic.

Digital poverty, understood as ‘The inability to interact with the online world fully, when where and how an individual needs to’, is just one of the challenges facing those living in poverty, but it has a huge impact on any pupil’s ability to access curriculum resources outside of school, take charge of their own learning, and engage with programming, digital media and office skills. The previous Labour government provided a highly effective home access scheme, offering computers and internet access to poor families with children in key stages 2 and 3. This was wound up when the coalition government took office, but the new government now has an action plan on digital inclusion, although the first phase of this seems quite modest, given the scale of the problem: piloting a ‘multi-department device donation scheme to provide re-purposed government laptops to those that need them’ is good, but not enough.

For schools, if pupils studying computing, especially if they’re taking GCSE or A Level computer science, don’t have a computer and internet access, then Pupil Premium can be used to address this. While access to general digital technology isn’t in the Pupil Premium catalogue, the DfE’s rules say that ‘In exceptional circumstances, and where this is necessary to overcome specific barriers to pupil attainment, schools may use this funding on items not included on the list’. Not having access to a computer while studying computing is a pretty specific barrier to attainment.

At the classroom level, we have to be serious about high expectations for all. We can’t take the present attainment gap as a given, lowering our expectations of the grades free school meals pupils will achieve, of how hard they’ll work, or of their ability in our subject. I don’t think knowing predicted grades helps with this. Pupils from poorer homes generally did worse in the SATs than the other kids, and so their predicted GCSE grades are reduced. What worries me is if teachers lower their expectations due to the flight paths they’re given.

Education should broaden pupils’ horizons beyond those of their background. This is especially true for pupils whose home environment reduces access to technology, opportunities to play in and explore the digital world, and understanding of the role of IT and AI in work and society. This means extending the opportunities for playful creativity and digital criticality beyond the requirements of the computing curriculum. It means stretching pupils’ thinking, exposing them to innovative technologies and debating some of the implications of technology in every aspect of life.

As with the gender gap in computing, we can do better with our role models and examples. Big Tech founders and CEOs are the wealthiest of the wealthy, and typically had privileged backgrounds themselves. Many of the great figures from computing history started life with many advantages. One notable exception is Tommy Flowers, born in the East End, son of a bricklayer, and taught as a child to be ‘frugal in everything’. Flowers did an apprenticeship and evening classes before working as an engineer at the post office. He built Colossus, the Bletchley Park computer that cracked the German’s Lorenz cipher; he received little recognition for the work at the time and was left in debt as he’d paid for the valves himself and wasn’t in The Imitation Game. You and your pupils can see a rebuild of his machine at Bletchley’s National Museum of Computing on a school trip. Beyond Flowers and other computing working class heroes, draw on your own former pupils, from backgrounds that your current pupils can immediately relate to, to help lift their aspirations for careers in computing.

I’d like to see all schools offering the GCSE and a far broader demographic taking it than at present. I’d also like to see the achievement gap between the least and most affluent start narrowing again. We need policy to address this, but there’s lots we can do at classroom and school level already.

Originally published in Sapientia, the newsletter of ICT for Education.