23 December 2010
Fresh doubts have been cast on the effectiveness of the government’s new pupil premium.
A paper published yesterday by the National Foundation for Educational Research suggests that extra funding currently given to schools to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds is not always spent on areas that directly benefit them. Schools often use the money to top up budgets across the board – including areas such as non-classroom support staff costs and IT resources.
The pupil premium, a flagship policy in the Liberal Democrat’s manifesto that has been taken forward by the coalition, will give schools that take on children on free school meals an extra £430 per child from next year. Schools will be free to spend the money as they wish.
The NFER research reveals that pupils on free schools meals already attract £4,000 on average in extra funding every year for their school, making the coalition’s new funding ‘less radical than first appears’.
The fairness of having a fixed national rate of pupil premium is also questioned in the paper School funding and the pupil premium: what changes will the new system bring? because of regional variations in costs of teaching, premises and other resources.
The researchers also warn that the government’s proposed move towards a national funding formula, removing budget responsibilities from local authorities, ‘could be seen as a centralisation, and mechanisation, of decisions currently negotiated locally’.
Ben Durbin, senior statistician at the NFER’s Centre for Statistics and report author, said the findings highlighted ‘the tensions that have to be managed under any new approach’.
The conflicts were ‘between a system which is fair and transparent and one which recognises the uniqueness of individual schools; between financial autonomy at local and school level; and the desire for funds to be spent consistently with central government priorities’, he said.
