Poverty is not a barrier to success at school, a respected international organisation said yesterday.
Factors such as poorly educated parents and run-down neighbourhoods condemn underprivileged families to a cycle of ‘social disadvantage’, according to some education experts.
But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development dismissed the assumption as a ‘myth’.
Research shows children from disadvantaged backgrounds in some countries outperform the wealthiest children in other nations in maths, it said.
The poorest ten per cent of pupils in Shanghai are generally more advanced than the richest 20 per cent of children in the UK, for example.
The gap between wealthy Shanghai children and underprivileged British children is equivalent to six years of education by the age of 15.
In the Netherlands, children from the poorest families can be up to a year ahead of a child from a similar background in Nigeria at the same age.
The findings suggest the social and economic background of a pupil is far less important than the quality of the teaching in their school and the education system in which it operates.
OECD spokesman Andrew Schleicher said the data ‘debunks the myth that poverty is destiny’.
His intervention will lend weight to the argument of those who say fundamental problems in education should be addressed to help more poor children go to university rather than so-called social engineering, under which top universities have been encouraged to accept candidates with lower grades if they come from deprived backgrounds.
The OECD analysis was based on tests sat by tens of thousands of 15-year-olds in 40 developed countries or major economic regions in 2012 – before Coalition reforms began to take effect.
