Poverty, whether absolute or relative, permeates every aspect of an individual's life, including their access to education and their experience of the education process itself. This is a disturbing fact when education is regarded by many as the best route of escaping poverty; to help individuals improve themselves and their lot in life, and ultimately to provide a better future for their own children. The situation is obviously more pronounced in developing countries, where education is not freely available to all children, with many becoming adults who are barely able to read and write. Even in many developed nations, though, there is a disparity between the education received by those from affluent backgrounds and those who are not.
This seems to be less of a problem in Scandinavian countries that take a more egalitarian approach to education, which is why Finland, for instance, continues to receive such high ratings in international comparisons of educational systems. In nations such as the United Kingdom and the United States, though, it is hard to ignore the persistent differences in educational attainment between young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from more privileged backgrounds.
Meritocratic societies are based on the fundamental notion that success is dependent on ability and talent, not class privilege and wealth, yet this is not borne out by statistics, which illustrate how children from poorer families are not as successful as their richer counterparts when it comes to examination results and the chances of going into higher education. Indeed, in the United Kingdom the gap between the richest and poorest in society has grown over the past few decades, and social mobility has been severely stymied by the systematic failure of governments to address the real issues of poverty and education.
Children who grow up in poverty tend to live in deprived areas within their town or city, sometimes in single-parent families. Often their parents have had a limited education themselves, and although they may want a better life for their children find they do not have the means to facilitate this. They cannot afford private schools, and unlike middle-class parents they are not as able to manipulate the system to their advantage.
Whilst affluent parents are likely to do anything possible to get their children into the best schools, most parents who are struggling to make ends meet are less likely to actively help their children get into to the best schools, meaning they often just put up with what they are given. The fact is that the children who would benefit most from getting into the best schools are those from poorer backgrounds, particularly if their own parents find it difficult to assist them with homework and extracurricular activities, and yet the odds of them getting into such schools are stacked against them.
Although lack of money is a significant component of poverty, it is not the only one, as the culture which develops out of poverty means that many children do not believe it is worth their while to attend school and have few aspirations to escape the poverty they are in, especially if they do not even realise they are living in poverty. Consequently, they put little effort into their school work, seeing it as a waste of time, and so leave school with few qualifications. Some drift into crime, others find themselves in unskilled, manual jobs with little job security. The education they obtained as children will continue to shape their lives well into adulthood, and will impact upon their own progeny, thus making it extremely difficult to break the cycle of poverty.
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