The BBC tells us that poorer pupils are doing better at school, although you have to scroll through a load of text and graphics before they squeeze in as an afterthought that the Pupil Premium championed by Nick Clegg was responsible for the success.
Two-thirds of pupils (67%) on free school meals gained a Level 4 in reading, writing and maths this year – up four percentage points on 2013.
This compares with 83% for non-disadvantaged pupils, reducing the attainment gap to 16 percentage points.
The data is based on tests taken by 11-year-olds in 16,000 school
Schools Minister David Laws said it was “encouraging to see the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers continue to narrow and parents, teachers and pupils deserve to be congratulated for their efforts”.
He added: “But we know there is more to do and there are still too many areas with simply unacceptable levels of attainment for disadvantaged pupils.”
There are some really tough things about being in Government, but when you look at things like this, giving disadvantaged kids extra help so that they can have better opportunities in life, it makes it all worthwhile.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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26 Comments
This could have easily been negotiated from a position of confidence and supply – introducing a pupil premium was in the Conservative manifesto
Caron will probably get a lot of flack on here for this article, but she deserves for not allowing critics to silence her.
After Harriet Harman introducing us to some good facts yesterday I support pulling out of the coalition again. There’s too many actions that I can’t defend and other Lib Dems and liberals struggle to do the same too.
Confidence and supply is not worth it – you can’t do anything but get the blame for everything that goes wrong – and we wouldn’t have had the influence we’ve had in holding the Tories back.
If you look through the figures school by school, there is little doubt that the Pupil Premium has had an effect in improving the performance of the most disadvantaged pupils.
However, I think it would be a great mistake to use this fact to justify the propping up of Cameron’s Tory government. Liberal Democrat MPs have voted through many bad things in the name of the “Coalition”, and when we trumpet Liberal Democrat successes, we want people to listen rather than reach for the “off” switch.
I actually think that the pupil premium was one of the good policies that the Lib Dems got out of the coalition. I doubt, however, that it’ll have more impact than the negative effects of undermining early intervention services and social work by decimating council funding and the knock-on effects of the assault on the poor and disabled through the welfare system that the Lib Dems have cheerfully voted through. Still, small victories, hey?
More fundamentally, I no longer have any confidence *at all* in these figures. Level 4 is sufficiently subjective that it’s subject to the same year-by-year fall in standards that has led to dramatic rises in A-Level and GCSE grades. The stats are being fiddled, and so any “rise” must be viewed as dubious.
Sorry, I was in a rush and made a typo. I meant to say Caron deserves credit for the article.
Frustrating!
We are heading for disaster, losing votes left, right and centre, with a reputation trashed, tied to an austerity economic policy that has spectacularly failed. Many voters think we are irrelevant, the support of most of those still toying with voting Lib Dem is soft, and the Tories no longer care what Lib Dems think. Lib Dem influence?
I would like to know what evidence there is to link the pupil premium money to the rise in attainment. Is it funding new teachers so there are smaller class sizes?
It seems to me that the a good reason for the rise in attainment is probably due to the huge amount of time being given in schools in years 5 and 6 to preparing for the tests.
I know this was going on in schools when I was involved and the added pressure from government to ‘perform’ in them, has only intensified the focus.
I wonder which subjects are suffering because of the relentless tyranny of the SATs? Probably the arts but hey, they are no ‘use.’ After all you can’t get a job in the city and schools will not be given any credit in the league tables for Art, Music or Drama.
Just like in the Singapore hothouses, creativity goes out the window with a relentless focus on exams.
To Helen (and perhaps others):
Schools are given credit for Art, Music and Drama in the secondary school accountability system, just as they always have been. Primary schools have never had these subjects included. Ofsted look for a well-rounded curriculum in all schools.
If you are interested in how the Pupil Premium is being used, then a good place to start might be here: http://www.pupilpremiumawards.co.uk/ppawards2014.
Wikipedia reports that primary school children in Singapore have national “SATS” every term. That doesn’t look much like the English system to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Examinations_and_Assessment_Board#Prior_to_PSLE_Primary_1_to_5
When Labour achieved year-on-year increases in examination scores, we rightly faulted them for getting there by a combination of dumbing down the exams so they were easier to pass, spending more time cramming kids with facts and less time teaching them to think, and bullying kids to spend more time at their desks and less time on activities like socialising, physical exercise and sport.
Now we’re doing all those things ourselves, so magically they are now right.
Singapore still appears to be slightly ahead of us in the mindless cramming stakes. Marvellous!
My reaction mirrors this —
Helen Tedcastle 12th Dec ’14 – 9:43am
” I would like to know what evidence there is to link the pupil premium money to the rise in attainment. ”
How can anyone legitimately claim that a change in funding arrangements within the last 4 years has resulted directly in “..poorer pupils doing better at school. ” ?
I have listened to Clegg and Laws making similar claims for free school meals, a policy which I personally support but which has only been in place for a matter of weeks.
It is lke when Chairman Mao was asked in the 1960s if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been a success.
His answer — ” It is too early to tell. “
@ Tim Leunig
Thanks for the links. I read with interest about the pupil premium awards ceremony. I am a little suspicious of award ceremonies for schools. They should be getting this money anyway. One school spent the money on a new stage, another mentioned they had done ‘targeted interventions’ to improve attainment – this is teacher time not an explanation of how they spent the money.
Of course, £ 3, 000 is not going to fund an extra teacher. It will barely fund a subject budget for a year.
Once again it is teachers who are working their socks off to please Ministers, while the latter trumpet the idea that it is their money or their initiative that raises standards.
No it isn’t. Teachers’ hard work raises standards – let’s not forget that so perhaps this government can get off their backs and call off the Ofsted rottweilers for a while.
On Art, Music and Drama, Tim wrote:
‘ Schools are given credit for Art, Music and Drama in the secondary school accountability system, just as they always have been. Primary schools have never had these subjects included. Ofsted look for a well-rounded curriculum in all schools.’
I know that they are not counted in the performance tables for primary – that’s my whole point. We have swallowed the same narrow ideology as the Tories. That only performance tables matter. If you push schools to ‘perform’ in the SATs so they get a score, don’t be surprised when creative arts suffer ie: cut back, slimmed down etc..
Of course Ofsted look for a ’rounded curriculum.’ Schools will offer simply a lot less Art, a lot less drama and less music but will tick the box for Ofsted because it is ‘covered.’ Ofsted will be the first to complain if schools did focus on exams – their political masters wouldn’t wear it.
Relentless focus on exams and performance inevitably narrows the curriculum – unless you force ten and eleven year olds to work in lessons until five or six o’clock every night – or later, like the hothouses of Asia.
@ John Tilley – Indeed!
Correction to my previous comment: Ofsted will be the first to complain if schools did not focus on exams – their political masters wouldn’t wear it.
You can’t discern a trend from two data points.
To know if the pupil premium had an affect you’d have to look at the data for a number of years before and after it’s introduction to see if there were a change in the attainment gap specifically after the pupil premium was introduced that was different to preceding years. You’d also have to control for other variables, such as the demographics of pupils which would naturally fluctuate year to year.
Maybe the pupil premium has worked, maybe it hasn’t. We don’t yet have the data.
What g said.
It’s frustrating that you can’t actually tell what effect a significant policy change has in some areas for several years; but it would be more honest (if not very smart) to tell the truth — we have to wait and see. We can be pretty sure that constant upheaval in search of the next best policy is counterproductive. (On a tangent, I saw Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics today complaining that political parties are competing to offer more money to the NHS but nobody is being serious about reforming it. The man seriously seemed to believe that the NHS has been plodding along doing the same old thing in the same old way for as long as anyone can remember. With political commentary like that, no wonder we keep getting stuffed…)
@g
“You can’t discern a trend from two data points.”
Yet if it were going in the other direction, you and other critics of the party would be saying the Pupil Premium had failed, wouldn’t you?
You also seem prepared to deny them the benefit of the doubt on multiple other areas, don’t you?
Really, what we’re dealing with here is the fact that this is a Lib Dem success and you just can’t bear to admit it, isn’t it?
RC
I can’t speak for g — you may be right in the counterfactual, s/he’s pretty partisan and has been getting more so as the election approaches. But g’s argument as it applies to the situation we have is perfectly sound, and I for one would certainly not be claiming the opposite if the numbers were going the opposite way. You’re about as partisan as g, in my experience — are you sure you would be putting such faith in this profoundly underevidenced claim from correlation if the data showed an uptick rather than a downtwitch at this point?
Caron Lindsay said:
“Confidence and supply is not worth it – you can’t do anything but get the blame for everything that goes wrong – and we wouldn’t have had the influence we’ve had in holding the Tories back.”
So why are the SNP already indicating that it is confidence-and-supply that they would wish to offer Labour? They are making the valid point that confidence-and-supply is the best way to apply a stranglehold in respect of the key promises which you want to make certain that government delivers. The SNP want to insist on home rule, settled in Scotland’s favour, which is a lot more important to them than a few ministerial posts would be. The Lib Dems took the opposite route and put careerism ahead of political principles.
As to Caron’s extraordinary statement that “you can’t do anything but get the blame for everything that goes wrong”, I look forward to seeing Ed Balls getting into economic problems and trying to convince his electorate that these were all Alex Salmond’s fault. Presumably he’d have to say “Wretched Mr Salmond, just meekly supporting us on confidence motions and not helping us out with his financial advice, leaving me on my own – it’s all his fault!”
So to sum up, Confidence and supply is worth it – you won’t get the blame for anything that goes wrong – and we would have has far more influence in holding the Tories back.
Helen Tedcastle – “I would like to know what evidence there is to link the pupil premium money to the rise in attainment.”
Thanks, I thought I might be missing something in the BBC article and the DfE tables. Not wishing to totally dismiss the Pupil Premium – because it does give schools some more money in their budget. I’m also interested to see whether there is now evidence of a link between pupil premium and other desirable outcomes, such as other (non-PP) pupils also performing better, ie. PP is a win-win.
Helen Tedcastle – “I wonder which subjects are suffering because of the relentless tyranny of the SATs? Probably the arts but hey, they are no ‘use.’ ”
I understand your concern, from my experience of the 2014 SATs, I can confidently say that this wasn’t the case with the school my eldest attended. Following their SATs, they did two arts projects: a play (performed to parents) and a film. these nicely filling in the time between SATs and end of term…
RC
If you look back at the original article and read the words quoted from Laws , he is much less gung ho in his claims than you are.
The comment from “g” is entirely reasonable. S/he actually concludes – “..Maybe the pupil premium has worked, maybe it hasn’t. We don’t yet have the data.”
That is the key point – it is too early to say. To claim an outcome for which there is insufficient evidence gives the impression that so little has come out of this dreadful Coalition that people are grabbing at straws.
Helen – my point was the SATs covered the same broad areas as under the previous govt. The emphasis on E&M goes back to at least Blunkett. It isn’t really a Tory (or Labour, or LibDem) thing.
RC/Malcolm Todd
A major problem in politics is that we don’t know what works, because successive governments come along and change what the previous government did before anyone really knows if it works, so all that’s left is partisan bickering. Everybody interested in politics is guilty of this.
However, governments elected for more than one term have the ability to run long term experiments to see what works and what doesn’t, all too often they don’t. At least not for political issues, It would make a great deal of sense to outsource policy to the research community, but then of course, there’d be little role for ideology, and that’s essential for political parties to exist.
I think the best we can do is to call out bad arguments, and strive to ensure that politicians of all parties understand how to use evidence.
also, the Liberal Democrats used to stand for ‘evidence based policy’, Evan Harris used to argue strongly and convincingly for such an approach. What changed?
I would hope that this expenditure has the desired effects. It would seem a little premature to be claiming this but hey, that’s politics.
What interests me is how this Party has not managed to screw Labour down in ‘their’ areas on child poverty, pension levels, overall equality etc. The answer appears to be that the association with our Parliamentary Leader means that the populus in those areas will not even listen to messages from Lib Dems, let alone consider agreeing with them.
Eddie Sammon
Caron will probably get a lot of flack on here for this article, but she deserves for not allowing critics to silence her.
The problem is heading the article “Why this coalition was worth it” gives the wrong impression. We are getting this sort of thing all the time from the leadership and leadership-loyalists. Yes, we may have managed to get a few good things out of the coalition, and yes, given that the alternative was a minority Conservative government which would have engineered things to win a majority a few months later, it was probably the best of the options we had – all of then unpleasant.
But keep on pushing the idea that this coalition was “worth it” because of those few good things gives the impression that we are in support of all the horrendous right-wing economic ways of thinking of the Tories and think having those is a price worth having for the few little things thrown at us. Even if it was not meant that way, that is how people are hearing it. We MUST find a way of getting across the message that the policies of this coalition are NOT ideal, that if we governed alone, we would be pushing something very different.