An extract from Leon Feinstein’s article in New economy, the journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
“Equality of opportunity is constantly and heavily influenced by the background of parents.
However, while early intervention is important, there are strong reasons to suggest that a serious effort to provide equality of opportunity requires a consideration of the whole of childhood. Attempts to evaluate the effects of pre-school interventions strongly suggest that where those interventions do not persist into the school years, even the effect of high quality programmes are lost.
What matters for success in programmes for disadvantaged groups is persistence, quality and adaptability to the diverse and complex needs of individuals.
These are the qualities of good parents that the state has to match or in some way mirror if it is to manage to level up rather than down. And these requirements have significant implications for government investment in education.
The requirements of persistence and quality are of course expensive to meet and therefore require some targeting of resources. This is not a question of means-testing but of providing schools and welfare agencies with a range of services that can be called on for the particular needs of particular children, based on informed assessment and, crucially, personal knowledge of the needs of the child.”