Support for pupil learning is premium consideration
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
The £1.7bn “catch-up” programme for pupils has recently started to have an impact: more than 100,000 children have received additional support since last autumn and the government has appointed Education Endowment Foundation chief Sir Kevan Collins to oversee the scheme.
Last month, the Department for Education also pledged an extra £700m for primary and secondary schools to provide group tutoring and activities for disadvantaged pupils.
Unfortunately, in March, the National Audit Office found that less than half of children to receive support through the National Tutoring Programme were from disadvantaged backgrounds, defined as someone in receipt of the pupil premium funding. In addition, analysis suggests the recent DfE decision to change the way the pupil premium is calculated in 2021/22, will undo the gains provided by the £700m “recovery premium”. According to the NAHT union, the £6,000 average funding allocated to primary schools under the scheme will be wiped out for two thirds of schools due to the changes.
If the association’s analysis is right, the DfE’s decision is short-sighted. Research earlier in the year by Juniper Education showed that disadvantaged children experienced the biggest loss of learning in the first national lockdown. That is likely to have been repeated during this year’s lockdown. Schools will need all the help possible to support pupils to “catch up” on lost learning – Collins has himself said the £1.7bn will be insufficient to tackle the issue – so technical changes that claw back small amounts of money will just make their task harder.
The government needs to get used to spending more on supporting the education of disadvantaged children as all the projections suggest the numbers eligible for pupil premium funding are set to soar. By the end of this parliament, the Resolution Foundation predicts 730,000 more children will be living in poverty compared with March 2021. This will mean 33.7 per cent of all children will be below the poverty line.
Tinkering around the edges of the pupil premium will make very little difference to the long-term outlook, but in the short-term could have a huge impact on an individual school’s ability to provide a tutor or after-school club place for a disadvantaged pupil. The pandemic is a generation-defining event. Society will need to pump more money into schools for years to come to offset, or at least minimise, the impact the pandemic has on children’s education, wellbeing and life chances.
- Derren Hayes is editor, Children & Young People Now
