‘The glaring gap in the English education system is social class’

Becky Francis is a Labour party member with strong views, and can’t stand it when politicians ignore evidence. Can she sort out the MPs’ select committee?

On the face of it, she was an unlikely choice as adviser to the education select committee. Becky Francis, professor of education and social justice at King’s College London, is a Labour party member and feminist who wears her politics on her sleeve. She thinks private schools should lose their charitable status. She does not mince words about failing academies. She is impatient with politicians who ignore evidence.
When you meet Francis – which I did at her plain university office – her appointment seems less of a surprise. She gives the strong impression of someone who wishes to be helpful, and talks in a very clear way – citing evidence when she says anything vaguely controversial. When she mentions how state school pupils get better degrees than their privately educated peers, she is quick to point me to a Higher Education Funding Council for England report published last month, for example.
Asked how she will measure her own success with the committee in, say, a year’s time, she replies: “I hope they’ll be glad they invited me.”
The priorities of the new committee, chaired by Neil Carmichael, the Tory MP for Stroud, with new faces including the SNP’s Marion Fellows as well as five Conservative women, are yet to be fleshed out, but include a report on the role of regional schools commissioners (already controversial) and another on a looming teacher shortage. Whether the committee will be able to match the robustness of its predecessor, led by Graham Stuart, remains to be seen. While the adviser provides support, it is down to MPs to question witnesses, including the secretary of state.
Francis is a strong believer in the pupil premium, introduced in 2010, which tops up and ringfences funding for the poorest pupils, and wants to see it remain “for all disadvantaged pupils, so for high-achieving as well as low-achieving kids. I think that was radical.”
She grew up in a village outside Bath, the daughter of a recycling entrepreneur and an Oxford-educated mother who stayed at home when her children were small. She scraped through O-levels at the local comprehensive and says the experience of staying on, when many of her peers left school, is where her interest in educational inequality began.
The independent study required for A-levels suited her better, and after reading English at Swansea University she won a doctoral scholarship for a study comparing boys and girls. This was the early 1990s, and coincided with the start of what she calls a “moral panic” about boys’ underachievement.
Just as some Tories hark back to an imaginary golden age of grammar schools, she thinks the golden age of comprehensives was imaginary too. They mostly weren’t comprehensive – her own school was both streamed and setted – while faith and other schools entrenched divisions that continue to this day. Also, in important ways, schools have improved: “The idea some people on the left have that things are worse in education now – go back to the statistics for the 1970s and 80s and see how the working classes were failed at every turn.”
She thinks the national curriculum has been beneficial and supports the model of a self-improving school system advanced by Michael Gove. But she fears this ideal could be jeopardised at a time of shrinking resources, because successful schools won’t share expertise when there isn’t enough to go around – let alone independent schools, whose response to repeated pleas from ministers to be more generous she calls “extremely disappointing”.
Above all, she fears for socially disadvantaged children. Educational inequality, she knows, goes hand in hand with economic inequality. Even extraordinary schools cannot close gaps on their own. “Whenever there is a squeeze on resources and capacity, it tends to be poorer areas and people that feel it most. I worry that welfare cuts will take away from families of pupil-premium children and that we might see gaps growing again.”