Pupil premium: The sting in the tail

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

The pupil premium was supposed to the Liberal Democrat’s great victory in the coalition negotiations.

Questions have dogged Michael Gove and the Lib Dems about how, given the government will cut the education budget, the pupil premium will be paid for.

Wednesday’s Guardian suggests an answer might have been found: cut ‘non-essential’ spending in the department for education. Money from youth services, art projects and after school music are to be spent instead giving a funding bonus to schools for each pupil who receives free school meals.

There are two questions: is the pupil premium a good idea? and what will get cut to pay for it?

It is clearly right in principle to allocate funding to schools based on the need of their pupils; and there is a depressingly strong link between family income and need. The question is how the systems works in practice.

Labour had our own version of the pupil premium that ensured schools in the most deprived areas got more generous funding for education from those in affluent areas. The amount spent per pupil in deprived areas like Islington rose enormously, and at a much quicker rate than the spend per pupil in more affluent areas. The massive increase in standards in inner-city schools over the last decade is partly due to this funding boost.

The Tory-Liberal coalition want the pupil premium to follow the pupil so that instead of all schools in poor areas benefiting (even if they have some well off children in them) the money will go to schools depending, in the first instance, on the number of free school meal children they have on their rolls.

Fair enough you may say, and the Tory-Liberals argue that their pupil premium will incentivise schools to take more low income pupils. Perhaps, but…

What the coalition’s scheme will actually do is to transfer money from schools in poor areas to schools in affluent ones. Schools in areas like Islington will loose money because of their, usually relatively small, number of children from well off homes. Equally, schools in affluent areas will gain from receiving a premium for their, usually pretty small, number of pupils from poor homes.

So the Liberal Democrats great ‘progressive’ victory in the coalition negotiations will simply mean poor areas handing money to rich areas.

The problem in this lies in the fact that it’s not more expensive to provide a good education for a small number of deprived children in an affluent school. The real cost is in running schools in areas of concentrated deprivation where more work has to be done to, for example, raise aspirations and support large numbers of children for whom English is a second language and so on.

The reality is that many schools in the rich areas don’t really need the extra money, while those in deprived areas will desperately miss the lost income. The scheme will provide a nice cash boost to lots of schools in leafy Tory constituencies; a fact which may not have gone unnoticed by MPs for places like Surrey Heath.

The Guardian isn’t clear about exactly what youth work or arts funding streams will be cut to pay for the pupil premium. We will start to find the answers to this in next week’s CSR, but I fear that this signals massive cuts to council’s ‘Area Based Grants’, which are used to pay for much of the vital work with young people that both helps them and provides a constructive alternative to hanging about on the streets.

The sting in the tail is that Area Based Grants are distributed according to deprivation, so poorer areas benefit most. So if these are cut to pay for the pupil premium deprived areas will loose out twice; first as school funding gets subtlety shifted towards affluent areas which need it less; and second, as grants in deprived areas that pay for services that boost life changes for young people and cut crime and anti-social behaviour are savagely cut to pay for the fig leaf of the pupil premium that could well deepen inequality in our schools.