Frances Akinde and Tor Flynn share what years in schools taught them about disadvantage, bias, belonging, and what it really means to know a child.

Do you think that schools have a good understanding of disadvantage?

Frances: I think that we can struggle and often make assumptions about what disadvantage should look like which means that some children get identified and others go completely under the radar. If a child isn’t on an official list such as pupil premium they may not get the support they need. Everyone has the potential to be in crisis. It also could be triple, quadruple disadvantage. ‘Double’ barely covers it.

Tor: The label is such a blunt instrument for vastly different experiences. After Covid, I’d hear people say, “These kids aren’t really disadvantaged – their parents lost work for a few months.” We cannot be labels-led. I met a child recently who’d gone into kinship care after significant trauma and wasn’t on any list at all. Data labels can help you spot patterns, but they can’t tell you what to do for a specific child . Only knowing that child can do that.

We cannot be labels-led. Any child can be disadvantaged at any point in time – multiply, complexly, and in ways no spreadsheet captures.

What actually puts children at risk that you think we don’t give enough attention to?

Frances: The biggest factor is discrimination. Schools can have a bias towards their own idea of what a good education looks like, without listening to the children in front of them. And alongside that, assumptions are made about children’s backgrounds and families that put a ceiling on what they’re expected to achieve. That bias is the biggest barrier in education. It shows up in things like SEN registers where someone has written “autism” beside a child’s name – no diagnosis, just an assumption – and the whole support system then follows that rabbit hole.

Tor: I’ve seen children presenting in very similar ways to my own adopted children receive far less empathy and far lower expectations. We sometimes hear people express assumptions about children and their families, “They don’t read with their children. They don’t come to parents’ evenings. They don’t care.” I couldn’t make my child’s last parents’ evening even though I really care.

As education professionals, people often assume the best about us as parents. Stereotypes are held and assumptions made about families, and it’s not that simple. We have to stop pretending that it is. We also need to remember the protective factors – the buffering experiences that help children and their families withstand adversity. Children and families who lack those buffers are the most vulnerable, regardless of how many labels they carry.

How do we make school a protective place?

Frances: You have to know that child on a personal level. The single most important thing for any child’s success in school is relationships. It doesn’t have to be the person you’d expect. Sometimes it’s the caretaker, sometimes a teaching assistant. What matters is that every child has someone who is their secure base. Rather than talking about “belonging,” I want us to talk about mattering. How does a child know they matter? That’s not about giving them a wellbeing app or an art therapy session – it’s about noticing them. Three things: listen, notice, and be curious. People think communication is just talking. It isn’t.

Tor: A big part of belonging is helping children understand their own needs and then working together to meet them. Listening is so important. One school I worked with was preparing to rewrite its entire English curriculum because leaders believed boys didn’t like writing. Before making any changes, they stopped to ask the boys themselves. Not one said he disliked writing. They said that they wanted less teacher talk and more space to write. The English lead’s response? “We can do that. It’s a lot easier than rewriting the curriculum.”

IN PRACTICE
What if we started there? With what children already know about their own learning before we reach for a solution that could potentially be more time consuming and costly?

Frances: Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory is useful here because to really understand a child’s assets and risks, you have to look beyond the school gates. Rather than focusing only on deficits or labels, schools really need to understand the factors that create vulnerability (risks) and the factors that protect and strengthen ( assets). How many people do they feel care about them? What does their world look like outside this building? One school I worked with moved lunch because children couldn’t sustain their focus until 12:30 and attendance improved. It sounds unusual, but it’s what happens when you genuinely put the child at the centre of your decisions rather than the timetable.

Frances: Scotland’s Getting It Right for Every Child framework shows what this can look like at a systemic level – a trauma-informed approach that draws on asset-based theory and considers all the factors shaping a child’s life, not just what’s visible inside school. Compare that to our own SEND reforms, which are mostly about what schools need rather than what children need. When I look at how Scotland’s curriculum is written, it’s full of joy, optimism, and the child at the centre. There’s a real contrast.

Tor: I think about this a lot. Some children don’t want to come to school, and I suspect a large part of the reason is that they’re simply not finding joy there. When I was teaching, we laughed so much. We had fun. That wasn’t incidental: it was fundamental. And I don’t see it so much any more. Seriousness has been mistaken for high standards. One of my strongest memories from being an English adviser is children asking, genuinely baffled: “Miss, why does everyone die in every book we read?” And you’d look at the curriculum and it would just be tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, no joy at all.

Frances: It’s true. Plague. Death.

During the conversation, both Frances and Tor paused to laugh and then caught themselves. “Laughter is definitely a buffering factor,” Frances said. “Can we put that in the blog? We need more joy in schools – for children and for staff.”

We can, and we have. That is not woolly stuff, they are the fundamental ingredients that allow everything else to follow.

Tor: The protective factors we talk about – the things that buffer children against adversity – include laughter, community, free play, being outdoors, good food, time with friends. My seven-year-old found a boy around the corner and every day he comes home saying, “Can I go knock on him?” They just play football in the garden. It’s that simple. And yet secondary school children are given twenty minutes for lunch – no time to eat properly, no time to switch off or talk to their friends. Who thrives on that? Not children. Not adults either.

Frances: We talk endlessly about resilience and say that children need to be more resilient. But consider the child who has spent all weekend caring for younger siblings because their parent was in crisis. Then they are told that they’re not resilient because they arrived late and couldn’t do up their tie. But that is resilience. We’ve just decided to look for it in the wrong place. A strengths-based approach asks: what does this child already have? How do we build on that, rather than always starting from deficit?

How do we engage with both disadvantage and privilege honestly without people feeling blamed or powerless?

Frances: Privilege is a multifaceted. I think of it as a pie, and all of us hold some slices and not others. Someone might benefit from racial privilege but not have economic security, good transport links, a stable home. When we only think of privilege in one direction, we miss huge parts of the picture including the assets that children from so-called “disadvantaged” backgrounds bring with them. The assumptions we make about what those families lack are often simply wrong.

Tor: I kept hearing about deficits and then I’d speak to the children and find out they were dancing every night, embedded in their community, with rich cultural lives that school had never thought to ask about. The communities with less money often had far stronger social connections than more affluent areas. Context matters too: living in poverty in rural Cornwall, where you can’t easily get anywhere, is a completely different experience to living on the same income in a city. It’s the same label but an entirely different life. We’re wired to look for what’s missing but imagine if we started instead with “What do you already have?”

Does changing the words we use change anything? How much does language shape how we see, or fail to see disadvantage?

Frances: Changing the word without changing the thinking is just window dressing. We call it “inclusion” when we mean SEN. We coin new acronyms. But we’re not getting to the actual issue. And I’d add: I don’t believe in the concept of a “safe space.” I never open a session by saying “this is a safe space” What I say instead is: share what you feel comfortable sharing. Be prepared to get things wrong. Say, I might use the wrong word, but I’d welcome the correction. Otherwise, how do people ever learn?

Tor: In the past, I’ve been so worried about saying the wrong thing around race or ethnicity that I’ve said nothing, and that’s worse. All the agonising over language detracts from the real conversation. What I’ve started doing is naming it from the outset: “I’m going to use this term, I know it’s imperfect, let’s talk about it if you want to.” And the most useful shift of all: using strength-based language – starting with what’s good, rather than cataloguing everything that’s wrong.