Education system set up to 'manage out' pupils in need
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
From September, the education services grant (ESG), used by councils to fund school-based additional learning support for disadvantaged groups of pupils, will be scrapped.
Worth £600m in 2016/17, it will be replaced with a new "central school services block" worth just £50m. The move, first announced in the 2015 Autumn Statement as one of a number of measures designed to undermine local authorities' role in education, has been pursued against the advice of children's services leaders.
Despite the government's assurances that extra money will be going into general education budgets to offset that lost from the ESG, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has warned that it will result in vital support for economically deprived pupils and those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) being lost (see analysis). Schools will find it harder to access educational psychology, speech and language therapy, and behaviour consultants as a result. These services are already under pressure - £400m was taken out of the ESG in 2015/16 - and will make it even harder for children to achieve academically.
The removal of the ESG is another example of the education system being stacked against the most vulnerable pupils. Further evidence of this emerged last week from a study by Education Datalab. Its research shows a disproportionately high number of children who move school are either in receipt of free school meals or have SEND (see analysis). Some will move to schools that can better meet their learning needs, others for personal reasons. But the researchers conclude that a large number of children will be effectively "managed out" by schools because they do not meet expected academic standards.
Some schools will see them moving on as a failure, but the system has built-in incentives that encourage this course of action. Parents and teachers use exam league tables to benchmark performance, and schools that are lower in the table may struggle to attract pupils, staff and funding - ultimately becoming unviable. Education Datalab concludes that some teachers, their careers potentially on the line, will try to move struggling children on in an attempt to "game" the exam system. These concerns are not new - a report in 2014 by former children's commissioner for England Maggie Atkinson identified how academy schools were becoming increasingly selective in the pupils they admitted in an effort to improve academic performance. Managing out pupils looks like another way of achieving the same aim.
Incentives need to be found to get children the additional support they need so that they do not need to change school. Education Datalab advocates including the GCSE results of children who move in their original school's attainment figures. In the unlikely event of this happening - or league tables being scrapped altogether - the solution could lie in education, health and care (EHC) plans for children with SEN. By April 2018, 250,000 children with severe SEN should have an EHC plan that sets out the services they are entitled to receive (see special report). These will include expectations for what schools and councils need to provide, and failing to deliver on them will likely lead to legal challenges from parents.
