Scotland's largest
and most effective
education trade union

• Home
• About EIS
• Careers
• Site Map

Updated: Saturday, June 12, 2010 | Printer Friendly Version | |

AGM 2010 equality fringe meeting

Contents

» Poverty and Education

Dr Linda Croxford, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Educational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh addressed the AGM 2010 equality fringe meeting which took place on Friday 11th June.

This meeting was chaired by Bill Ramsay convener of the EIS equality committee.

Linda has written a number of papers for many years on this issue and in October 2009 she spoke at the EIS Poverty Seminar on social inequalities in Scottish schooling.

Poverty and Education

At the AGM of 2008, the Institute took the decision to re-examine why the blight of poverty continued to have a detrimental impact on the educational opportunities of a worryingly high proportion of young Scots.

Although there was an increase in prosperity generally, the gap between rich and poor had never been wider.
As we publish this report into the links between poverty and educational underachievement, our public services face the prospect of contraction in the levels of investment for our schools, colleges and universities.

In many communities, as this report (download) reveals, poverty persists. Many initiatives, referred to in this report, which to some extent managed to breach the wall of poverty and open up educational opportunity to some to whom it had been denied, are now under threat.

Poverty is a multi-faceted canker on the lives, not only of far too many young people individually, but on their families and on their communities. It is true many can and do overcome poverty’s pernicious effects. However, many individuals, and even worse, many institutions, simplistically argue that all individuals are inherently equipped to overcome poverty’s effects on self esteem, on aspiration and on educational attainment, even when the evidence, as we argue in this report, suggests otherwise.

We argue here, based on the evidence from a wide variety of sources, that underlying and recurrent patterns of poverty can often undermine the ability of pupils to learn and can pose challenges for teachers within impoverished communities to teach.

Since its founding in 1847 the Institute has promoted sound learning and has argued that sound learning requires positive engagement by those who learn and those who teach. Poverty can, and does often, undermine positive engagement. We will therefore continue to argue for its eradication.

Bill Ramsey
Convener Equality Committee

• download poverty & education report 2010
• view equality motions & amendments results
• back to AGM 2010 home

» Full News Index