Over at the Financial Times today, former Lib Dem cabinet minister David Laws and CentreForum’s director Julian Astle write about the potential of the ‘pupil premium’ to transform the life chances of pupils from the most disadvantaged backgrounds — but argue that schools must be held accountable for using the money directly for this purpose. Here’s an excerpt:
The pupil premium, which for the first time will see a universal service underpinned by an explicitly pro-poor funding system, sits front-and-centre in this [social mobility] agenda.
At present there is additional school funding for young people from deprived backgrounds, but it is allocated in inconsistent and unpredictable ways, with the amount reaching schools varying dramatically and arbitrarily from place to place. By contrast the new policy will, by the end of this parliament, see an additional £2.5bn a year distributed transparently and predictably. This should deliver three benefits. First, it will give existing schools an incentive to admit more pupils from deprived backgrounds. Second, it will see new schools encouraged to set up in deprived areas too. And third, it will ensure that schools in poorer places are given additional funds to succeed.
Of course, money alone will not solve the problem. But giving “hard to teach” children intensive support cannot be done on the cheap. Recruiting and retaining inspiring teachers; longer school days and weeks; more one-to-one tuition and catch-up classes – all of it costs money. …
… the coalition must set itself a … difficult task: giving schools discretion over how the funds are used, but also creating an accountability system that forces them to answer for their decisions. Schools should be free to experiment. It is what they achieve, not how they achieve it, that should interest government.
You can read David Julian’s article in full here (free to access, but registration required).
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4 Comments
“the coalition must set itself a more difficult task: giving schools discretion over how the funds are used, but also creating an accountability system that forces them to answer for their decisions. Schools should be free to experiment. It is what they achieve, not how they achieve it, that should interest government….
School leaders should … be aware that .. the government gives them these freedoms … with conditions. Those schools … who spend their pupil premium money in ways that do not improve pupil performance – should expect government to take a much closer interest in their affairs. Such schools should be supported, perhaps even required, to use tried and tested pedagogical techniques in return for further additional investment.”
@David Laws and Julian Astle
I applaud this, though it contains a paradox. What you are proposing is different from the previous government’s policy of telling schools how to spend the money. It gives them initial freedom to experiment.
But if they fail to tackle under-performance by the poor, then you are calling for the government to do what the previous government did: tell them what to do.
What is ironic is that this may apply to schools with high success rates for their brightest pupils, but who neglect the poorest.
If we have the inspectorate bearing down on schools that do well in school league tables, but neglect the poor, I would strongly applaud it.
I still can’t wotrk out the paradox of giving poor kids a bit more extra help at school and then sending them home to squalor becuase we have cut housing and social security benefits .
Deeply worried that this system wil be abused by ‘Free Schools’ with either an agenda to make profits or to push a particular narrow message. In any other profession a someone would have to prove their creditials before being allowed to ‘experiment’ at the publics expense.
@George Kendall wrote: “If we have the inspectorate bearing down on schools that do well in school league tables, but neglect the poor, I would strongly applaud it.”
Second.
“At present there is additional school funding for young people “. this is what concerns teachers and headteachers who work in areas of deprivation. Are the existing deprivation grants (administered I think by LEAs) part of the protected “school funding” or do they fall outside this budget and are subject to cuts?
It also depends on what criteria the Pupil Premium will use to allocate funding. If it is just on Free School Meals then schools that need the money may suffer because some parents simply don’t register for free meals and others are just outside this entitlement but still on low incomes.
If the existing deprivation funding is cut, the Pupil Premium may mean that money moves away from schools located in deprived areas who don’t have the free schoo meal numbers to gain from the PP. However these schools may have much more “average deprivation” than schools in more prosperous areas that will now be able to access PP money for their free school meal pupils.
The Pupil Premium is a great idea but it must support existing deprivation funding not replace it.