In 1996 a group of Oxford academics produced a book called Options for Britain. It was intended as a thought piece for an incoming (Labour) government. 12 years on, and with less clarity as to the makeup of the next government, we are working on a new volume along the same lines. To that end I have spent the last three days in Oxford at a policy conference.
The concept of pupil premium is was widely supported in the education session. I asked the obvious question: How large must the pupil premium be for the child of Somalian immigrants in Lambeth, compared with a child who is white, living in an affluent suburban area, and with well-educated parents, if we want both to have an equal chance of doing well at school?
No one at the conference knew: because we have never had a pupil premium in Britain we cannot know the answer. But there is some evidence from the United States, contained in Woessmann and Peterson Schools and the Equal Opportunity Policy.
In this book is the authors ask a different but related question: if we hold educational spending for whites constant, how much do we need to spend on the education of blacks for them to have equal educational outcomes? It turns out that the number is very large: spending on black pupils needs to be nine times as high as that on whites.
What does this mean for Liberal Democrats? If we imagine that one in three children received some element of the pupil premium, ranging evenly from almost nothing to nine times the baseline level of funding, then the policy would more than double expenditure on education, and would cost approximately £90 billion.
Of course the final figure could be less. Perhaps the correct figure for Britain will not prove to be nine times, perhaps it will only prove to be four times. Perhaps it will not need to go to one in three students, perhaps only to one in five. But even then the pupil premium would require £24 billion. Whatever the final figure, and we cannot find that out until we try it, it is clear that the £2.5 billion the party says that it will allocate to a pupil premium should be considered a down payment on a work in progress, not a policy completed.
This is not to criticise the party: it has done well to find £2.5 billion has a down payment. Nor should we underestimate the amount of money that a government can find over time. In the first 10 years of the Labour government, government spending rose by more than £140 billion in real terms. A government committed to better educating those who currently do badly in schools could certainly find £24 billion in normal economic circumstances over the duration of one parliament, provided that they made it an absolute priority.
It is worth asking whether such a policy would pass cost benefit analysis. The evidence from America, sadly, is no. In narrow economic terms, taking into account only the additional wages earned, and the greater cost of education, is that spending nine times as much on the education of blacks as whites would yield an investment return of just 1.2%. We could no doubt had a little for reductions in crime obesity and other social ills associated with poor education and resulting poverty. But it would be naive to say that such a policy will pay for itself over the long term.
Of course, there is more to life and economic and investment returns. Liberal Democrats believe that no one should be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. It says so on our party membership cards. But I think we also believe, well, most of us at least, that people should not be enslaved by the accident of their birth. To that end I think the pupil premium is a right and proper policy for the Liberal Democrats, even if the return is lower than the cost of capital. The challenge for the party is to find a proper sum of money to fund this policy: there is no doubt that we can transform the lives of millions of young people in Britain. But it will take real money to achieve that goal.
Tim Leunig is a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and writes a regular column on economics for Liberal Democrat Voice.
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33 Comments
As an economist, Tim will know about diminishing returns to scale, marginal benefit etc
The point is that beyond a certain point, spending on education will have limited returns if a pupil’s circumstances outside school are awful. The party needs to match the holistic view of attainment wrapped up in the ideas of children’s centres, extended schools etc. These aren’t adequate solutions because they don’t always lift pupil aspirations and parental expectations. Poor families with great ambitions – and there are many of those in our cities – will seize educational opportunity. It’s those without ambition or a concept of what education can give we have to worry about.
If we’re putting extra investment into education, let’s give some thought as to where it will be most effective.
Great points which I mostly agree with. Just a general issue with the ‘poverty of ambition’ point. I do to a certain extent agree with this diagnosis as an explanation for educational failure but always feel a pang of guilt afterwards as it’s quite patronising.
In my experience poorer families don’t have any less ambition for their children but the circumstances surrounding them and their lifestyles have taught them that to want is to be disappointed.
Personally I always lent towards the ‘cycle of poverty’ explanation for low levels of educational attainment in this group of pupils. Therefore I think Nick addressing social mobility/equality is the key here.
Sorry, I rambled a bit there.
I agree to a large extent with what you’ve said, Jo. People in poor areas, however ambitious they may be, are limited by inferior services. A cursory glance at the education league tables will prove that.
I recommend the book “Estates: An Intimate History” by Lynsey Hanley. Although the author is significantly more left-wing than myself, she has a lot of worthwhile stuff to say for herself, having personally grown up on a sink estate and faced the challenges of an intelligent person in a monolithic, conformist environment in which achievement is not valued.
The last thing we should ever do is abuse people for their circumstances. Leave that to the Tories.
Thanks for that, Herbert (or Herbie?) :@) I have heard a lot of Liberals talking about this ‘poverty of ambition’ though. It is a good idea but I’m afraid it’s to relieve middle-class guilt – probably why it has the reverse effect on me!
Also Ed Balls expanding the academies programme which has meant 10% of the budget being spent on 1% of schools, and which have been proven are selective is a golden example of why thinking about equality in education is heading off in completely the wrong direction under Labour.
Jon: For clarity, although diminishing marginal returns are common in every day life, the article has no evidence that they apply here. It is possible that the improvement in educational outcomes for kids from backgrounds associated with low educational outcomes are proportional to the money you spend on them.
Poverty and lack of ambition by no means go together. However from experience in Birmingham, there are many poor families in Birmingham with terrific ambition and very minimal investment in education pays dividends. I’ve seen grammar school pupils stoically working away in tiny cramped houses. We also have inner city schools stashing away cash they don’t need (although this is a matter under investigation).
But there are also families, who for historic or social reasons have absolutely no confidence or interest in the education system. Yes, by intensive mentoring you can turn around the prospects for these young people. And it is certainly true you need sustained investment in their education – but the money has to buy good, inspiring teaching as well as intensive teaching. The problem is both categories of young people would attract the same premium.
Of course, if you do a regression analysis on, say, PISA results for international test scores, the biggest effects on pupil outcomes are parents’ income, parents’ educational level, and peer effects. Spending more on poor pupils is great- freedom is after all the education you receive to conceive and actions a life that fulfils one’s dream. Aristotle called it eudomonia. But using the money to create a price signal to get schools to select poor pupils to middle-class schools by catchment area would make a real difference.
Poverty ambition is a factor. If a parent leaves schools at 16, statistically the child is much more likely to. I also have anecdotal evidence of the same- in schools as much as families. Identifying clever kids and encouraging them to apply to the Oxbridges and the LSEs would make a real difference.
We have much to learn from grammar schools. They ghettoised forgotten people in secondary moderns who lost out on the peer effects of their luckier peers, but the grammar schools created an atmosphere and peer effects where grammar school kids dominated Oxbridge. It wasn’t the best solution, but we should learn from both the good things and the bad about that time… Grammar schools didn’t have more money spent on them.
Simon said:
“Poverty ambition is a factor. If a parent leaves schools at 16, statistically the child is much more likely to. I also have anecdotal evidence of the same- in schools as much as families. Identifying clever kids and encouraging them to apply to the Oxbridges and the LSEs would make a real difference.”
How does leaving school at the age of 16 translate into a poverty of ambition? This phrase is so ugly – perhaps ‘a lack of ambition caused by living in poor circumstances’ would be a nicer way of putting it?
Clever kids in state schools are usually not as bright as the cream of the crop at private schools and may therefore not be able to compete at the level of Oxbridge and LSE – does that mean you should not bother with the less bright students who want to go to Durham or Bristol…
Partly- but that doesn’t completely encapsulate it. I went to one of the best private schools there are and Cambridge- much like our leader- but I don’t buy your argument that clever kids in state schools are not usually as clever as those in private schools. Many of them just don’t have the same advantages. take my mate Giles- state school in East London, now doing his PhD at Cambridge. his teachers told him that ‘cambridge wasn’t for people like him’. He was bright enough. He ‘overcame’ his background to go to the same place that I did with all of my advantages. But it was ambition that almost stopped him. It’s a ver British class nonsense. Witness the emotions generated by a pile of bricks and mortar like places like Eton or Oxbridge. Or ginger headed kids who happen to be from one particular family. This nonsense, unfortunately, matters to some people.
To answer at more length, might I be so bold to point you to a blog post that I just wrote?
Also, of course Durham matters! Not least, my sister goes there…
Simon you must appreciate that creaming 7% of the pupil population into private schooling has some effect on the quality of intake at the remaining state schools. There is further segregation between state schools as better schools become oversubscribed with plucky middle-class parents who couldn’t quite scrape together the fees for private school queueing out the door.
If you don’t think that has an effect on the state school struggling down the road to get pupils on seats as my primary school is then there is a problem. It will affect their pupils and it will affect their intake. But the brightest kids in my primary should be helped in the same way as the brightest in any other school, even if they don’t come close to their opponents in spelling bees or debating comps…
Oh god just read it back to myself – I’m not a class warrior or anything…:@)Just interested in the effects of everything…eek!
Jo & Tim,
Could you please explain more of what a student premium is and how that money will be spent? Also, in the countries where the premium has been introduced, what have the results been? Is this going to be value for money?
Alex
I think it is a mistake to characterise educational differences between students as being that between “clever” and “stupid”, “intelligent” and “unintelligent”, or “academic” and “good with their hands”. I call this the Morlock/Eloi syndrome (I’m sure you get the source.)
We have, or used to have, a perfectly good word for this difference that is both more inclusive and less patronising: “docility” (www.thefreedictionary.com/docile). We don’t use the word with quite its original meaning any more, but it simply means that students will differ in their readiness and willingness to learn and be taught. And there can be many reasons for this, including – yes – innate intelligence, but also all the societal factors that posters have already mentioned. I also believe that docility can vary for different subjects, for different teaching methods, and over time. (With respect to the latter, I mean that people often seem to become more docile with age; this was why attempting to put people in either the Morlock or Eloi box at age 11 was so profoundly wrong.)
If I understand it correctly, the supposition behind the pupil premium is that less docile students are costlier to educate. I think that this is likely to be true in the majority of cases. Although I want to make three observations.
First, if this is true then I’m puzzled by the argument we sometimes hear, to the effect that the pupil premium will incentivise schools to admit more less-docile pupils, because of the extra funding they bring. The extra funding is supposed to be required to teach such pupils, so how is the school supposed to gain a net benefit? (Incidentally, I think one of the better arguments in favour of comprehensive schools – and non-selective education generally – is that the per-pupil funding of the docile students cross-subsidises the less-docile students.)
Second, it’s arguable that gifted (hyper-docile, if you like) students are also more costly to teach, and therefore also deserve a premium. Now, I confess I’m sceptical about how many genuinely gifted students there are; I suspect many are merely precocious. But the argument still applies.
Finally, as other posters have hinted, because docility can have so many, overlapping causes, we need to be careful to ensure that extra funding is really the right answer in each case. As I mentioned above, a change of teaching methods may be enough.
Gifted students are classified as SEN I think although I may be wrong on this. They deserve as much help. Although it’s entirely at the teacher’s discretion whether the child is labelled so. Which is not the case if the child were to suffer aspergers syndrome for instance. Although it debilitate the child in the same way…
Great points! I’m less interested in the economics but that debate must carry on too…
I like this docility thing. It suggests to me the idea of a graduated scale, with children who suffer from the horrid-sounding “poverty of ambition” at the rough end and the hot-housed precocious ones at the other end. I also agree it’s got very little to do with raw intelligence after a certain age – otherwise poorer kids wouldn’t start out ahead and fall behind their wealthier counterparts between the ages of 7 and 11, which I believe it what currently happens.
It’s surely much more useful to think of it as a scale, as opposed to an either/or choice of “poverty of ambition or not”, but it does make Tim’s basic question – how much is enough? – even more complex because literally every child would require a slightly different subsidy to bring them to some agreed standard. How could you band pupils fairly and decide how much subsidy certain bands should get? Where would you draw the line in terms of fine detail assessment?
“The extra funding is supposed to be required to teach such pupils, so how is the school supposed to gain a net benefit?”
Is a slightly cynical case of subjective economics in play? Just as individuals are hopelessly optimistic about, eg, future earnings (certainly I am :-D) perhaps the idea is that schools get optimistic about how much of that extra funding will really be required to take on the extra teaching costs. There’s also a less cynical argument at work to do with economies of scale – say taking on ten SEN pupils requires the same number of extra teachers as eight but all SEN pupils bring the same amount of funding, the school would be sensible to take on the ten, which is a good outcome.
Jo- no need for ‘eeks’! A good discussion, I thought!
There is a problem of social segregation by private vs. state schools, but we can’t exactly use state power to ban people educating themselves not through the state, whether it is home schooling or buying books at Waterstones. What we can do is let different schools compete, raising up poverty, rather than lowering down wealth, and aim money, resources and other levers that we have access to to spread opportunity to the worst off. For example, the Observer today has a great article about the over 1 million adults who can’t read and write. By tackling their problems, we can really help their kids too. This should be something that would really help the worst off and something that liberals should be leading the charge on. This is as much about extra literacy classes, Surestart, Skills for Life and government programmes as just extra money.
Re competition: I hope we can all agree that both diversity and choice are important in education, not least because students differ in docility. However, (a) I’m not yet 100% convinced that competition is a necessary condition for either, and (b) even if it is, I think that competition within a school is likely to be more cost-effective than competition between schools. Unfortunately, a scheme for intra-school competition requires more thought and a much longer post than I have time for now!
An interesting piece.
Question for you though, Tim. Are the calculations based on increased monetary impact only, or also considering potential benefits from good schools being more attracted to pupils who receive the premium?
Whilst it’s a bit unclear with our non-selection policy whether this would even be possible, a big driver of change from the original (pre-“free schools”) proposal was the increased attractiveness of socially deprived children to previously solid middle class schools.
Your cost-benefit analysis suggests that overall it wouldn’t make sense for schools to do this (i.e. the increased cash wouldn’t cover the increased expense), but in practice many schools might have specific uses for increased funding and an ability to deal with socially deprived children at a lower than average marginal cost (e.g. already existing specialist services, currently under-utilised).
Dear all,
Some clarifications in answer to questions:
1) A pupil premium gives more money to schools if the pupil concerns meets certain criteria. An obvious one would be to pay £x more to the school than the usual allocation for each “free school meals” kid. This should have two effects. First, it makes these kids more attractive to schools, so that they are less likely to try to cherry-pick easy-to-teach kids from supportive backgrounds. This means that places in “good schools” will be spread around more evenly. Second, it gives the school more money to use to teach these kids.
2) Whilst it would be possible for the state to prescribe what the school could do with the money, I assume that the LibDems would leave it up to the School. If we were talking about doubling, trebling, or multiplying funding by an even higher multiple, then realistically much of the money would be spent on staff. I assume that this would include improving the quantity of staff (smaller class sizes, or much great use of small group or individual teaching), and the quality of staff (these schools would be able to offer higher salary rates, thus attracting better staff)
3) We have a sort of pupil premium in the UK already, in that shire counties (which have fewest kids from low attainment backgrounds) have the lowest levels of funding. In addition, a handful of kids in care are sent to private boarding schools (although some of the costs are offset by reduced costs of care home places). It is more explicit in the Netherlands, where I understand the ratio is 3:1 for the kid who gets the most, to the kid who gets the least. I am told that it is effective, but I am not sure what proportion of the educational gap is closed. I understand that CentreForum are thinking of doing some work in this area, and I think it would be brilliant if they did.
4) The cost-benefit-analysis is for the govt as a whole. It simply looks at whether the costs are covered by the increases in wages later in life. It is not a CBA for the school. At (say) 3:1 funding levels I think that there would be real interest in taking in these kids at school level.
5) At the moment encouraging kids from poor backgrounds to apply to Oxford and LSE is unlikely to be very effective, as very few kids from such backgrounds get the grades to get in, and succeed on arrival. Sad but true.
I hope that this is useful: if people have any other points that they want answering, ask away, either via the list or to [email protected]
Tim,
Thank you for answering questions and being good enough to carry on the debate. Thanks.
On your point 1, though. Surely higher funding might not be enough to simply stop schools cheery-picking middle class kids. To a certain extent, it is the middle classes cherry picking the best schools by paying extra to live in the catchment area. I am sure that it would be a partial answer to the problem, but not quite close to a solution.
Oh, and for fear of becoming a bore, or even more of one, on the final Cambridge/LSE point. You are right that those who would get a pupil premium might not have the grades, but plenty of kids from state schools do get the grades, but fail to apply in the numbers that they should. While some of this might be a greater affinity for better-off people to go to places with older buildings, a good amount of it is still ‘fear’ or ‘not for the likes of us’ syndrome. This wasn’t as true in the ‘History Boys’ days when the likes of our current Governor of the Bank of England went through the grammar school system (Wolverhampton Grammar) and Cambridge, but this is not the case with the brightest kids from a comprehensive setting. As a party that believes in social mobility, it is something that is worth thinking about.
Simon: You are right that nothing in the pupil premium would stop the middle classes “clumping together” – not least because middle class housing tends to be clumped together. As such kids would still largely be educated with other kids of similar social backgrounds. Unless we are prepared to bus kids from Sunderland to Winchester, and vice versa, that will always be the case.
But it would mean that schools no longer had a “league table” rationale for cherry picking middle class kids.
Under the pupil premium kids from these backgrounds would (finally!) get the grades to end up as my students in decent numbers. I hope that they then would.
But today the reason so many people at Oxbridge/LSE etc are from private schools (or selective state schools) is that so many of the students getting 3As+ come from those schools. This is one of those sad but true facts. Of course, at the margin, we want more of those who come from non-trad backgrounds and get high grades to go to top univs, but the big reason that there are so few people from such backgrounds at these univs is not lack of ambition, or discrimination, it is lack of grades. That is why a pupil premium is so important.
Simon says:
“plenty of kids from state schools do get the grades, but fail to apply in the numbers that they should.”
Do you have any figures to back your claims up? As Tim has said it’s been proven that working-class kids from state schools underachieve – I was told by one of my A Level teachers – by as much as one or two grades below their ability. This is due to many factors, poverty being the most obvious one, but also the fact, which I have recently blogged about, that the presence of middle-class kids in a school improves working-class achievement. But they are just not integrated enough due to all this selection we have. There is also an issue of confidence in ability here, an issue which I have also blogged on.
I have only been educated alongside a very bright student once and the class really did benefit from it. He was at our FE college for reasons I could never quite work out, but was a straight A student. His questions used to startle the tutor so much she’d spend 15 minutes of the class just talking to him and discussing his ideas, but the rest of the class benefitted hugely from that. What we had was probably a university level discussion around us, which surely increased our confidence with ideas. Just a thought at the end there!
“plenty of kids from state schools do get the grades, but fail to apply in the numbers that they should.”
I’d back Simon up, purely anecdotally. For a start, bright state school pupils are disadvantaged by the anti-Oxbridge bias of some teachers. A recent Sutton Trust report suggested that something like a staggering 20% of teachers would NEVER recommend Oxbridge to their bright pupils. That’s an outrageous curtailment of people’s options.
Also anecdotally, a friend who used to be an admissions tutor at a Cambridge college showed me a database of schools he used when considering applications. It showed averages for GCSE/A-level results for every school, and he was able to make a fairer contextual judgement about people’s grades or predicted grades based on the school they went to – not very systematic but a slight improvement, and I think he said the whole university used that system. It’s rare, but EE offers do exist as a mechanism for getting underachieving bright pupils in. Checking the figures on those offers and who they get made to might be worth doing, actually…
Small point – Wolverhampton Grammar School is a fee-charging independent school.
I don’t think the boy I was writing about before needed any encouragement to apply to Oxford, he’d already tied a place up.
If I had got the grades at A Level I wouldn’t have waited until my teachers suggested Oxbridge I would have been there before they’d even asked!!
There’s also the case of preparation for Oxbridge interviews – from my experience, and anecdotally, most state schools don’t do preparation for interviews like many independent and public schools do . . .
Liz- I might be wrong, but I don’t think it was when Mervyn King was there in the 50s. The engine for working class kids prepared for top unis and jobs has not been replaced by anything else in a less socially-segregated context.
The interview was certainly the barrier in my case. I was ill-prepared for it. I got the grades but no offer.
I was saved by the fact that we all had two separate interviews, I was then called for a third one – and then I was interviewed by a different college. The three interviews I’d just had made the last one much easier. There was no preparation by my school.
I didn’t have any practice interviews either- maybe due to the fact that I applied to read Law which wasn’t taught at school. I get the impression that practice interviews and Oxbridge classes tended only to be at the big London day schools (Westminster, St Pauls, Habs etc)
Well I got an unconditional offer to my university so there! :@P
What is this Oxbridge alumni connect? :@P