"HIGHBROW” cultural pursuits such as theatre trips or museum visits have no impact on children’s GCSE performance, new analysis has found.

Researchers from the universities of Sussex and Edinburgh found that while children’s reading habits had an impact on exam grades, visits to museums or historical sites had no correlation with high grades at GCSE.

Using data from the National Pupil Database, linked to figures from Understanding Society – the UK Household Longitudinal Study, the researchers found family cultural outings had no statistically significant impact on grades. The research will be published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

The study of 736 pupils in English state schools from 2009-10 to 2012-13 finds that engaging in reading-related activities is “mildly influential” on pupils’ achievements, but that “engagement in highbrow cultural activities are not”.

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“This is an important finding as the concept of cultural capital has become more prominent in Government education policy,” it adds.

“Cultural capital” is an idea developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which argues that disadvantaged pupils are not exposed to the same range of cultural experiences as their better-off peers.

Wealthier children are taken by their parents to museums, galleries and the theatre, which makes them not just economically but culturally more advantaged, the theory suggests.

In 2019, schools inspectorate Ofsted included the phrase in its guidance for the first time. “As part of making the judgment about quality of education, inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life,” it said.

It added: “It is essential knowledge pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said, and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.”

The study did find that parents’ and children’s reading habits and activities, such as borrowing books from the library, had a significant impact on grades: “Engaging in two or three reading activities, on average, increases the pupil’s GCSE score by between seven and nine points.

“The size of this effect should not be overlooked, since an extra GCSE pass at grade A* is worth eight points.”

However, reading activities explained between 4% and 5% of the differences in GCSE grades, while parents’ social class background had a much stronger impact on grades.

“It is beguiling to believe that increasing pupils’ levels of cultural capital will have a positive influence on GCSE outcomes,” the researchers said, adding that it was “tempting to theorise that visits to museums or historic venues might be helpful in igniting interests in history, and that visits to the theatre might similarly cultivate learning in drama”.

However, they said their findings “do not lend any support to the view that increasing cultural capital will reduce the size of social class inequalities in school GCSE outcomes”.

They added that “if schools are serious about reducing educational inequalities” then “schools would be better placed to concentrate on increasing reading activities.”

They added that targeted policy interventions should address the “stark social class attainment gaps, which are consistently observed in school GCSE outcomes”.

The Government’s social mobility commissioner, Katharine Birbalsingh, said teachers should not assume that they could draw knowledge out of pupils, rather than teaching them material directly – as this would benefit middle-class students.

“A more middle-class child can go home and will sit down at the dinner table with their parents and they will talk about the politics of the day, read the books that are on the shelves; mum and dad might take out the newspaper,” she said. “But the more disadvantaged child does not.”