Funding for disadvantaged pupils

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

UKParliament wrote: »

Hi MSEs

Sadly Parliament TV is not able to be embedded in this page so we have to include it only as a link.

I can let you know more detail on the scope of the inquiry though as set out by the Public Accounts Committee.

Scope of the inquiry
The Department for Education aims to improve the quality of education for all. It also aims to raise disadvantaged pupils’ attainment and reduce the gap between them and others. In 2011, the Department announced new funding for schools, the Pupil Premium, which specifically aims to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.

Worth £2.5 billion in 2014-15, the Pupil Premium is distributed to schools by the Department according to their number of disadvantaged pupils between the ages of 5 and 16. The Department expects schools to use the funding to support disadvantaged pupils to achieve more but schools can decide how to spend it. The attainment gap between disadvantaged and other pupils narrowed by 4.7 percentage points in primary schools and 1.6 percentage points in secondary schools between 2011 and 2014, but no clear trend has been established and the gap remains wide.

The National Audit Office report raised concerns regarding the identification of disadvantaged pupils, particularly with the introduction of Universal Infant Free School Meals and Universal Credit. Ofsted has expressed concern about provision for disadvantaged pupils in 8% of primary schools and 21% of secondary schools it inspected between September and December 2014. There are particular risks around some of the approaches schools most commonly use. The NAO estimates that schools have spent an extra £430 million on teaching assistants since the introduction of the Pupil Premium; a high-cost approach, while other low-cost interventions are used too infrequently, with just 25% using peer-to-peer learning. This inquiry examines the current accountability and intervention mechanisms and how the pupil premium is improving disadvantaged pupils’ attainment and achieving other impacts.

In English, it means that kids on Free School Meals (ie, in homes where no parent is working, so is on Jobseekers' Allowance or Employment Support Allowance because they're medically unable to work) don't achieve as high grades as kids from better off families.



There are lots of contributory factors - parental educational attainment, motivation or support, the financial ability to provide nice housing where it's possible to complete homework, access to the Internet to complete homework, hand in work, access online resources such as MyMaths, having to move around a lot due to insecure housing/benefit changes and sanctions, affording school equipment such as uniform, shoes, coats, calculators, text books, access to instrumental lessons and sports clubs, etc, etc, etc.
families with children who have particular needs tend to be poorer - after all, it's a lot harder to find a childminder for a kid with ADHD, autism or physical difficulties - the latter also affect better off families but, at the same time, they are also more able to elicit support and cope with the problems - however, they still need more.

A school mostly full of nice middle class kids from nice middleclass families in a leafy enclave of detached houses and Volvos will generally have better results than one full of kids who aren't and don't tend to have additional needs.

The pupil premium grant is an additional source of funding to try and offset the issues - the barriers - affecting poorer children and those with special education needs, because even something as simple as providing tinted paper for a kid who has difficulty processing words on white paper costs far more than ordinary white paper.


Investing in support for twenty kids who are learning English means the teacher has more time to spend with children who have English as their first language; investing in providing a partial remission on music tuition means kids who would never have the chance to learn at full cost get to learn and find out they actually have a talent and can use the mathematical, organisational, creative and social skills inherent in learning music in the rest of their school lives (example, a kid who has dyslexia learning to read music/tab, one with dyspraxia to develop fine motor control, one with attention issues calms down and learns that not all teachers shout, that they are good at something, that school isn't all stressful, that they have to manage their time and get themselves to music lessons...)


I'd suggest that, at the risk of offending somebody, if you have a less than perfect house, you spend some time and money on it and it's as good as anyone else's on the street. If you have kids who have come from a less comfortable background, you spend some time and money on them and they can be as good as anybody else in the school. And, if your nice enough house, once surrounded by less than pleasant housing, suddenly benefits from the pavements being fixed, gardens planted, nice little houses being built in place of neglected tenement, you benefit from the area improving - kids not receiving PPG or extra help benefit from the improvements in terms of more class teacher time, better facilities, better behaviour and, quite frankly, don't feel as though they've been tipped into a bearpit so often.


I can look at a class list at work and it's unusual for a kid not to be on the inclusion register and/or be PPG; a grammar school three miles away would find the complete opposite.

UKParliament

Hi MSEs

The Public Accounts Committee would like to thank all of you that have posted your thoughts in this thread. It has been very informative for them.

Don't forget you can watch the Committee discuss this live today from 1pm on Parliament TV.

You can tweet along on the hashtag #pupilpremium.