What is 'underachievement at school'

This paper formed the basis for our oral and written presentations to the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills on the topic of underachievement. ‘Underachievement’ is now a widely used term in education policy and practice. It is used routinely to refer to nations, home nations and regions, to types and sectors of schooling, to physiological, ethnic and social groups, and to individuals. It has been used to mean simply low achievement, also lower achievement relative to another of these groups, and also lower achievement than would be expected by an observer. The paper presents examples of each. These multiple uses lead to considerable confusion which, coupled with common errors in assessing the proportionate difference between groups, mean that significant public money has been spent attempting to overcome problems that may not, indeed, exist. Where underachievement is understood to mean a lower level of achievement by an individual (or group) than would be expected using a model based on the best available predictors, then there is nothing we can know about underachieving individuals (or groups) that they have in common. They can not be disproportionately working-class males, for example, because class and sex would then be part of the ‘best available predictors’. Even if, instead, we reserve some predictors from our best model, there is no evidence that underachievers have much in common (and examples from such models are presented in the paper). In raw-score terms, we might say that a particular social group exhibits lower achievement (in the sense of publicly available figures relating to pencil and paper tests) than another, as in the case of some ethnic groups. Or we might say that there is differential attainment between groups, as in the case of males and females. This is very far from saying that the lower-attaining group could and should do better on that assessment, or that the surface dissimilarity (such as ethnicity or sex) is in any way the cause of the difference in attainment. Making explicit what we mean by underachievement is an important step towards accepting that, collectively, we do not really mean anything by it