The quality of schools is not responsible for the gap in attainment between poorer pupils and their more affluent peers, according to a leading education academic.

Professor Steve Strand from the University of Oxford was due to present research findings today (September 23rd) showing that the academic performance gap between pupils who are eligible for free school meals (FSM) and those who are not tends to remain consistent regardless of the school’s Ofsted outcomes.

The gap between FSM and non-FSM pupils in schools deemed “outstanding” by the inspectorate is sizeable. Indeed, the difference between the proportions of each group achieving five or more A*-C grades at GCSE is as much as 25 percentage points. Just half of all FSM pupils reach this level, compared to three-quarters of non-FSM children.

However, the difference in attainment at schools that Ofsted named as “good” was still 25 percentage points. Some 64 per cent of non-FSM pupils reached the benchmark in these institutions, compared to 39 per cent of those eligible for FSM.

In contrast, schools that Ofsted refers to as “satisfactory/requires improvement” or “inadequate” reported a 22 percentage point attainment gap between FSM and non-FSM pupils, even though both figures were lower.

Attainment gaps of at least one GCSE grade existed in 92 per cent of schools, and schools with higher proportions of FSM also reported lower academic achievement among non-FSM pupils. But there was little association between the school’s proportion of FSM pupils and those children’s academic performance, which was generally low across the board.

Professor Strand says the findings show that governments that have successively blamed bad schools for failing to close the attainment gap have failed to understand the crux of the problem.

Instead, factors outside of the school’s control are often contributory factors - and because current accountability measures do not take this into account, league tables essentially put schools with higher FSM populations at a disadvantage.

“This is not to say that schools should not do everything possible to strive to close the FSM gap, but does indicate that a punitive approach to ‘failing’ schools misconstrues the nature of the problem,” the paper states.