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Summary POVERTY AND CHILDRENS SCHOOL EXPERIENCE
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Journal of Poverty and Social Justice • vol 27 • no 3 • 313–331 • © Policy Press 2019Print ISSN 1759-8273 • Online ISSN 1759-8281 • https://doi.org/10.1332/175982719X15622547838659
Accepted for publication 5 June 2019 • First published online 5 September 2019
article
The influence of poverty on children’s school
experiences: pupils’ perspectives
Lynn Naven, Lynn.Naven@glasgow.ac.uk
James Egan, James.Egan@glasgow.ac.uk
Glasgow Centre for Population Health, UK
Edward M. Sosu, edward.sosu@strath.ac.uk
University of Strathclyde, UK
Sara Spencer, sspencer@cpagscotland.org.uk
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Child Poverty Action Group, UK
This study examined the potential influence of policies and practices on the ability of children from
Copyright The Policy Press
low-income families to participate fully in the school day. Pupils from six schools participated in 71
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focus groups and revealed a range of barriers affecting their school experience: transport costs and
limited support; clothing costs, stigma and enforcement of school dress codes; material barriers
to learning at school and home; concerns about free school meals; missing out on school trips,
clubs and events.
Findings on school uniform were an important catalyst towards a recent policy change in Scotland
in increasing the school clothing grant.
Key words poverty • attainment • barriers • children • school experiences
To cite this article: Naven, L., Sosu, E., Spencer, S. and Egan, J. (2019) The influence of poverty
on children’s school experiences: pupils’ perspectives, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice,
vol 27, no 3, 313–331, DOI: 10.1332/175982719X15622547838659
Introduction
Family background is an important predictor of academic success, and a large body of
evidence indicates that poverty has a direct and negative effect on children’s educational
outcomes (Blanden and Gregg, 2004; Cooper and Stewart, 2013; Dickerson and
Popli, 2016; OECD, 2016). For instance, children living in poverty are likely to have
impaired working memory, short attention spans, high levels of distractibility, difficulty
monitoring the quality of their work, and difficulty generating new solutions to
problems, making school harder for them (Evans and Schamberg, 2009). Conversely,
increases in family income have been associated with gains in cognitive achievement
(Cooper and Stewart, 2013; Cooper and Stewart, 2017).While the evidence suggests
a causal relationship between household income and children’s educational outcomes,
313
, Lynn Naven et al
our understanding of the mechanisms by which poverty leads to poorer outcomes
is not well understood.
Two key theories are generally used to explain the poverty-attainment gap.
According to the Resource and Investment theory, children living in poverty fall
behind more economically advantaged peers because poorer parents have fewer
resources to invest in goods and services that directly or indirectly contribute to
child development (Mayer, 1997; Conger et al, 2010). Parents on low income lack the
resources to provide access to stimulating home learning environments, such as books
that help children to familiarise them with the words teachers use in class or the words
that appear in reading materials (Jensen, 2013; Connelly et al, 2014). Resources also
determine the ability of children to participate in extracurricular activities (Wikeley
et al, 2007), and afford day-to-day essentials, such as school uniform that can affect
feelings of belongingness (Ridge, 2002; Jensen, 2013). Poor or damp housing, and
nutritional deficiencies associated with poverty directly affect key mediators such as
children’s health and brain development (Gottlieb et al, 1995; Reading, 1997;Taki et al,
2010; Basch, 2011). Indeed, children living in poverty are more likely to experience
other health problems such as chronic disease, mental health problems and increased
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risk of unintentional injuries and accidents associated with wider environmental risk,
all of which interfere with school attendance and educational outcomes (Benzeval,
2014; NHS Health Scotland, 2018).
Copyright The Policy Press
The Family and Environmental Stress theory on the other hand argues that money
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affects children’s cognitive outcomes through high levels of parental stress. Parents on
low income experience significant stressors and negative impacts on mental health
arising from the struggle to pay for day-to-day essentials. (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn,
1997; Mortimore and Whitty, 2000; Butterworth et al, 2012). Poor parental mental
health in turn leads parents to use harsher disciplines and less positive comments,
which negatively affects children’s behavioural and cognitive outcomes (Risley
and Hart, 2006; Sosu and Schmidt, 2017). Children living in poverty themselves
experience greater chronic stress which affects brain development, social competence
and academic success (Evans et al, 2007). This stress in families, caused by poverty, is
thought to result in children spending a part of their day worrying instead of learning
or playing, leading to ‘a little part of their childhood being taken away’ (Royal College
of Paediatrics and Child Health, 2017).
Existing theories suggest that poverty affects children’s cognitive outcomes mainly
through parental behaviours. Despite the fact that children spend a large proportion
of their time with teachers and peers at school, very few studies have explored
the mediating role of the school environment on the educational experiences of
children from low-income households. A recent review of evidence suggests that
a positive school climate can mitigate the association between poverty and poor
academic achievement but points to significant gaps in the quantity and quality
of research (Berkowitz et al, 2017). It has been argued that schools are modelled
on particular norms within society and those norms can either help children to
succeed in the face of economic adversity or lead to further disadvantages (Reay,
2006). For instance, evidence suggests that teachers’ decisions and behaviours
about children’s ability are influenced by children’s socioeconomic background,
and this can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies of low educational outcomes (Francis
et al, 2017; McGillicuddy and Devine, 2018). Theories of social exclusion (Levitas
et al, 2007) also suggest that decisions taken by schools can significantly affect the
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, The influence of poverty on children’s school experiences
ability of children from low-income households to fully participate in school life.
Crucially, research on children’s own perspectives about how poverty influences their
participation and school experiences is sparse (Berkowitz et al, 2017). Privileging
children’s own voices is likely to give insight into the nuanced ways in which
poverty affects educational outcomes, a perspective that might not be visible to
adults within the school or home environment. It has been suggested that children’s
reports of their own experiences very often differ from adults’ perceptions of child
experiences (Casas, 2011). The current study aimed to fill this research gap by
exploring children’s experiences of the school day and their perceptions of how
poverty influences these experiences.
Context of the study: poverty and educational attainment in Scotland
Similar to the rest of the United Kingdom, recent data on child poverty in Scotland
indicates one in four children (26%) were living in relative poverty (Scottish
Government, 2017a). Child poverty rates had been falling for many years but started
to rise following the effects of the 2008 economic crises and the UK government
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policy decisions around welfare reforms, cuts to public spending, as well as stagnating
wages (Scottish Government, 2015; Scottish Government, 2017a). Within Scotland,
the local authority where this study was located has one of the highest rates of child
Copyright The Policy Press
poverty in the UK, with 37 per cent of children living in poverty (after housing costs)
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(End Child Poverty, 2019).
There is clear evidence in Scotland that poverty significantly influences children’s
educational outcomes with students from the richest households consistently
outperforming those from poorer backgrounds (Scottish Government, 2014;
Sosu and Ellis, 2014; Scottish Government, 2019; OECD, 2016). Recent Scottish
government policy and investment has focused on closing this poverty-related
attainment gap. For instance, the National Improvement Framework for Scottish
education (Scottish Government, 2017c) provides a vision for closing the
gap through actions such as improved school leadership, teachers’ professional
development, increased parental engagement, and use of assessment and other data
to monitor and guide school decision-making. Other policies include the provision
of free school meals (FSM) being extended to all Primary 1 to Primary 3 children
in Scotland from 2015 onwards, to ensure that every child has one hot meal each
day and to minimise stigma around claiming meals (Scottish Government, 2017b).
The Scottish Attainment Challenge launched in 2015 committed £750m, some
of which is directly given to schools to improve the educational achievement of
pupils from low-income households.
While schools are increasingly being expected to address the attainment gap
through curriculum-based and pedagogical measures, there is limited understanding
of the underlying poverty-related mechanisms involved in educational attainment
for the most disadvantaged pupils (Scottish Government, 2017c). More specifically,
little attention has been devoted to understanding and addressing school-related
factors that might serve as a barrier to attainment for children from low-income
backgrounds. Even more scarce is research focused on understanding these
relationships from the children’s own perspective. It is this gap that the current
research aimed to fill. The current study was therefore aimed at answering the
following research question:
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