The first thing David Laws has been doing as the new Education Minister is promoting the Pupil Premium. For schools in Haringey it’s worth £8.8million. So it’s a shame that their Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone ends up having to write to them to find out how they are spending the money.
One report finds that while some schools are spending the premium as intended, for example on early intervention schemes or more one-to-one tuition, a sizeable number also use it to mitigate cuts. Most worryingly teachers don’t seem to be aware of their school having priorities for spending the pupil premium.
Family Action believes it’s vital the pupil premium is used as a lever to raise awareness among schools and teachers of how disadvantage directly impacts on children’s attainment. Our Be Bothered! report published this week shows that many schools and teachers remain unaware of the challenges facing some of the UK’s most vulnerable pupils: the 175,000 young carers who look after parents or siblings with disabilities, illness or substance abuse issues.
Many teachers remain unaware that these pupils have caring responsibilities outside the classroom, punish them for lateness, inattention and failure to complete assignments, (which may be caused by their caring duties) and fail to offer to offer them any additional support. One teacher from London told us: “This guy was in my form, I didn’t know that he was a young carer for three years that I was his form tutor. I was supposed to know everything about him and I didn’t have a clue at all , maybe it was a lack of communication on all of our parts. Eventually when we did find out we tried to help him a little bit more bit I think it was too late by then. He wasn’t educated the way he should have been.”
This is unacceptable when schools are getting dished out a pupil premium worth £2.5 billion by 2014, not to mention the millions being doled out to local authorities to tackle school attendance and exclusion via the Troubled Families programme.
One answer would be duties and guidance for schools to be proactive in reaching out to parents to identify the needs of all pupils on free school meals and ensuring form teachers devise appropriate strategies for all vulnerable young people accordingly. A further step would be the ringfencing of pupil premium monies. The Children and Families Bill presents an opportunity for either measure.
In any case the message of Be Bothered is that Liberal Democrats and their colleagues need to work to secure a legacy for the pupil premium rather than assuming that there will be one.
Rhian Beynon is Head of Policy and Campaigns for the charity Family Action, a leading provider of services to disadvantaged and socially isolated families since its foundation in 1869.
* Rhian Beynon is Head of Policy and Campaigns for the charity Family Action, a leading provider of services to disadvantaged and socially isolated families since its foundation in 1869.
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12 Comments
So… you’re advocating that rather than the pupil premium being spent on pupils it should be spent on educating teachers to use common sense?
The whole point of a liberal government is to place trust with teachers and parents, not to dictate from upon high. Schools should be free to use the money they receive in whatever way they think is best as they understand the needs of the children they look after better than some executive trying to lobby on behalf of her employer.
It should be noted that there is more accountability being brought in regarding the Pupil Premium. I completely agree with Thomas that teachers are the best people to decide how to spend the money – however, to borrow a line from Nick Clegg, they are not free to fail.
From this month, schools will have an obligation to publish how they are spending the Pupil Premium so that parents, governors and yes, even local MPs, can see how the money is being used to support disadvantaged pupils. Plus, school league tables now show separately the performance of pupils receiving Free School Meals. This will allow yearly comparisons to be made indicating how successful schools are being at closing the attainment gap.
I don’t think that is what she is saying at all. The spending of it on improving pupils’ lots should be utilised as an educational tool for teachers (not spending on the education itself but as a consequence f the support)… The whole point of a liberal government is to inform people so that they can make their own decisions, including teachers and that is surely what is being proposed here. Sounds quite sensible to me and I might try it in my area.
Thanks for the comments.
Of course I have been known to lobby for my employer! but in this instance I am doing so on behalf of young carers we work with who asked us to campaign on this issue. Sadly their experience is that some teachers do not know best and in fact cannot be bothered to find out – hence the title of report!
It’s good news on increased accountability on premium spending. But given that schools know which pupils are on free school meals why shouldn’t they have to take a more targeted appoach to understanding individual pupil aspirations, and needs? Why shouldn’t they have to involve teachers in their pupil premium strategy? That doesn’t preclude them making local decisions about spending. £2.5 billion is a lot of the tax payers’ money. Shame not to be able to demonstrate more social mobility per buck .
Thank you for raising this important issue Rhian. With the PP as in so many areas it seems that governing bodies often do not feel they owe parents any account of how they spend taxpayers’ money.
Rhian – you make some very good points, but I wonder how exactly you would propose to enforce the ringfencing of PP money that you suggest? Perhaps I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that involve a (probably v expensive) monitoring system? Or would you want to incorporate it somehow into the normal Ofsted inspections? I assume Family Action and other similar organisations probably don’t have the resources to monitor all schools in receipt of the money.
To the standard bearers of unfettered liberal localism 🙂 – what happens if (or rather when) teachers don’t know best? What happens when teachers are either ignorant, overworked, not paying attention, uncaring, prejudiced or a combination of all the above? Normally I’m all in favour of giving power to individuals to make their own decisions, but in this case it’s someone else’s education they are potentially cocking up. If a doctor made a series of bad decisions that impacted negatively on patients’ treatment, we would surely advocate them being investigated / monitored? We shouldn’t be advocating for the teachers in this case, but rather for the pupils.
However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, I would add that even in cases where the money is being used just to mitigate cuts, it is probably still having a beneficial effect on the school in general and thereby indirectly on the pupils it’s intended to help. So the result will still be that schools with a higher number of pupils entitled to free school meals will be better off than those with fewer disadvantaged pupils.
Oh come on, this is just reiterating the tabloid misinterpretation of those numbers from a while back. That “sizeable number” is 8%. This study clearly shows that, leaving aside the people surveyed who simply didn’t know how their school was spending the money (which is expected: not every person in a school knows everything about how it’s spending money), around 90% of schools are spending the pupil premium money in ways it was intended to be spent.
By any reasonable measure, that is a spectacular success. We can but dream of a day when 90% of all government funding gets spent on the things it was intended to be spent on.
Failed ofsted inspections, special measures, and the sacking of the school management. This system works reasonably well at turning failing schools into mediocre ones, so I don’t see a big problem here. Any other questions?
@Thomas Long
“… you’re advocating that rather than the pupil premium being spent on pupils it should be spent on educating teachers to use common sense?
The whole point of a liberal government is to place trust with teachers and parents, not to dictate from upon high. Schools should be free to use the money they receive in whatever way they think is best ”
Unfortunately no ‘school’ has ever spent a penny on education. As a longstanding governor, I must inform you that education spending decisions are largely made by head teachers and rubber-stamped by governors. Perhaps 20-30 per cent of school governing bodies have the intellectual power and/or competence and/or interest level to question Head teachers’ decisions. I have a sneaking feeling that in Academies this is likely to be an even lower level.
Some head teachers will be using this money, genuinely, to try to address issues of underperformance by those pupils who are from deprived backgrounds. Others will use it to protect generally against cutbacks, high energy costs etc and even to give their pet teachers (including themselves!) extra pay.
It would, of course, be brilliant if schools published how they are using the pupil premium. I wrote to the schools in my constituency (and had meetings with two of the Secondary Heads) to find out how the money was being spent – so that I could spread good ideas around. When I have finished this research – I hope it will not only demonstrate best practise and good ideas – but give a clear picture of how money the coalition has targetted on those most in need is actually being used in the schools in my constituency.
It seems ridiculous to have government dole out taxpayer’s money and not know how it is being spent, and worse, for the recipients to not feel it’s their automatic duty to tell government how it is spent, but to feel instead that they can spend it on something else.
If it happened in a 3rd world country we’d call it corruption!
@Tony Dawson “Some head teachers will be using this money, genuinely, to try to address issues of underperformance by those pupils who are from deprived backgrounds.”
@lynne featherstone “It would, of course, be brilliant if schools published how they are using the pupil premium.”
There’s an old maxim: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. I’m sure all heads will be able to point to good things they’ve done with the money, and this could mean better salaries for some teachers, or resources that would otherwise have been lost because of other cuts, but I doubt that it will be possible in most cases to show any direct link between that expenditure and the performance of poorer children. But who will be reading these reports? Who will be evaluating the success of the expenditure? What can be done about wasteful expenditure, and by whom? In an anti-target political culture, how do we know what is good enough and what is failing?
We’ll probably have a huge collection of anecdotes, shallow press exposes of examples of lefty / PC / trendy wastes of money, some good projects, some bad projects, and simply a lot of reshuffling of budgets which won’t have changed overall as much as one might expect from all the fanfare about the pupil premium – compensating for other cuts, repairing buildings, etc. might all be the best ways for a head to spend any additional income from the PP. Since secondary schools will be assessed on A*-C grades, then I would guess that for many the priority will still be on pupils approaching the end of year 11 on a C-D boundary regardless of the social background of any particular child or whether intervention in earlier years would have helped. What is the incentive to help a failing child attain a D grade, or to support a child falling behind in year 7 whose performance won’t affect the schools record for another 4 years?
In some ways, the Pupil Premium seems to be addressing criticisms of Labour for throwing money at big organisations by simply throwing it at smaller ones without thinking clearly about what is the best way to spend that money. If we accept that localism is good, why is it the received wisdom that the headmaster is precisely the right level of localism. In some areas the LEA might be the right level, or a group of schools within a community, in order to achieve economies of scale, collaboration, coordination, etc.. Or why not give the money directly to the parents (or even the children!): it doesn’t get more local than that.
It appears to me that most of the educational reforms from the coalition government have been ushered in without any great scrutiny or debate. Is this a fair assessment, or is it simply that as a layperson I am just late to the party?