Article
Deprived students to get more funds, government says
'Pupil premium' is pledged by all three main parties to alleviate effects of deprivation
Ed Balls will allow local authorities and schools to decide how to distribute funds for the most deprived pupils. Photograph: David Levene
The government today entered the battleground of a key education election issue – how to narrow the achievement gap between the poorest and richest pupils – with a promise to "more fairly" distribute funds to the most deprived students.
The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have already set out their ideas for a "pupil premium" – a fixed financial incentive for schools to take pupils from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
At the moment, local authorities receive nearly £4bn each year for deprived students, but not all the funds are given directly to the schools that take in the poorest students. Forums made up of teachers and officers at the local authority decide how the money should be spent. Under the current system, the poorest parts of the country receive more funds than the richest. This puts poor pupils in rich areas at a disadvantage and means that the funds do not necessarily go to the most deprived children.
The Lib Dems have pledged to give an extra £2.5bn each year to deprived pupils. Their pupil premium would be introduced a year after they came to power. The money would go directly to schools, rather than be allocated by the forums.
The Conservatives have said they would give "extra money" for their pupil premium, but have not stated how much. They have talked about modelling their policy on the recommendations of the Policy Exchange, a right-of-centre thinktank. It advocates scrapping the way schools receive the majority of their funds – based on complex criteria laid down by local authorities – and funding them instead using a single national formula that includes a pupil premium. Under their plans, the money would not be allocated through a forum.
Ed Balls, the schools secretary, today waded into the debate by promising to allow local authorities and schools the right to decide how to distribute funds for the most deprived pupils. He said this was the fairest way to ensure schools had the "additional resources they need to provide them with the necessary support".
He said: "A nationally set pupil premium would not take account of local need and would prescribe a single amount of funding to overcome deprivation across the whole country and would ... require severe and immediate cuts to school budgets or other public services to pay for it."
Some local authorities keep some of the funds and distribute them to all pupils in their area. Balls added that this would be stopped by 2015, and all funds for deprived pupils would follow the poorest students. All local authorities would be required to have a local pupil premium in place in three years' time, he said.
A study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies this month found that a pupil premium would lead to a "modest" closing of the gap in attainment between rich and poor children, and could boost schools' intake of poor pupils and reduce house prices near "good" schools.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said any pupil premium needed to be introduced slowly, otherwise it would destabilise schools.
Malcolm Trobe, ASCL's policy director, said: "The introduction of a pupil premium will need to be carefully modelled and managed. The government has accepted that a rapid introduction could financially destabilise a number of schools. It is essential to get the basic funding entitlement level right for all pupils as a precursor to the introduction of a premium for deprivation."
Related Content
User Comments
PaulBeckinsale
15 March 2010 9:20PM
We already have a £2,500 gap between funding the less able and the able. Ignorant politicians are patently unaware of the levels of multiple funding they have already put in place over many years for social deprivation, practical learning and double funding for vocational courses. Even Gordon Brown's laptops for drugs was a huge amount of cash wasted as most of the free laptops had been sold within 48 hours. £20 over 5 years on our most able who are treated as third class compared to £32,500 spent on those who disrupt school and that just an average figure taken across one local authority..
This obscene discrimination against our most able students leaves them to their own devices with nothing on offer but the knowledge that their final successes against all odds will be written out of history by socially engineered data for schools that boost the scores of the poor performing pupils.
Why invest so many tens of thousands in this way? Why not save a few years and just fast track them to the best places in University further damaging the morale and ambitions of our brightest pupils who are now being denied University places because multiplications factors applied to social disadvantage.
What a lunatic way to run an education system. Risible.
burtonleo
16 March 2010 8:26AM
Perhaps if the poor children were given the right to beg outside the school for a few hours a day, then they might actually get their hands on the money
RickoShea
16 March 2010 11:51AM
@ Breaking3 and Paul Beckinsale: You are both absolutely right of course, which is one reason why I'm not voting in the forthcoming election. Bright children from *all* backgrounds have been penalised by this miserable government, which only recently axed the pathetically inadequate "gifted and talented" programme, and neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal-Democrats show any sign of realising that if we do not accord a higher priority to the needs of our most intelligent children, wherever they come from, this country will never get out of the mire into which it is steadily sinking. Perhaps this is because MPs can usually afford to send their children to independent schools if they are unhappy with the anti-"elitist" philosophy of many of the institutions to which they expect the bulk of the population to send theirs.
Breaking3
15 March 2010 5:11PM
Labour has thrown money at the poor and it hasn't made much difference to them but it has ruined the education of the majority, there is only so much money to go around.
My well behaved son gets about £4K per annum spent on him at his comprehensive, most of his lessons are disrupted by children who don't want to learn - they get one to one catch up lessons my son and the other good children get nothing but an abysmal education, teachers are being replaced by cover assistants who are not allowed to teach and can't teach.
Children in the inner cities are getting far more spent on them, maybe as much as £25K per annum each, maybe more - it's difficult to find the figures because they are hidden from us.