Rates of child poverty are on the rise, and last year the Child Poverty Action Group estimated that 30 per cent of all children in the UK live in poverty. The impact of disadvantage particularly affects children's educational outcomes, with a report published in July by the Education Policy Institute identifying that the GCSE attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and better off peers has stopped closing.
While families' incomes are being strained, cuts to local services mean that schools are often plugging gaps in support. The pupil premium was introduced by government in 2011 to help schools mitigate the impact of disadvantage on pupils, improving their academic outcomes and helping to narrow the attainment gap.
The core grant for disadvantaged children - worth £1,320 per primary child and £935 per secondary child each year - may be used strategically to meet pupils' needs across the whole school setting, while the enhanced grant for looked-after children - worth £2,300 per child - must be used to meet the specific individual needs of a child in care.
The premium enables schools to focus commissioning on tackling the "wicked issues" that create barriers to learning. Within wider spending strategies, it can be part of a whole-school approach to raising standards, destigmatising intervention for the most in-need pupils by delivering quality teaching and curriculum across a whole cohort. It can be used to form part of "tiered" delivery structured around whole-school strategies; targeted, evidence-based interventions; and support and development for staff. This is commissioning in its most fundamental sense - not just procuring services from external providers, but using the whole resource available to assess needs and develop provision to improve outcomes.
EFFECTIVE COMMISSIONING WITH THE PUPIL PREMIUM
- Understand: The best commissioning is based on a clear understanding of what needs are being addressed, and for whom. Schools need to identify the barriers to good outcomes, both for individual pupils and at a cohort level; what is already working well and where the gaps are.
- Plan: It is important to understand how the school will commission and deliver the changes, especially when funding levels may change from year to year depending on the number of disadvantaged pupils in a setting. What works in one school may not be suitable for another, so learning from other schools' successes - and failures - is crucial.
- Do: It could be necessary to seek additional expertise to ensure that any external contracting is transparent and compliant with procurement regulations. Working together with local authorities or CCGs, or commissioning across a school cluster, academy chain or area, can streamline this process and avoid duplication.
- Review: School leaders and teachers need to understand the evidence of impact in order to inform future commissioning. What are the outcomes, for both pupils and the school's system/culture? What have staff learned from the process? How will success be sustained, replicated and scaled-up during the next funding cycle?
Entrenched educational inequalities
However, this kind of commissioning is difficult to do right. The educational inequalities faced by pupil premium students are often complex and entrenched. Schools may not have the internal expertise to address them effectively - but may also lack the commissioning expertise to get the right support from outside agencies. Meanwhile, the approaches and interventions funded by the grant need time to bed in - time which staff and pupils often don't have, meaning there is only "one shot" to get it right, and which the annual allocation of the grant often doesn't support, in spite of recent government guidelines promoting three-year funding strategies.
The Charles Read Academy, a small rural catchment secondary school in the East Midlands, has experienced these issues first-hand when using the pupil premium to improve literacy standards. With nearly 40 per cent of pupils eligible for the grant, teachers found that many children started school with lower than expected levels of reading and writing at Key Stage 2, and that these issues persisted throughout their school journey. Previous small-scale interventions focused on this cohort had demonstrated inconsistent success and mixed levels of engagement.
In 2018, the academy commissioned the Accelerated Reader programme as part of a whole-school initiative to support reading activities. This intervention was designed to trigger a cultural shift - to embed reading within the wider curriculum so that texts would be meaningful and relevant to all pupils, and to provide a structured programme of learning with clear baselines and measurable progression. Dave Young, the school's raising standards lead, identifies three key factors for success: a clear understanding from leadership of the barriers to learning within the school's population and buy-in to the approach; a universal intervention which removes the stigma of targeted specialist classes; and using a programme which is proven to improve access to the curriculum for the most vulnerable learners while raising literacy standards across the board, making the academy "a reading school for everyone".
- Toni Badnall-Neill is senior commissioning officer for children's & public health, Bedford Borough Council
FURTHER READING
Education in England: Annual Report 2019, Education Policy Institute, July 2019
Pupil Premium: Funding and Accountability for Schools, DfE & ESFA, June 2019
The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium, Education Endowment Foundation, June 2019
Commissioning Futures: A Guide for Schools, The Young Foundation, May 2018
Effective Pupil Premium Reviews: A Guide Developed by the Teaching Schools Council, National College for Teaching & Leadership/Teaching Schools Council, February 2018
