ABSTRACT
In England today, young people’s educational outcomes continue to vary significantly between different parts of the country, despite decades of area-based education policymaking. Adopting an approach to area-based policymaking that sees the world through the lens of area types, and develops better causal stories of how neighbourhood contexts shape young people’s outcomes, would put efforts to tackle area-based inequalities in education on a stronger footing. The long tradition of area-based policymaking in education offers few pointers: most previous policies have lacked specificity and tend to fall back on well-worn notions of “deprived” and “disadvantaged” areas. Past policies involved a range of approaches to tackling underachievement including targeted additional funding, new forms of governance and partnership working, or bringing together local services spanning education, health, and regeneration. Identifying area-level associations with particular education- and youth-related outcomes is not the same as explaining how these effects operate.
