The reality of the pupil premium

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

The pupil premium will become one of the main battlegrounds in education policy over the next few years.

The core principle of the pupil premium is clearly right: that children from disadvantaged homes should receive more generous funding for their education.

The evidence is depressingly clear that children from poorer homes have a range of disadvantages entering the education system. After all, how much easier is it to grasp Roman history if your parents have the money to take you to see the Forum and the Coliseum? The extra money form the pupil premium can help redress some of these disadvantages.

Like so much of what this government does, the pupil premium is dressed up in the rhetoric of fairness. But, like so much of what this government does, the reality could be that the pupil premium will be regressive and unfair.

David Laws writes of his pride about the introduction of the pupil premium in Monday’s Guardian. The article makes four highly contentious points that together demonstrate how the pupil premium isn’t as fair as the coalition would like to pretend.

1) “Some people have tried to make mischief by claiming that the pupil premium is not additional money. This is nonsense.”

A bit embarrassing this, because in the same newspaper Michael Gove is clear that a lot of the pupil premium will not be much additional money and will, in fact, at least partly come from the budgets of other schools.

2) “The pupil premium is designed to have two beneficial effects. First, because the extra money follows the child, it will ensure that deprivation funding is far better targeted than it is now. Second, the premium will deliver extra money to the schools with the highest level of challenge – giving them an opportunity to combat disadvantage.”

There is a fundamental contradiction in these two apparent benefits of the pupil premium.

The effect of money following the child will actually be to move education funding away from deprived areas and into the leafy shires. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, and Warwick Mansell gives more details on his blog. In fact the Telegraph reports that the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of the current pupil premium consultation suggests richer areas will receive a far larger premium than poorer ones.

The Labour government, quite rightly, gave extra funding to areas of concentrated deprivation, or “the schools with the highest level of challenge” as David Laws puts it. This has allowed schools in areas like inner London to already do all of the things, like individual tuition, that David Laws claims won’t happen without the pupil premium. Exam results in urban areas have rocketed up as a result.

It seems very likely that the extra money following the child (claim one) will make it much more difficult to combat disadvantage in the most needy areas (claim two).

3) “Schools must not use the pupil premium to avoid making efficiency savings”.

There is something sadly typical of the Tory-Lib Dems around the government that assume all public sector institutions can absorb cuts by simply ding things more efficiently. This is a particularly dangerous illusion when it comes to schools, where things like smaller classes and teaching assistants reducing staff-to-pupil ratios would seem deeply ‘inefficient’ to a Treasury civil servant.

Laws assumes schools can reduce their budgets while still delivering the extra services he wants the pupil premium to pay for. Maybe some can but most schools are already run effectively and, of course, any extra money is going to be used to mitigate some of the damage caused by cuts to the school’s mainstream budget. After all in many schools much of the increased budget we have seen in recent years has gone on exactly the kind of measures that David Laws wants to see: increased tutoring for children falling behind, out of school classes and so on. Inevitably, these will be the first things to go when budgets get cut and schools would be justified in using the pupil premium to simply retain a lot of the services they currently offer, which benefit poorer children.

4) “We should develop a clear framework of accountability, including through Ofsted, to ensure that the pupil premium is being used both effectively and for its purpose.”

This idea sounds exactly like the kind of thing that the new government is so critical of Labour for – supervision by central government to ensure that money is spent how government intends, not how schools want. Although Laws criticises Labour’s “micro-management” I cannot see how his proposal could not lead to more central government interference on how schools run. The idea the Ofsted can oversee this is both wrong and impractical given the cuts announced last week in the organisation’s budget.

Of course organisations already exists that could help schools to implement the pupil premium, guiding schools in spending it on the things that really make a difference and support schools that lose funding. These organisations are called local councils and they have helped schools manage issues like this for many years. Except that the coalition has decided that LEAs are the enemies of the marketised system it wants to introduce and so they couldn’t possible be allowed near something as important as the pupil premium, so more power for Whitehall and quangos it is.

The Tory-Lib Dems’s proposals for the pupil premium remain very unclear and have the potential to do a great deal of damage to the education system. Nothing that coalition cheerleaders are currently claiming for the premium convinces me that the idea will be either fair or well managed.