Inequalities in quality of education by income deprivation
About 2 mins
Key points
- More deprived areas tend to have a higher proportion of schools rated ‘Inadequate’ or ‘Requires improvement’ by Ofsted.
- The difference in education quality between more and less deprived areas is greater among secondary schools than primary schools.
- Secondary schools in the least deprived areas were three times more likely to be rated as ‘outstanding’ compared with schools in the most deprived areas.
Education plays an important role in shaping people’s health by influencing factors such as income and employment. In turn, these provide the resources people need to maintain good health, such as access to nutritious food and safe housing. It can also support better health literacy, making it easier for people to understand health information and allow more informed health choices as a result.
A good school environment can provide children with academic, emotional and developmental benefits and can help reduce the negative effects of deprivation.
This chart shows the proportion of state-funded primary and secondary schools in England by their Ofsted quality of education rating and their area’s level of deprivation – measured by ranking local areas by the concentration of children living in households experiencing income deprivation.
- 13% of primary schools in the least deprived areas have a rating of ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’, compared with 19% of primary schools in the most deprived areas
- Least deprived areas had the highest proportion of ‘outstanding’ primary schools at 13%, compared with 8% for the most deprived areas
- Among secondary schools, the differences in the quality of education between areas with different levels of deprivation is more pronounced compared with primary schools.
- 12% of secondary schools in the least deprived areas have a rating of ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’, compared with 31% of secondary schools in the most deprived areas.
- Areas with the lowest deprivation had the highest proportion of ‘outstanding’ secondary schools at 27%, while areas with the highest deprivation had the lowest at 9%.
- This analysis uses the ‘quality of education’ Ofsted domain, one of the domains that contribute to overall school inspection judgements. Although single-word judgements for overall school ratings are no longer used, they are still used for the underlying domains that contribute to the overall scores. Within the ‘quality of education’ domain, Ofsted rates schools as ‘inadequate,’ ‘requires improvement,’ ‘good,’ or ‘outstanding’.
- Areas are grouped into quintiles by their score on the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI). This is a subset of the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) and uses the Income Deprivation Domain to measure the proportion of children up to the age of 15 that live in low-income households. Quintile 1 consists of the areas with the most children living in households experiencing income deprivation and quintile 5 consists of areas with the fewest.
- Income deprivation refers to income deprivation affecting children index (IDACI).
Source: Ofsted, State-funded schools inspections and outcomes, England, 2024; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Income deprivation affecting children index, England, 2019
