By David Williams
16 November 2010
The government’s proposed pupil premium, designed to direct money towards children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is likely to leave the most deprived communities worse off, Public Finance has learned.
Two pieces of independent research, one by education workers and another by the House of Commons Library, suggest that the planned funding mechanism could divert money away from schools with high proportions of the worst-off pupils.
At present, deprivation funding is allocated by area, with schools in the most deprived wards receiving the most money. The pupil premium seeks to change this by allocating additional money to pupils from deprived backgrounds.
According to the Commons Library report, the premium will be worth £2.5bn by 2014/15, or 6.3% of the total schools budget – about half the proportional size of the existing deprivation fund.
The report, produced for shadow education secretary Andy Burnham following last month’s Comprehensive Spending Review, says: ‘The impact is likely to be a shift in funding from better-funded (generally more deprived) to less well-funded (less deprived) local authorities, and within the less well-funded local authorities, those with a more deprived intake will gain the most.’
It adds that the direct schools grant – the general revenue source for schools, which is not adjusted for deprivation – will in effect be cut for all schools.
‘Only those in less well-funded (less deprived areas) can potentially benefit with additional resources from the pupil premium.
‘Within this group, schools with relatively large numbers of deprived pupils will gain overall.’
In education questions in Parliament yesterday, Burnham quoted the study, saying: ‘The pupil premium is not what it seems – it will create winners and losers, and, scandalously, the biggest losers are predicted to be schools in the most deprived areas of England.’
The Department for Education has not yet announced how it will measure the number of deprived pupils. Its consultation document on the pupil premium, issued earlier this year, suggested three options, including children on free school meals.
In the most deprived areas, schools with even the highest proportions of children on FSM could be substantially worse off under the new system.
Calculations by the Waltham Forest Schools Forum in northeast London found that many schools that currently enjoy generous deprivation settlements could lose out substantially.
For example, in Downsell Primary School, 77% of pupils live in areas in the top 20% for indices of multiple deprivation but its additional £200,923 allocation could fall to £117,619 if funding were allocated per FSM pupil. Buxton secondary school, which has 72% of pupils living in the poorest neighbourhoods, could lose more than half of its deprivation funding – from £352,519 to £171,900.
The schools which would do best in Waltham Forst are the ones with fewer poor pupils. Chingford Foundation School, where less than 10% of pupils live in the most deprived communities and a similar proportion qualify for FSM, would double its extra funding.
At the moment, it receives £44,797 in deprivation – that would rise to £93,173.
Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy, whose constituency forms part of the Waltham Forest Schools Forum area, said: ‘At the moment we don’t know the metric they’re going to judge by. But any metric you use, when you look at areas like Waltham Forest, or big swathes of Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool where deprivation is concentrated, there is no indication that that is going to be recognised.
‘There is concern and horror at what this might mean… money is going to be taken from poorer areas and given to more affluent areas.’
