Making Raw Deals Right
The age of the pupil premium is upon us. Designed to help reduce the gap in attainment between disadvantaged children and their peers, the pupil premium is a national fund shared out among schools, the individual allocations initially calculated on the basis of free school meals and 6 months plus looked after children; and then extended to include ‘all children eligible for school meals at any point in the last six years’, as well as those children who have been ‘looked after for a day or more, are adopted, (or) leave care under a Special Guardianship Order or Residence Order.’
Introduced in 2011, the original and relatively modest fund of some £625 million has been ramped up to £2.5 billion, which breaks down into £1,300 per eligible primary-school aged child, £935 per eligible secondary-school aged child and £1,900 per looked after child. Not to be confused with monies allocated for special educational needs (SEN) provision, it represents a significant – if ring fenced – top up to the school budget, with those schools serving particularly disadvantaged areas suddenly eligible for premium pupil funds worth nearly £300,000 per year.
Results. The most recent set of Ofsted inspections has seen ‘large improvements’, particularly in London; notes ‘considerable variation’ across local authorities; and finds that pupils in Barnsley, Portsmouth, South Gloucestershire, North Lincolnshire and Northumberland are ‘least likely to achieve five good GCSE passes including English and mathematics at the end of Key Stage 4’. It reserves its absolute ire for Barnsley, which, despite the funding, has slipped from third bottom to last since 2013 (‘the poor children in Barnsley are getting an extremely raw deal’), and concludes that it is at the door of ‘weak governance and leadership’ that the blame for failure to close gaps ought to be laid.
Looking Gift Horses in Complicated Mouths
Much here to think about: That the fund should have to exist is by the by. It does and, as Marc Rowland, Deputy Director of the National Education Trust and author of A Practical Guide to the Pupil Premium, says in a round-up paper on the same subject, its introduction has ‘shined a harsh light on a very broad and diverse group of pupils that is underperforming in comparison to their peers.’ Poverty begets poverty begets poverty. Education is a proven predicator for finding our way out of poverty, for breaking into a world of opportunity. Anything that helps mitigate the disadvantageous circumstances into which a child is born is a good thing. A whole lot of new money to do that is a very good thing.
Or should be; for, as the report cited above shows, whatever the money, clearly not everything’s going to plan. Exactly why goes beyond, in my opinion, Ofsted’s findings. However, and briefly, less the inspired top down guidance that marks one local authority from another, if the figures are right, a significant number of schools appear not to know what to do. Here’s the devil’s detail: The money’s great, but with it comes increased accountability, in the form of Ofsted, which more and more links its criteria for ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’ to a given school’s pupil premium policy, use and measurable outcomes - mandatorily linked to attainment in Maths and English. At the same time, while inspection stipulations grow ever tighter, the fund allows schools and teachers the ‘freedom to respond appropriately to individual circumstances’, it’s advice for ‘appropriate response’ made available in Ofsted reviews and from government funded research carried out by the independent Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which has produced a Toolkit for best practice ideas. Thus, a school’s pupil premium allowance may be ring fenced in terms of who you spend it on, but once inside, the to-do-with list is long.
Part 2
All of which is to the good – or at least would seem so. Recipients of public monies must be held accountable for how it’s spent. Schools and their teachers should have the power to make decisions as to what best to spend that money on. We’re all professionals. Only, the pupil premium directives under which Ofsted operates are less than clear to schools, meaning that while schools may in theory have been granted the independence with which to develop highly creative ways of closing the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers, the reality is that many spend much of their time looking over their shoulders, second guessing Ofsted, the final result a middle ground that, though safe, pleases neither inspector nor school, and so fails to make the impact it should.
There’s more. Schools face, says Rowland, a number of challenges when it comes to working out how to successfully meet not only the needs of those eligible, but also those that fall outside of the economically deprived bracket. The question of how a given school’s ethos stands up to a fund with enough weight to create a sea change in culture is often so big as to remain unanswered. The irony of a fund designed to help reduce inequality actually reinforcing that inequality is lost on no one. Management of the school community’s perception of pupil premium affected changes is vital to its collective health – economic and ideological. Thus does Rowland speak of successful schools creating ‘economies of scale’, whereby they take ‘a pragmatic approach ... providing resources and intervention at the point of need (while) at the same time not diluting where the pupil premium is supposed to be targeted.’ Those schools that fail to effect economies of scale fail to incorporate the fund into a system that manages ring fenced monies in such a way as to both benefit targeted need and the school as a whole.
As well as statistically analysed results based on Ofsted findings, Rowland issues by way of ‘a word of warning’ a number of other more subjective challenge observations, pointing out that those schools with low numbers of students eligible for the premium are in the position of being held accountable for the spending of monies the amount of which are possibly not enough to guarantee effective intervention. Also, he highlights the fact that those schools with large numbers of SEN students among their overall cohorts of disadvantaged children will generally find it much more difficult to show evidence of having closed gaps, concluding that, in these cases, ‘deprivation may not be the main determinate of low attainment.’
Part 3 - Imagining Without Limits
So, what to do? More specifically, what, given the above, makes for best close-the-gap practice? Returning to Barnsley, what might a local authority defined by Ofsted as failing its ‘poor children’ do to reverse an apparent trend that, despite the money being pumped in, sees the gap actually widening? How to persuade LAs and schools to pick up the loaded baton, to create responses both ‘appropriate’ and creative?
Personally, while I question the a priori educational validity of a system that insists on linking tracking and measures of attainment to league tables, as well as the very narrowness of what it deems worth measuring, I’ve never had a problem with interventions placing an emphasis on literacy and numeracy, so long as, one, schools don’t end up teaching to test, task or hurdle, and, two, the quality of teaching is such that the skills and knowledge required for becoming literate and numerate are incorporated into a curriculum as creative as it is rigorous. It is a curriculum that, as every future employer might hope for, that adds to the three Rs a whole range of applied skills and knowledge, including team work, problem solving, a foreign language, digital literacy and personal communication skills. None of which, dare I say, is not made provision for in the National Curriculum, or which at some time or another has not been highlighted as important to critical by HM’s Inspectors.
Meaning, first: Ofsted or not, we are – ethically, as educators – duty bound to intervene, and that, given this, it makes perfect sense that we do so intelligently, from a position that understands the culture of a school, the community it serves, and in a way that anchors big picture thinking to local on-the-ground needs; that the objectives of the intervention be clear, realisable and in some way measurable; that its delivery be in the hands of very good lead and support teaching; and that we ensure the intervention’s eventual success through valuing voice – staff, pupil or parent – as well as identifying need. And, as Rowland intimates, if it doesn’t work, jack it. If it works, keep it, and build on it.
Second, so long as the intervention answers the above criteria, and that schools can show, by comparing results to national averages (not, note, to local or other disadvantaged intervention outcomes), how well it’s working, then the best practice nature of that intervention is up for grabs. Ofsted is, by definition, results driven, but as a quick glance at its 2013 best practice feedback more than illustrates, it’s not as closed minded as we would all like to think: the schools it highlights operate interventions that range from the doggedly obvious to vertical tutoring to careers advice and practice to early intervention to parental involvement to pupil consultation groups to nurture first groups etc. – all underpinned by vision, strong leadership, evidence based research, training, strong teaching and a failsafe method for tracking and measuring progress.
Obviously, as all know, there’s so much more to hitting ‘good’ and / or ‘outstanding’ than pulling off a benchmark intervention, but as Dame Alison Peacock, author of Creating Learning Without Limits, intimated at a recent CBI, that the Pupil Premium hasn’t seen a proliferation of fantastically maverick interventions owes as much to the limitations of our own imaginations as it does anything else. It’s there, in nearly every school. It just needs unlocking.
