Education should be the great equaliser – the ladder with which all children, regardless of circumstances of birth, can improve themselves and, by doing so, climb towards a more prosperous future. It was certainly that way for me. I loved learning, and my state education took me from humble beginnings in Clacton-on-Sea to working in Westminster.
Fixing this system will not be politically easy … but political difficulty is no excuse for inaction
But not all children are so lucky. Despite England’s significant success at raising overall attainment over the past decade, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils has stubbornly remained – despite the significant sums of money spent on the problem.
New research by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) highlights the issue. The average Attainment 8 score – calculated by adding together pupils’ highest scores from eight government-approved GCSE subjects – for disadvantaged pupils was 37 in 2016/17, 12.8 points lower than that for all other pupils. By 2023/24, this gap had risen to 14.4 points, the widest point for seven years. Much of the progress that began under the coalition government has since been reversed, and by 2023 disadvantaged secondary school pupils were over a year and a half behind their peers.
Perhaps most concerningly, the CSJ reveals that in six out of ten mainstream schools, results for disadvantaged pupils are now worse than they were before the pandemic – even as results for their better-off peers improve.
So, what to do about it? One way we try to tackle these persistent inequalities is by investing in the education of disadvantaged pupils, recognising that the time children spend in the classroom has the potential to be the most transformational years of their lives.
We spend huge amounts doing so: almost £30 billion has been spent on the Pupil Premium, a pot of funding which largely follows children who are eligible for free school meals, or who have been at any point in the past six years. Yet the evidence increasingly suggests the system is not generating the hoped-for returns.
At a time when public finances are so tight, it is important that we ensure the money we spend is delivering on its intended aims. Such stark statistics show the Pupil Premium is failing to do that, and we should be prepared to conduct a root-and-branch overhaul to ensure funding reaches the right schools.
This is not about scrapping the entire system or throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A series of targeted, sensible reforms could return the Pupil Premium to something more effective. A good place to start would be replacing the crude, binary eligibility test – where funding is triggered simply because a child received free school meals at any point in the past six years – with a more nuanced model that captures the full picture of cumulative deprivation. That means drawing on a broader range of indicators: welfare data, pupil attainment records and measures of geographical disadvantage should all be part of the equation.
Doing this would also allow us to differentiate between persistent and temporary hardship by accounting for how deprivation changes over time. It is astonishing that our current system could award the Pupil Premium to a child living in a household earning £80,000 because their parents’ income was once below £7,400 at some point in the last six years, while leaving a child growing up in a household with a consistent income of £10,000 with nothing. A fairer model would assign funding according to the extent and depth of disadvantage a child faces, rather than remaining statically tied to one point in their lives.
Politicians could also show a bit more creativity in targeting money at the problems disadvantaged children face today. An additional 100,000 children are now severely absent – meaning they miss 50 per cent or more of possible sessions, making them absent more often than present – since the pandemic. Tying Pupil Premium funding to reductions in absence could realign incentives and give schools more reason to ensure children attend. It would be good for the children too – not least because they cannot catch up if they do not show up.
Fixing this system will not be politically easy – particularly because the extra funding has become deeply woven into school budgets – but political difficulty is no excuse for inaction. If a policy has stopped working, it should change. Without reform, the government is set to spend another £10 billion on the Pupil Premium this Parliament and may well have little to show for it. Surely we owe it to the disadvantaged children across Britain to have another go?
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