The gap we are not going to accept

Some weeks this blog writes itself around something that happened in the diary. This week I want to write about something harder: a problem we have not solved, and what we are now going to do about it.

If you are a disadvantaged child in a Wiltshire school — and "disadvantaged" here is a clumsy word for a child whose family is on a low income, or who has been in our care — you are, on average, further behind your classmates than you should be. Worse than that: on some of our most recent measures, that gap has not been narrowing. In places it has gone the wrong way.

I am not going to dress that up. It is not good enough, it is not the Wiltshire I want for our children, and as the Cabinet Member with responsibility for education I am not going to pretend the figures say something kinder than they do.

This is not only a Wiltshire problem — but it is still our problem

It is worth being clear that this is a national failure as much as a local one. The Government's recent schools white paper sets out an ambition to halve the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers, and the consultation on those wider school reforms closes this coming Monday. The fact that ministers have made closing this gap the centrepiece of national policy tells you how stubborn the problem has been, and for how long, across the whole country.

But "everyone is struggling with this" is an explanation, not an excuse. The children in our schools are ours to serve. So the question I have been asking colleagues — and the one I want to put honestly to you — is this: if we put additional effort and resource into this, will it actually make a difference?

Why I think the honest answer is "yes, if we spend it on the right things"

Here is what I have become convinced of, and it is the thread running through the plan our education team has developed.

Money on its own does not close attainment gaps. Decades of national evidence are fairly blunt about that. What closes gaps is the quality of what that money buys — and the strongest evidence we have points to two things above all.

The first is the quality of teaching itself. The best available research is consistent: great teaching is the single most powerful lever a school has, and disadvantaged children benefit from it disproportionately.

Let me be very clear about what that does not mean. It is not a suggestion that our teachers are not already working hard, or not already doing the very best they can for the children in front of them — I know they are, often in difficult circumstances and with stretched resources. The point is different. Teaching is a craft you never finish learning, and the evidence on what helps disadvantaged children most is always developing. Our job is not to tell good professionals they are falling short; it is to give them the time, the training, the encouragement and the practical support to keep developing their best practice still further. So the heart of our approach is not a gadget or a scheme — it is sustained backing for the people already doing the work, especially in the early years and in the foundations of reading, writing and maths, where gaps open early and then harden.

The second is attendance. A child who is not in school cannot benefit from even the best teaching, and the national evidence now identifies absence as one of the largest movable drivers of the disadvantage gap. Poorer attendance is not only an attainment issue; it is often an early signal of something else going on in a child's life. That is why a focused, leadership-led push on attendance and engagement — particularly tackling persistent absence among our disadvantaged children — sits right at the centre of what we are doing, rather than being treated as an afterthought.

None of this is guesswork. The plan is built deliberately around what the evidence says works, not around what we hope might. That is the most honest answer I can give to my own question.

What we are committing to

I am not going to set out the delivery plan here in detail — it is still being worked through and properly scrutinised, and you are owed precision rather than half-formed numbers. But I can tell you the shape of the commitment.

We are putting real, targeted effort behind the schools and children where the need is greatest. We are doing it over a sustained period rather than as a one-year flourish, because gaps that took years to open will not close in a term — or even, realistically, in a single year. And we are setting ourselves measurable ambitions — clear improvements, by a defined point, in how our disadvantaged children read, write and do maths, and in how reliably they are in school to learn at all.

I want to be straight that this is a hard target and we may not hit every part of it. But I would rather be held to an ambitious, public goal and miss part of it than set a comfortable one and call it success.

Hold us to this

So this is less an announcement than a marker put down.

I should say why this one matters to me. I first volunteered as a youth worker in 1988, spent fifteen years teaching in further education before this, and have now given seventeen years to the council — and across the whole of that, the work I have been proudest of has almost always come back to the same thing: a young person who was being quietly written off, and the moment someone decided not to write them off. That is really all this plan is — a refusal to accept that a child's start in life should decide how it goes. Every percentage point in those figures is a real Wiltshire child with a name, a teacher who believes in them, and a future that is still entirely open. That is worth getting right.

Over the coming months you will see this work begin in Wiltshire schools. I want to be realistic about timescales, though: gaps that took years to open will not close quickly, and I would expect it to be eighteen months to two years before we can fairly judge whether this programme is genuinely shifting outcomes. Anyone promising faster than that is not being straight with you. But when that data comes, you are entitled to see it and to ask whether it is moving. That is the right way for this to work. A council that talks about disadvantaged children but never publishes whether it is making a difference for them is not serious about the problem.

I think we are serious. Hold us to this over the next couple of years, and let's see together whether the gap has started to close.

As ever, these are my own reflections as a councillor and Cabinet Member, written in a personal capacity.