A commentary on Teach First’s Class Dismissed: Closing the Gap for Persistently Disadvantaged Pupils (2026) and the Education Policy Institute’s Persistent Disadvantage: Further Analysis for Teach First (2026)
Simon Uttley is a serving Catholic secondary school Headteacher. He is Director of www.koin-ed.org, Adjunct Professor at the University of Notre Dame (USA), London and Visiting Professor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
Table of Contents
3. The framework of Catholic social teaching. 5
3.2 The preferential option for the poor. 5
3.5 The common good and the Universal Destination of Goods. 6
4. A Catholic reading of Persistent Disadvantage. 6
4.1 Persistent Disadvantage as a structure of sin. 6
4.2 The Preferential Option and the politics of invisibility. 7
4.3 Subsidiarity and the witness of Outlier Schools. 7
4.4 The Common Good and the postcode lottery. 8
4.5 Double disadvantage and the dignity of the person. 8
4.6 Work, vocation and the crisis of sixteen. 9
4.7 A Note of Conscience on Faith Schools and Admissions. 9
5. Catholic social teaching and the policy recommendations. 10
6. Limitations of the analysis. 10
1. Introduction
This report takes as its subject two linked publications: Class Dismissed: Closing the Gap for Persistently Disadvantaged Pupils (Teach First, 2026), a position paper from the education charity Teach First, and its underlying technical analysis, Persistent Disadvantage: Further Analysis for Teach First (Andrews, 2026), produced by the Education Policy Institute (EPI). Together these documents construct a detailed empirical portrait of a specific and largely unrecognised group within the English school system: pupils who have been eligible for free school meals for at least eighty per cent of their time in school, and who are described throughout as “persistently disadvantaged”. But, surely this is broad educational research and nothing to do with ‘Catholic education’?
Over the many years of working in the Catholic educational sector, I have been struck by the two very different approaches people – including those wielding considerable authority – can take to the question of what Catholic education is. In one form, it is all those elements of Catholic life and mission, prayer and religious education that are ‘extras’ to what is universally understood as ‘school’. Like a beautiful gloss, this approach sees the Catholic educational philosophy a, attractive, even compelling, but fundamentally extrinsic to ‘school’. On the other side, the view is radically different. Here, the Catholic educational approach is wholeheartedly intrinsic. Like the lava in a volcano, it comes from within, defines the entire landscape and constantly remoulds itself as it comes into contact with everything the world throws at it. It is this latter approach which, I commend, not least because our ‘sector’, benefits from 2000 years of experience, and is less constrained by the short-term political business cycle, which gnaws away at children’s chances in this country. So, it is no longer enough to discuss what we are doing within ‘our’ Catholic schools. Let us, instead, be truly as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves, and, in good faith, lean into the public square of educational debate, armed with our rich tradition and truly transcendent worldview.
The purpose of this report is not to interrogate the statistical methods used by EPI, which are conducted with evident care and appropriate caveats regarding the effects of Universal Credit transitional protections on the reliability of free school meal eligibility as a poverty proxy. Rather, the purpose is to ask a different kind of question: what does this evidence disclose about justice, when read through the categories that the Catholic tradition has developed over more than a century of formal social teaching? The analysis draws on the principal themes of that teaching, namely the dignity of the human person, the preferential option for the poor, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, and the concept of structures of sin, and applies them to the specific findings of both reports concerning attainment, regional variation, school-level outcomes, special educational needs, and post-sixteen destinations.
2. The empirical picture
Both reports converge on a single, sobering claim: persistent disadvantage is not simply a more severe version of ordinary disadvantage but a distinct condition with its own trajectory. Teach First (2026) estimates that 12.9 per cent of pupils in England, more than a million children, are persistently disadvantaged, comprising roughly half of all pupils eligible for the pupil premium. By the end of Key Stage 4, these pupils are, on average, 22.4 months of learning behind their non-disadvantaged peers, compared with a gap of 15.7 months for disadvantaged pupils whose fifth shorter-term school meal eligibility has been, 2026). Crucially, Andrews (2026) demonstrates that while the overall disadvantage gap narrowed between 2011 and 2019, this improvement did not extend to the persistently disadvantaged group, whose position relative to their peers has remained essentially static across a period in which other forms of disadvantage were, however modestly, being addressed.
The average GCSE grade in English and mathematics for persistently disadvantaged pupils nationally is 3.3, against 4.9 for non-disadvantaged pupils, meaning that failure to achieve the standard pass grade is, in statistical terms, the ordinary experience of this group (Teach First, 2026). This pattern compounds sharply where special educational needs are also present: persistently disadvantaged pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan achieve an average grade of just 1.1, placing them around four years of learning behind non-disadvantaged pupils without identified needs, and still eight months behind non-disadvantaged pupils who themselves hold an EHCP (Teach First, 2026).
The geographic distribution of this disadvantage is markedly uneven. The Northeast has the highest regional rate of persistent disadvantage, at 18.6 per cent, against 8.7 per cent in the South East and 9.4 per cent in the East of England (Teach First, 2026). Yet the relationship between prevalence and outcome runs in an unexpected direction: London, and inner-London authorities such as Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Westminster in particular, combine comparatively high rates of persistent disadvantage with the smallest attainment gaps in the country, while the South East, with one of the lowest rates of persistent disadvantage, has the largest gap, at 25.9 months (Andrews, 2026). At school level, of 2,554 mainstream secondary schools for which a measure could be calculated, 88 schools achieved average outcomes for their persistently disadvantaged pupils that exceeded the national average for non-disadvantaged pupils altogether, although these schools were disproportionately concentrated in London and disproportionately likely to be faith, selective or single-sex institutions (Teach First, 2026). Conversely, 418 schools recorded a gap of at least two and a half years.
Post-sixteen, the consequences sharpen further. A quarter of persistently disadvantaged pupils, 25.5 per cent, are not engaged in any substantial education or training a year after completing Key Stage 4, compared with 18.9 per cent of shorter-term disadvantaged pupils and 9.3 per cent of their non-disadvantaged peers (Teach First, 2026). In the Southwest this rises to almost one in three. Local authorities such as North Somerset, Derby and Blackpool record non-participation rates above forty per cent for persistently disadvantaged young people, while several London boroughs sit below twelve per cent (Andrews, 2026).
3. The framework of Catholic social teaching
3.1 Human Dignity
The starting point of Catholic Social Teaching is the conviction that every human being, made in the image of God, possesses an inherent and inalienable dignity that does not depend upon usefulness, achievement, or social position, a conviction set out in Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world (Second Vatican Council, 1965a, para. 12; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, para. 1700). This dignity grounds every subsequent principle. A child’s worth is not contingent on the grade they achieve, the postcode of their birth, or the duration of their family’s poverty; their claim upon the community’s care is total and not partial.
3.2 The preferential option for the poor
From this foundation, the tradition develops what John Paul II (1987, para. 42) called the preferential option, or love of preference, for the poor: a conviction that the justice of any social arrangement must be measured first by its effect on those most disadvantaged within it. Pope Francis has insisted that this option is not optional within Christian social practice but “the heart of the Gospel” applied to public life, requiring structures, not merely sentiment, that are biased towards the deepest need (Francis, 2013, paras. 197–201).
3.3 Solidarity
Solidarity names the recognition of interdependence between persons and groups, and the consequent duty to act for the good of others as though it were one’s own (John Paul II, 1987, paras. 38–40). The Catechism describes it as a virtue that demands the fair sharing of spiritual and material goods among persons and communities (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, para. 1939).
3.4 Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity holds that decisions and functions should rest, wherever possible, with the smallest and most local body capable of exercising them competently, with higher authorities offering support rather than substitution (Pius XI, 1931, paras. 79–80). It is a principle of trust in local agency, balanced by an obligation on the part of the state to ensure the wider conditions within which that agency can flourish (John Paul II, 1991, para. 48).
3.5 The common good and the Universal Destination of Goods
The common good is understood as the set of social conditions that allow individuals and communities to attain their own fulfilment more fully, a definition offered in Gaudium et Spes (Second Vatican Council, 1965a, para. 26). Allied to it is the principle of the universal destination of goods, which holds that the goods of the earth, and by extension the social goods a community produces, including education, are intended by their Creator for the benefit of all, such that particular distributions and entitlements are legitimate only insofar as they continue to serve that universal purpose (Paul VI, 1967, paras. 22–23; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, paras. 2402–2406).
3.6 Structures of sin
Finally, John Paul II (1987, paras. 36–37) introduced the concept of structures of sin: patterns of social, economic or political organisation that, while not reducible to any single person’s malice, accumulate and perpetuate injustice through the ordinary operation of institutions, habits and incentives. Such structures are sinful in their effect even where no individual actor intends harm, and their remedy requires not merely personal conversion but structural reform.
4. A Catholic reading of Persistent Disadvantage
4.1 Persistent Disadvantage as a structure of sin
The single most theologically significant finding across both reports is that persistent disadvantage behaves differently from disadvantage in general. It did not narrow when the wider gap narrowed; it remains, in the words the government’s own Schools White Paper uses, “stubbornly high” (Department for Education, 2026, as cited in Teach First, 2026). This is precisely the signature of a structure of sin as John Paul II described it: not a single unjust decision but an accumulation of ordinary policies, funding formulae and accountability measures that, taken together, consistently fail one group while gradually assisting another. No single teacher, governor or civil servant intends this outcome. Yet the duration of a child’s poverty, measured here as years spent eligible for free school meals, functions as a kind of compounding interest on disadvantage, each additional year deepening a deficit that the system as currently configured does not interrupt. A Catholic reading of this finding refuses the comfort of attributing it to misfortune alone; it asks what habitual structures allow such an entrenched and measurable pattern to persist across more than a decade of supposed progress.
4.2 The Preferential Option and the politics of invisibility
Both reports share a central institutional complaint: persistent disadvantage lacks a formal definition, a dedicated data publication, and a place within national accountability frameworks. It is folded into the broader category of pupils ever eligible for free school meals, a category that, as Andrews (2026) shows, contains pupils whose experience of poverty is six or seven months less severe in attainment terms and considerably less severe in destination terms. This invisibility is not a neutral oversight. The preferential option for the poor demands a structural bias towards those facing the greatest need, and a system that measures and rewards improvement in the disadvantage gap overall, while permitting its most severe expression to remain unmeasured and therefore unaddressed, has in effect optioned for the moderately poor over the most poor. The finding that the general gap narrowed between 2011 and 2019 while the persistent disadvantage gap did not is the empirical trace of exactly the inversion the preferential option exists to correct: a system can appear to be succeeding in aggregate while its most vulnerable members continue to fall further behind, hidden within an average that conceals more than it reveals.
4.3 Subsidiarity and the witness of Outlier Schools
If Section 4.1 identifies a structural failure, Section 3 of Class Dismissed identifies a structural possibility. The 88 schools in which persistently disadvantaged pupils outperform the non-disadvantaged national average, and the local case studies, Mercia School in Sheffield, Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, Oasis Academy South Bank in Lambeth, Landau Forte College in Derby and Derby Moor Spencer Academy, are not explained by any single national lever. They are explained by leadership culture, trauma-informed practice, careers programmes built through years of relationship with local employers, and the willingness of individual schools to fund uniforms, breakfasts and trips that families cannot afford. The eleven schools identified as local outliers, those achieving strong outcomes despite sitting within local authorities that otherwise perform weakly for this group, are particularly striking from the standpoint of subsidiarity. They demonstrate that the proximate community, properly supported, possesses a capacity for moral and practical response that cannot be replicated by central direction alone. Gravissimum Educationis (Second Vatican Council, 1965b, para. 5) describes the school as a community ordered towards the integral formation of the person, not merely the transmission of qualifications, and the testimony from school leaders such as John Connolly at Unity Academy Blackpool, describing food banks, free breakfasts and a deliberate commitment to consistency and trust for pupils living in overcrowded housing, illustrates this integral conception precisely. Subsidiarity does not, however, excuse the state from its complementary duty. The principle requires that higher authorities support local initiative through adequate funding, sensible accountability and the removal of structural obstacles, such as admissions arrangements that work against access for the poorest pupils, rather than treating local success as grounds for withdrawing wider investment.
4.4 The Common Good and the postcode lottery
The reports describe what they themselves call a postcode lottery: a North East rate of persistent disadvantage more than double that of the South East, a South East attainment gap a full two years larger than London’s, and post-sixteen non-participation rates ranging from 10.3 per cent in Camden to 51.3 per cent in North Somerset (Teach First, 2026; Andrews, 2026). From the standpoint of the common good, such variation is troubling not because the difference between places is inherently unjust, but because the good in question, namely the opportunity to learn, to pass core examinations, and to progress into further study or training, is a good intended for universal access rather than one whose availability should depend on the accident of where a child happens to live. The universal destination of goods, usually invoked in discussions of property and material resources, applies with equal force to the social and educational goods a community produces. A system in which a persistently disadvantaged child in North Somerset faces a non-participation risk five times greater than an equivalent child in Camden has allowed geography to determine the distribution of a good that, theologically speaking, belongs to no one region by right.
4.5 Double disadvantage and the dignity of the person
The finding that thirty per cent of persistently disadvantaged pupils have an identified special educational need, more than twice the rate among non-disadvantaged pupils, and that persistently disadvantaged pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan achieve an average grade of just 1.1, deserves particular theological attention (Teach First, 2026). Catholic anthropology insists that dignity is intrinsic rather than earned, and is consequently independent of capacity, productivity or social utility (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, para. 357). The compounding of poverty and additional need that this data reveals, what the report itself terms “double disadvantage,” should, on Catholic principles, generate the strongest, not the weakest, claim upon the community’s attention. Fratelli Tutti speaks of a duty of particular care towards those whose vulnerability is layered or intersecting, since it is precisely at these points of multiple marginalisation that a society’s stated commitment to universal dignity is most severely tested (Francis, 2020). A funding and accountability system that treats disadvantage and special educational need as separate, parallel categories, rather than recognising their compounding effect on a single child, risks precisely the kind of administrative blindness that obscures dignity behind bureaucratic categorisation.
4.6 Work, vocation and the crisis of sixteen
The finding that more than a quarter of persistently disadvantaged pupils are not engaged in substantial education, training or employment a year after leaving compulsory schooling carries weight beyond its economic implications. Laborem Exercens teaches that work is not merely a means of subsistence but a fundamental dimension of human existence through which a person participates in the ongoing work of creation and achieves a measure of self-realisation (John Paul II, 1981, para. 6). To be excluded from any credible pathway towards further study, training or employment at sixteen, disproportionately because of the length of one’s childhood poverty rather than one’s ability, is therefore not only a loss of earnings potential but an obstruction of vocation in the fuller sense the Church intends by that word: the young person’s capacity to be recognised as a contributing member of the community rather than, in Pope Francis’s phrase describing the economy of exclusion, someone simply left over (Francis, 2013, para. 53). The case study of Derby Moor Spencer Academy, where a deliberate, sustained programme of employer engagement, interview practice and embedded careers education raised the sustained destination rate for the school well above the local average, demonstrates that this exclusion is not inevitable; it is, again, a function of structures that can be altered by sustained local commitment, supported by wider policy.
4.7 A Note of Conscience on Faith Schools and Admissions
Schools with a religious character make up thirty-seven per cent of the 88 schools where persistently disadvantaged pupils outperform the non-disadvantaged national average, against eighteen per cent of secondary schools nationally, yet in only five of the thirty-three faith schools identified was the proportion of persistently disadvantaged pupils equal to or higher than the local authority average, a pattern the report links to wider research on admissions practices among faith schools (Teach First, 2026, citing Latham, 2024). This finding cannot be received with simple celebration. Gravissimum Educationis explicitly directs Catholic education towards those who are poor, lack family support, or are estranged from the faith, naming this as a particular duty rather than an incidental concern (Second Vatican Council, 1965b, para. 9). Where admissions arrangements, however unintentionally, filter access in favour of families with the resources or cultural familiarity to navigate them, the resulting excellence, however genuine for the pupils served, sits uneasily beside the preferential option it should embody. This is not a case for apportioning blame to individual schools, several of which are explicitly celebrated within Class Dismissed for their work with the persistently disadvantaged pupils they do serve, but a case for the kind of structural self-examination Catholic Social Teaching asks of every institution, the Church’s own included: that good outcomes achieved for a narrower population than a school could in principle serve are not yet the same thing as justice.
5. Catholic social teaching and the policy recommendations
The recommendations advanced by Teach First (2026) map closely onto the categories already discussed, and a Catholic reading lends them a coherence that the policy language alone does not always make explicit. The call for a formal, published definition of persistent disadvantage, and for consistent national data on attainment, attendance and destinations, is fundamentally a demand for visibility in service of the preferential option: a community cannot direct its attention towards its most vulnerable members if it cannot first see them clearly. The proposed supplementary pupil premium, calibrated proportionately to the additional severity of the attainment gap, reflects the principle of distributive justice embedded in the universal destination of goods, the conviction that resources should be allocated according to need rather than uniform entitlement (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, para. 2402). The targeted placement of teachers and leaders into high-disadvantage schools and the proposed Coastal Target Areas pilot in Blackpool and Thanet embody solidarity in its most concrete sense, the willingness of able people to go where need is greatest rather than where conditions are most comfortable. The recommendation to examine how admissions reform might widen access to high-performing schools for persistently disadvantaged pupils speaks directly to the tension identified in Section 4.7, and deserves to be pursued with particular seriousness by faith-based providers. Finally, the call to embed persistent disadvantage explicitly within SEND reform answers the compounding injustice described in Section 4.5: a structural acknowledgement that two forms of vulnerability experienced together are not adequately addressed by policies designed for either alone. Subsidiarity, meanwhile, is honoured throughout by the recommendation that improvement support work collaboratively with trusts, local authorities and school leaders to diagnose barriers, rather than imposing uniform solutions, while the proposed strengthening of governance capacity recognises that local agency requires institutional support to be effective rather than merely permitted to exist.
6. Limitations of the analysis
Several qualifications are necessary. First, Class Dismissed and its accompanying technical analysis are policy and advocacy documents produced from a secular standpoint; their authors did not write with theological categories in mind, and a Catholic reading necessarily imports a framework the data was not designed to test. The analysis offered here is interpretive rather than evaluative of the underlying statistics, which fall outside the competence of theological method. Second, Catholic Social Teaching itself contains genuine internal tensions that this report has not fully resolved, most notably between the localism implied by subsidiarity and the scale of redistribution implied by solidarity and the preferential option; these tensions mirror, rather than dissolve, the practical difficulty visible in the reports’ own recommendations, which call simultaneously for greater local school autonomy and for substantial new national funding and accountability structures. Third, the EPI analysis itself notes the imperfection of free school meal eligibility as a poverty measure following the introduction of Universal Credit transitional protections, a methodological caveat that this report has not sought to adjudicate but which any reader applying moral weight to the statistics should bear in mind.
7. Conclusion
Read together, these two reports describe a form of disadvantage that is geographically patterned, intersectionally compounding, and largely unrecognised within the structures meant to address it. Catholic Social Teaching does not supply additional statistics, but it supplies a vocabulary capable of naming what the data otherwise leaves implicit: that an attainment gap which persists for over a decade despite wider progress is the mark of a structure of sin rather than simple misfortune; that the absence of dedicated data and funding for the most disadvantaged is a quiet failure of the preferential option; that the success of individual schools and the failure of whole regions both testify, in different ways, to the unfinished work of subsidiarity and solidarity held together; and that a child’s claim upon a flourishing future does not diminish with the length of their family’s poverty but, if anything, grows stronger. No child’s prospects, the Church has long insisted in its own language, should be limited by circumstances of birth; what these reports show is the precise extent to which, in England in 2026, they still are.
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