I am under no illusions about the challenges posed to schools in deprived areas. Throughout the country, parental income remains the best predictor of a pupil's success at school. It was revealed last year that only 4 per cent of pupils aged 15 eligible for free school meals end up going to university, compared with 33 per cent of their wealthier peers. However, while it is one thing to say that a low socioeconomic background tends to hold back a child's education, it is something completely different to say that their education can only improve once their low socioeconomic status is changed. When transferred from the lecture theatre to the classroom, this sociological determinism — we might call it "the sociological view" — breeds a culture of excuses and low expectations. 

I teach at an inner-city state school, and the academic and behavioural expectations made of the pupils are distressingly low. Our catchment area is deprived, but it is hardly a ghetto. Unemployment is high, and about 40 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, meaning their parents have a combined income of less than £16,190. However, many of the pupils come from stable, hard-working families, and it is only a small minority whose home lives can be described as "chaotic".

One can judge the extent to which an "excuses culture" pervades a school by the frequency with which references are made to "our kids". At my school, this phrase, redolent with sympathy and concern, is used on a daily basis to keep standards low. When a pupil tells a new member of staff to "fuck off", senior staff explain such behaviour is to be expected from "our kids". When I asked why we did not teach a more academically challenging GCSE history course, I was told it would not be right for "our kids". When my teaching style is criticised for being didactic, I'm told "our kids" cannot listen to a teacher in anything more than five-minute bursts. On one memorable occasion, a French teacher decided to hand out detentions to pupils who did badly in their weekly vocabulary homework, but was told to stop by a member of senior management. Apparently, compulsory homework was unfair, considering the home backgrounds of "our kids". Choosing to teach in a deprived area, I expected to be surrounded by colleagues aiming to overcome social disadvantage, not capitulate to it. 

In America, where I worked part-time as a teaching assistant, I often heard teachers claim: "We'll never solve education until we solve poverty." Rhetorically, the sociological view provides a very useful argument for those who wish to deflect all conversations about education standards to wider issues of social justice. Recently, a friend who is studying for a masters degree in education told me about a university seminar he had attended. The professor delivering it has written in a recently published book, "Social variables are too significant to be ignored and there can be no hope of improving education until we have understood and found ways to deal with the pernicious problems of poverty and social disadvantage."

At the seminar, he launched into a tirade against Michael Gove. How dare we expect schools to raise standards, he fulminated, while belonging to a government which is "making the poor poorer".