Pupil Premium not reaching 100,000 disadvantaged children, researchers find

Last year, the Department for Education announced that funding for this year’s Pupil Premium, which is calculated based on free school meals eligibility over the last six years, would be based on the school census carried out in October 2020 rather than January this year.

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This means that 100,000 pupils who were newly eligible for Pupil Premium funding in the period between these two months, who would have previously received funding, are no longer counted, experts have said.

New government figures, calculated using data from January this year, show that the number of children now receiving free school meals has risen to 1.7 million compared with 1.44 million in January last year, equating to one in five pupils.

The proportion of pupils receiving free school meals is now 20.8 per cent, up from 19.7 per cent in October 2020.

Of those children eligible for free school meals more than one million are aged between four and 11, the data shows.

Jon Andrews, head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute said: “These figures are a further indication that the government’s change to how the pupil premium is allocated means that pupils and schools are now missing out on vital funding. These losses are found not only in the pupil premium itself but in other areas such as catch-up funding for disadvantaged pupils, which is closely linked to it.

"The Department for Education should now publish its analysis of the impact of this decision on pupil premium allocations and clarify whether any savings from this have been redistributed.”

“These latest statistics confirm that recent government changes to how pupil premium funding is allocated will leave many schools with less funding to support their low-income pupils from April this year,” Jenna Julius, a senior economist at the National Foundation for Educational Research added.

“Given the extra financial pressures the pandemic has placed on schools, anything which reduces potential funds, particularly money which schools had been expecting to receive, will make their jobs even tougher.”