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Nearly three in five boys from low-income families are not school-ready by age 5.

In real terms this meant that in 2024-25, around 29,000 boys eligible for free school meals did not reach a good level of development by the end of Reception.

These well-established attainment gaps open up early and persist throughout schooling, with knock-on effects on employment, health and overall wellbeing. 

Boys not being school-ready

This is not simply a story about boys developing later than girls. The gender attainment gap is also wider among children eligible for free school meals than among their better-off peers. England also has some of the widest early gender and socioeconomic attainment gaps among .

Yet policymakers have persistently overlooked this. Socioeconomic disadvantage and gender-based attainment gaps are too often seen as separate issues, rather than ones that can “stack up”.

As a result, successive governments have paid little attention to the particular barriers facing boys from low-income families in the earliest years, meaning they have remained largely unaddressed. 

 identifies five systemic failures in how government designs and implements policy that have allowed early attainment gaps to persist and, in some cases, widen:

• The weak political incentives to prioritise disadvantaged children
• The overwhelming focus of early years spending on expanding childcare entitlements
• The failure to steward the childcare market for better outcomes
• Siloed accountability structures that are ill-equipped to address root causes
• A standardised, centralised approach to policymaking that practitioners and parents too often feel is detached from their experience. 

The result is wide, persistent attainment gaps: visible at age 5 and felt for decades afterwards.

This matters for Labour’s agenda. Its ambition is for 75 per cent of children to be school-ready by the end of this Parliament, and that is only a few years away.

Where to start

Of course, there is only so much that any government can do quickly, within the relatively short time frame of a single Parliament, to undo long-standing weaknesses.

However, a sustained reform agenda will be required to make any meaningful impact on the figures above; not least properly equipping stretched public services to provide early, comprehensive support to boys from low-income families.

But there are several immediate challenges that policymakers can, and should, tackle to avoid boys from low-income families falling further behind.

One key fix would be to address perverse incentives introduced by government targets - which could encourage schools to focus on those closest to the “pass” boundary.

One primary school headteacher went as far as to say that they felt incentivised “to cheat or fail”. The government needs to get a grip on this and ensure that progress for this group is still rewarded even where headline targets are not met.

Stronger governance is required to drive coordinated action across departments to tackle the drivers of low attainment - issues that could too easily fall through the cracks of a fragmented early years delivery system.

The Department for Education is primarily responsible for results, but some of the strongest levers and tools for addressing the barriers that hold this group back sit outside of its control.

The government can also do much more to facilitate sector- and peer-based partnerships to scale best practice for this group, as worked so successfully during New Labour’s London Challenge programme. �į

Frontline impact

There is also much to learn from the frontline. We spent time in early years settings serving low-income communities in Sheffield, Brixton, Bradford and King’s Cross, and spoke to the parents they support.

The most promising settings did not offer easy fixes.

But they did show what better delivery could look like: centring families, not just children; building a deep understanding of local communities to provide practical and meaningful support; tailoring learning appropriately without making assumptions about how different groups learn; and empowering staff to go above and beyond to improve children’s wellbeing and outcomes.

Our research suggests that these approaches are particularly important for boys from low-income families - and likely to benefit many other children at risk of poor outcomes, too.

In the settings we visited, parents and practitioners alike spoke with passion about the difference nurseries made to them and their families.

One parent noted that, with support from the nursery, her son, who has additional communication needs, was gaining in confidence. She said: “He said ‘good morning’ to his teacher today - I’ve never heard him say ‘good morning’ before.”

This government - and future ones - needs to recognise the systemic policymaking failures that leave this group, and others, behind. Then it can start to address them.

Sophie Metcalfe is senior researcher on the Institute for Government’s policymaking team, and Nehal Davison is a programme director at the Institute for Government

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