A child’s socioeconomic status shapes their access to education and life prospects. A child growing up in poverty is more likely to attend an underachieving school, have fewer opportunities to attend extracurricular activities and face greater barriers securing adequate support for any special educational needs (SEN). Poor educational outcomes limit earnings, health and participation, which in turn reproduces socioeconomic disadvantage across generations.
The data on this is overwhelmingly clear. In England, pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM), which is the best proxy that we have for poverty in the data gathered by the Department for Education, were suspended at almost five times the rate of non-FSM pupils (26.66 compared with 5.41) and permanently excluded at more than six times the rate (0.32 compared with 0.05). Pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) were suspended at almost four times the rate of pupils with no identified SEN, while pupils receiving SEN support were suspended at more than four times that rate. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller of Irish Heritage pupils had the highest rates of suspension and permanent exclusion, with Black Caribbean pupils experiencing the next highest rates. These factors overlap: FSM pupils are twice as likely to have SEN, while Black children face a higher risk of poverty. Exclusion then compounds the socioeconomic disadvantage. The think tank IPPR has estimated that the lifetime public cost of a permanent exclusion from school to be about £370,000 per young person, reflecting lost taxation and increased education, benefits, healthcare and criminal-justice costs.
The potential impact of section 1 Equality Act 2010 could plainly be significant in respect of access to education. Once brought into force, the socioeconomic duty will require specified public authorities, when making strategic decisions, to have due regard to reducing inequalities caused by socioeconomic disadvantage. This was the focus of discussion at the education breakout session at the recent Garden Court Chambers and King’s College London conference on the socioeconomic duty, which built upon discussions on these issues at School Inclusion Project meetings.
The socioeconomic duty’s value lies in forcing attention upstream. Much like the public sector equality duty (the PSED) it will not prescribe a particular result. Rather, the socioeconomic duty will require decision-makers to identify disadvantage, examine the evidence and consider whether apparently neutral systems are reproducing inequality. Admissions arrangements are an obvious area for intervention that is identified in the explanatory notes for section 1. Catchment areas, sibling rules and faith criteria can be indirectly discriminatory by socio-economic status as there are generally better resourced schools in wealthy postcodes.
Curtis James’ presentation about Class Divide’s work in Brighton and Hove provided a concrete example of what sustained campaigning on challenging socioeconomic inequality can achieve, and demonstrated the potential impact of the socioeconomic duty. Following five years of grassroots campaigning, the Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) introduced new admissions arrangements that prioritised FSM pupils, followed by open-admissions places and catchment changes benefiting Whitehawk, an area of significant socioeconomic disadvantage. Early data shows that 95 FSM-eligible children obtained places outside their catchment under the new admissions arrangements. On National Offers Day 2026, 83% of families received their first preference, an increase on the previous year, and every pupil in a dual catchment who named both catchment schools received one of them or a higher preference. Class Divide reported families successfully using both the FSM and open-admissions routes. Those results suggest that inclusive reform can widen genuine choice without simply displacing families elsewhere.
One point highlighted by Dan Rosenberg from Gold Jennings in his presentation was that the legal and institutional landscape has changed significantly since 2010. When the Equality Act 2010 was enacted, only around 6% of secondary schools and virtually no primary schools were academies. By January 2026, 48.8% of state primary schools and 83.9% of state secondary schools were academies or free schools. Brighton and Hove has resisted that national pattern, with around only 10% of schools being academies or free-schools and the rest local authority controlled. This means that BHCC could make significant changes to admissions arrangements, however, other local authorities have fewer tools.
Section 1 (as currently drafted) applies to various public bodies including local authorities but not to academy trusts. Academies are their own admissions authorities. A duty constructed around the education system as it existed in 2010 therefore fails to reach many of the bodies now taking strategic decisions on admissions, behaviour, exclusions and allocation of resources. Parliament anticipated that the law would need updating and section 2 confers a delegated power on Ministers to do so.
Drawing the threads together, there is clear evidence that educational inequality drives socioeconomic inequality and vice versa. This is a system failure that the socioeconomic duty should force decision-makers at all levels, from schools to central government, to grapple with. The socioeconomic duty is not a replacement for grassroots organising, campaigning and individual enforcement of rights through litigation, however, it should provide another tool to hold public bodies to account and focus their attention on socioeconomic inequality. Indeed, one early point for campaigners to bring to Ministers’ attention might be that the duty and any accompanying statutory guidance will need to reflect the significant changes in the education landscape in the last decade and a half.
