Yesterday the Government announced the details of the brand new Pupil Premium which will make available £2.5 billion a year to children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds by the end of this Parliament. In doing so the coalition is delivering one of the key Liberal Democrat manifesto policies.
Schools will now be able to work out exactly what they will be receiving from next April and how they will be able to use this to help their most disadvantaged children.
I have three young children and care passionately about fostering children’s potential early on. I know that there has been an unacceptable, avoidable and yet demonstrable link between children who qualify for free school meals and underachievement. By sixteen, a pupil who has not been entitled to free school meals is more than three times more likely to get five good GCSEs. In a wealthy society which should aspire to giving all children the best start in life, this cannot be right.
Labour’s record is weak and they cannot bring themselves to admit that our party is going where they failed to go. The coalition Government’s Spending Review protected school funding at flat cash per pupil, before adding the pupil premium. (Flat cash per pupil means that as pupil numbers go up, the overall budget goes up in line). The pupil premium is totally in addition to this, and will amount to £430 for each child eligible for free school meals.
In line with our desire to free our education system from overbearing central government control, it will be entirely up to schools how they choose to spend the Pupil Premium, but the emphasis will be on raising the attainment of those children who need support and extra help the most. Parents will be able to see exactly how this money is being spent as schools will be required to publish information online to demonstrate how they are using these funds.
In the first year, the funding is being assigned by a Free Schools Meal indicator but the aim is to extend the Premium to those children who have previously been eligible for FSM even if they currently are not. Total funding for the premium will be £625m in 2011-12 and will be built up over time amounting to £2.5bn a year by 2014-15. This contributes to an overall increase in the schools budget by £3.6bn in cash terms by 2014-15.
Difficult economic times bring the need for necessary and painful cutbacks. However, Liberal Democrats have always set education at the heart of our policy programme and so we have made finding this money, even now, non-negotiable.
The last few weeks have proved extraordinarily difficult for the party and there are further challenges ahead which we must face together. With the Pupil Premium we are putting into practice something which has the potential to make a very real difference to millions of disadvantaged children up and down the country. Being in government is undeniably challenging, involving tough decisions as we’ve all observed over recent weeks. It is even more testing when that government is a coalition of two very different parties and the country is recovering from a state of economic turmoil. However with it comes the opportunity to implement important elements of our Party’s policy. The Pupil Premium was central to our campaign in April and thanks to our role in coalition Government it is becoming a reality; it will deliver a new beginning, a fairer start for those who need it most.
Dan Rogerson is the MP for North Cornwall and co-chair of the Lib Dem backbench Education, Young People and Families committee.
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7 Comments
Dan. I am hugely disappointed by this watered down policy.
Why?
– The promised small “real terms increase” for schools has now evaporated
– some individual schools will not only fail to get a real terms spending increase, but may get an absolute cash terms cut
– the Liberal Democrat manifesto promised a pupil premium worth £2.5bn from day 1. There was no mention in the manifesto of it being phased in slowly like this.
– The original intention was for a geographical variance. This has disappeared
– The intention was that free school meals was too crude a measure to implement this – yet it is your measure
– The Early intervention grant is being cut 11% cf the grant it is replacing
All in all – whereas the party can celebrate the term “Pupil Premium” entering the national educational consciousness – the policy itself is a huge disappointment, at the expense of a multitude of good ideas.
–
Sorry to spoil your piece, but …this is now a far cry from the pre-election pledge of investing £2500 million. The first year the amount will only be £625 million – and its not new investment.
The pupil premium is the same money that is simply being re-allocated. Some schools will receive less. It’s recycled from one budget to another – robbing Peter to pay Paul, Call it what you will. The pupil premium is now just a funding formula to determine budget distribution, not a new investment. It’s true the amount rises as the years progress, but as this announcement illustrates the devil has been in the detail. The headline announcement always sounds very rosy, though, I grant you that.
.
“The coalition Government’s Spending Review protected school funding at flat cash per pupil, before adding the pupil premium. (Flat cash per pupil means that as pupil numbers go up, the overall budget goes up in line). The pupil premium is totally in addition to this, and will amount to £430 for each child eligible for free school meals.”
This is a bit of clever wordsmanship. The overall Schools funding is not going up, therefore the Pupil Premium i snot additional money, more an internal redistribution. Some schools will lose money, the Education Secretary admits this.
This is better than it could have been, but it isn’t all it’s being sold to be. I accept that the premium could not be as per the manifesto, but let’s not pretend it is. Shout from the rooftops this is as good as we could get, we would have like to get more but the Tories stopped us…..
Also, Labour’s record was not that poor. I have two children 18 and 6. My son started school under the Tories. His school buildings were a disgrace, funding was too tight. Over the course of his schooling this improved dramtically (and in a relatively poor area). When my daughter started things were much better. Now I accept that there is still some distance to travel but the current opposition left the country’s education system much improved than that left by the current major party in Government.
Lets not forget either that in the Liberal Democrat Manifesto, The pledge was £2500 for each child, Not the
£430 that we ended up with.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/press_releases_detail.aspx?title=Liberal_Democrats_pledge_smaller_class_sizes_to_break_education_inequality&pPK=8db93222-2bd0-4255-a63e-441018957eea
Policy Detail
“The Pupil Premium would be available to the school which each disadvantaged pupil attended. It would be attached to those children entitled to Free School Meals – the million poorest children. The Pupil Premium would be set nationally and it would top up a national per-pupil base funding figure. It will raise the poorest children’s school funding to private school levels, with the average school receiving around £2500 extra for every child entitled to free school meals on their roll.”
And it was to be costed by
“Costs/Savings
This policy costs £2.5bn a year, and will be introduced in the second year of the Parliament after our jobs stimulus package, paid for from savings in Government such as our proposed reforms to tax credits (which will save £1.5bn) and administrative savings in the Department for Education and quangos (which save an additional £1bn)”
Oh Dear, I don’t think things happened like that somehow did it?
It’s been costed by recycling existing schools Budgets, scrapping EMA,
In Short it is another Farce, which has the Tories, holding their bellies in laughter at the incompetence of the Liberal Democrat Leaderships inability to spot when they have been shafted
do all people who are eligable for free school meals take it up? there is quite a stigma attached to the system
personally i think mentoring in early teenage years is important. middle class and privately educated people have a confidence that just isn’t present in young people from lower income families. Schools that are pleasant to be in, small classes these things count for a lot. Feeling appreciated, feeling respected. My Pa felt quite insulted by the implication that children who had free school meals might not read as well as those that didn’t!
A change in the money and respect given to different jobs and skills is needed. the academic are just one part of a larger (bigger) society. Pay people who are carers and cleaners (do you want to sit in a dirty office, use a dirty toilet?) better. they are as essential as bank staff, perhaps even more.
It is actually at as young as two and a half that a child’s future can be redicted.
make all schools good. In one city alone the difference is appalling (I know about Cardiff). higher education is all about BAs now, HNDs disappeared. Why? We all have different skills. In art and design HNDs preferenced business and practical skills and BAs the academic. don;t put one down and expect everyone to follow the same form of education.
change the education system. make it more fluid. allow more freedom for some teenagers (particularly boys).
Mind you as I live in Wales probably not really relevant to join in this discussion. I suspect the pupile premium is an england only thing, doesn’t affect Scotland, wales and NI. don;t really hear much about policies in these [arts of the UK in the national press anymore
I take it you removed my last post because I went slightly off topic rather than pointing out the fact the pupil premium is a con so I’ll try again.
The pupil premium is a con. It is not the policy that we agreed and the implementation is not what is being advertised. There is no extra money for this at all by the sounds of it. The money is going to come from other kids. We are in fact steeling some kids education to support our policy. This policy was wheeled out a couple of days after we have just destroyed the chances of thousands of kids by effectively stopping them from going to university. The idea which was sold to us was that we would support a net increase in funding. The truth is that in working class areas where most parents work the schools will lose money which will seriously affect these kids. This is disgraceful. It is also (in my opinion) dishonest not to tell people the full truth. Instead of the truth we are presenting with half the truth which paints a completely different picture to reality. I would ask anyone who reads this in our leadership why are you doing this – i.e. not telling the truth to the members of our party? The truth has a tendency tocome out and when it does it tends to make those not telling it look bad.
mod – sorry about y last comment – my first comment didn’t appear so I thought you had zapped it. Please accept my sincere apologies in thinking that you would do this.