Schools white paper: what it means for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds

Last week’s Schools White Paper, Every child achieving and thriving, was a watershed moment in English education policy. It breaks with the established orthodoxy of the past decade - the belief that high standards can only be secured through a relentless focus on a narrow set of outcomes. It sets a new direction: one where inclusion is not an add-on, but a design principle. The other side of the standards coin.

From here on, creating school environments where young people get the support they need to thrive and achieve is core education business.

As an organisation championing young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, we’ve argued for this shift for years. The indefensible and persistent attainment gap means young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are 30 percentage points less likely to attain GCSE English and maths – gateway qualifications that open the doors to opportunity in adulthood. Attainment has always been critical to what we do.

But at the same time, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, it was clear something deeper had shifted. Rates of school absence, suspension, and exclusion rose sharply, but the political and policy environment lacked answers. Our Who Is Losing Learning (WILL) coalition – alongside partners The Difference, Misson 44, and IPPR – found that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds were losing staggering amounts of learning. 34 million days lost to unauthorised absence and suspension 2023/24, up from 19 million pre-pandemic. 1 in 3 young people eligible for free school meals persistently absent, with a suspension rate over four and a half times higher than their more affluent peers and nearly double the rate of permanent exclusion.

Our research illuminated the long shadow the disengagement crisis cast over young people’s lives – and our work with hundreds of schools, families, and charities made the diagnosis clear. Inclusion needs to be baked into the system to re-engage young people and help them reach their full potential, with support starting early and continuing through adolescence as they embark on their GCSEs and take their first steps into the labour market.

This is why we support the vision of the white paper - every school should be “a safe, calm, and caring place where every child feels they belong and are seen” - and many of the proposed solutions.

If implemented effectively, this will be a game changer for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Now, as we move from vision into implementation, there are spaces where Government could go further, and unanswered questions which must be answered.

Inclusion – the big win

The white paper adopted the WILL coalition’s definition of inclusion – 'all staff supporting the learning, wellbeing, and safety needs of all children, so that they belong, achieve, and thrive'. They commit to universal and targeted support in all schools, so young people’s routine and predictable needs are met at the earliest opportunity through specialist teams, dismantling barriers to learning before they become blockers. We modelled that this would take £850 million; Government committed to £1.6 billion to build inclusive mainstream, plus £1.8 billion for external support.

We called for inclusion to be measurable: the Pupil Engagement Framework will enable schools to effectively measure pupil experience, including feelings of belonging, and provide a foundation from which every school can develop a strategic approach to inclusion and track their progress.

Promising signs on suspensions

Early intervention will help reduce suspensions, offering young people the support they need before their behaviour escalates. While suspensions are sometimes necessary, they are not without cost: pupils who are suspended from school even once experience much worse long-term outcomes in school and in work on average.

But more detail is needed...

We broadly support the position set out in the white paper that out-of-school suspensions should be limited to the most serious issues. However, more detail is needed on what in-school suspensions might look like – if they don’t involve efforts to understand the barriers young people are facing, rebuild and repair relationships, and ensure pupils aren’t missing out on vital learning, this will be a missed opportunity. Schools should report data, and we need oversight on outcomes.

Grasping the nettle on SEND

Potential SEND reforms are an issue that has understandably caused real anxiety, but it’s hard to escape the facts. The current system doesn’t work for anyone - young people, families, or schools. The challenge is particularly acute for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are more likely to have special needs but less likely to secure an EHCP or special school. A universal system, if properly implemented, will effectively level the playing field for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and benefit those whose needs are currently undiagnosed or unmet, while also improving outcomes for those who previously had to fight to secure support.

Still, we would like more clarity on the requirement that all schools will have an inclusion base, a dedicated safe space where pupils can access targeted support that bridges the gap between mainstream and specialist provision. Through our work with Co-op Academies Trust and The Two Counties Trust, we have learned that effective inclusive internal provision is more than just a space for students to go. Instead, it is an intervention that is deliberately designed and targeted, appropriately resourced and integrated into a school that is inclusive at its core.

Anything less, and we risk creating inclusion on paper but not in practice, where students with additional needs remain confined to selected spaces but who are still missing from main classrooms. There is also risk that without clarity and careful planning, any additional resource ‘base style’ provision will be used to manage students who would have otherwise been suspended, when the profile of need – emotional health, behavioural, learning, welfare – and therefore the support required may overlap but ultimately be very different. We continue to wonder whether the extra resource committed to building inclusive mainstream will account for these additional non-SEND needs, which also require thoughtful and targeted intervention to support learning.

A smorgasbord on attendance

The Government is right to highlight attendance is a critical problem – but it’s also a tricky one to solve. Our research has found that the post-pandemic surge in school absence is driven by a diverse array of factors: a fractured social contract between schools and families, a school environment that too often feels rigid and transactional, and complex trade-offs on attendance that young people decide every morning. Likewise, the attendance crisis can only be solved with a diverse array of interventions.

The turn towards inclusion, combined with a boosted enrichment offer and additional support for emotional health promised in the white paper, could see many of these students return to the classroom. But last year, 1 in 3 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds missed ten percent or more of their lessons, and we worry that without laser focus and the freedom for schools to innovate on attendance, this group might continue to be left behind.

Changes to the funding formula proposed in the white paper could mean greater investment in schools serving the most persistently disadvantaged populations, but we’d love to see Government be more ambitious, targeting the young people furthest from the classroom. This will require Government to create an environment where schools are supported to test, learn, and grow new approaches to the issue, in conversation with young people and their families. We’re glad to see recognition in the white paper that parent engagement is vital, but this must go beyond improved communication. Our research found that many low-income parents feel that school does not meet the needs of their child – a rupture that can only be fixed by a system that truly delivers for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We would also encourage government to accept that schools should learn from the community and voluntary sector, who have significant expertise on re-engaging the most marginalised students, supporting them to reconnect with education. Our partners in the Engage Fund are school engagement experts, and much can be learned from their child-centred and relationship-based practice models.

Attainment

Efforts to improve attainment outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have stagnated for too long, which is why the Government’s commitment to halving the attainment gap is so crucial. GCSE English and maths qualifications are protective for young people: every step up the qualifications ladder halves their chance of being neither earning nor learning in adulthood. As the white paper makes clear, there are already hundreds of schools in England bucking the trend and delivering better attainment outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We’re pleased Government is investing in high-quality teaching and hope that the funding formula changes allow schools serving the most disadvantaged cohorts to recruit and retain high quality teachers. This should be the norm, not the exception.

Still, there’s less detail on what else this group will need to really break the link between family background and outcomes. Increasing access to tutoring through new AI models is a potentially promising approach, but we must go further. The young people furthest away from vital GCSE qualifications will need more than tech – they need trusted adults to motivate and guide them to exam success, and this can’t be done on the cheap.

So what next?

None of this will be easy. Schools are being asked to hold higher standards, rebuild trust on attendance, meet increasingly complex needs, and close a stubborn attainment gap - all at once.

This demands more than rhetoric. It requires sustained investment, clarity of purpose, and the confidence to stay the course. But it is worth doing.

When inclusion and excellence move together, the payoff is profound: more young people achieving, more families believing in the system, and a stronger economy built on broader talent. The White Paper sets a new direction. The task now is to deliver it in classrooms, in staffrooms, and in the lives of the young people who stand to gain the most.