That disadvantage compounds: poverty, place, gender, and ethnicity combine rather than operate in isolation, is not a new thought for anyone working in this part of the sector. Intersectionality has been part of the vocabulary of access and equality work for years, rehearsed in strategies, training, and committee papers. A recently published report from a social mobility charity offers fresh evidence of the pattern, broken down more finely than before, and the evidence is worth having, yet the pattern itself is one most senior leaders would grant well before reaching the foot of the first page. The more uncomfortable observation is different, and it is not really about intersectionality at all. It concerns the machinery institutions are obliged to plan with, which seems ill-equipped to address intersectional needs, and the distance this creates between what the sector claims to understand and what its systems can actually represent.
What the planning apparatus can see
Planning tends to reward what can be counted. A target group can be defined, returned, monitored and resourced; a bid can be written against it; a governing body can be shown a number that moves in the right direction. This is less a failing of any individual institution than a property of the apparatus itself, which represents need through categories. The difficulty is that intersectional disadvantage, by its nature, falls between those categories. The young person disadvantaged by the meeting of several factors at once is, almost by definition, the person least legible to a system built on single markers, because they sit in the overlaps that no one column records cleanly. The sector, therefore, finds itself in a slightly odd position. It holds a concept it discusses fluently, whilst operating an infrastructure of measurement and accountability that is more or less blind to what that concept describes. The gap appears structural rather than attitudinal, which may be part of why it persists. An institution can be entirely sincere about intersectional disadvantage and still find itself unable to act on it, because the means available to it are organised around groups that its own evidence cannot fully resolve. This is not really an awareness or training problem, but one of the design of the instruments through which institutions are required to see their students and this in turn has more to do with governance and quality assurance than with equality theory.
A proxy that is weakening
The difficulty grows sharper when one looks more closely at the markers themselves. Much of the analysis in the report rests on free school meals eligibility, a single proxy standing in for disadvantage, and it is a fragile stand-in. Eligibility varies between local authorities; it depends in part on whether a family applies at all, and it is set to become even less reliable as the rules governing it change in the coming year. Some genuinely disadvantaged children never appear in the measure, whether for reasons of culture, awareness or immigration status. There is something rather ironic in this. The sector has spent years adding conceptual sophistication, layering gender, ethnicity, and place onto the analysis of disadvantage, whilst the underlying measurement on which all of it rests has been growing less dependable beneath it. The report is candid about this, and about a related limitation, too. Once the population is divided finely enough to capture the intersections that matter, by gender within ethnicity within place, the numbers in any one area become too small to analyse with confidence, so comparison retreats to the regional level where the local detail is precisely what disappears. The sector is, in effect, refining its theory whilst the measure beneath that theory grows blunter.
When the category inverts
The finding that most directly complicates the familiar story is perhaps also the most unsettling. On the report’s data, the same nominal group, white pupils carrying the free school meals marker, ranks near the top of the opportunity ordering in some constituencies and near the bottom in others, with every region of England appearing at both ends. Young people in that group in parts of the North East progress to higher education at rates that sit awkwardly with any account treating them as uniformly left behind. Attainment, for its part, does not reliably predict progression, and strong school results do not always translate into proportionate earnings later on. Taken seriously, this does more than refine the execution of group-based targeting. It raises a question about group- and place-based targeting as a method, since a category that inverts depending on where one happens to stand seems an uncertain basis for directing finite resources. It also bears on how much weight a single year of data, in a single place, should be asked to carry when attention and money tend to follow it. This is a matter of institutional design and the evidence beneath it rather than of any particular targeting arrangement, and it cuts rather deeper than the comfortable conclusion that the remedy is simply to think more intersectionally.
Holding what cannot be counted
What this leaves, for those carrying senior responsibility, is less a prescription than a question about how institutions hold knowledge they cannot easily count. The systems will, in all likelihood, continue to require categories because resources have to be directed somehow, and a return cannot record overlap. The task is therefore not to abandon categories, which would leave planning with nothing to work with, but perhaps to treat them as provisional and partial, and to build alongside them the local and qualitative knowledge that the countable measures cannot hold. That is harder, slower and more demanding of judgment than reaching for a single familiar group, and it asks more at a time when institutional resources are already under evident strain. How might an institution organise its access and support work so that it can act on need it cannot fully measure, without either retreating to the legible category or drowning in the detail beneath it? What would it take to treat a target group as a starting point for inquiry rather than a settled answer, and to notice the point at which a measure has quietly decayed beneath the analysis built upon it? And how does a sector that necessarily plans in countable groups keep faith with the students whose circumstances were never going to be captured by a single line in a return?