To think that a pupil premium should be paid for children who live in home where none of the parents have qualifications

[ReallyTired]

I think that the education of the parents has a more significant outcome on a child's attainment than income. (Especially as many working poor don't have much more money than those on benefits.)

I feel that children who live in households where no adult has five GCSEs or equivalent should get extra support at school. Often these families aren't entitled to benefits because the parents do work so currently don't get the pupil premium.

It is harder for uneducated parents to support their children with homework than someone with a degree. Better eduated mothers are better at getting their children's needs met as they are often more articulate. For example making sure that statemented child gets what they are legally entitled to. (Getting a child assesed by an ed pych so that the child's dyslexia is spotted.)

Unskilled people often do physically hard work for very long hours for very little money. I believe that a child with unskilled working parents is at a major disadvantage as their parents are time poor as well as cash poor.

Oh and the PP funding is used to increase staffing levels and fund TA support. The same TAs cover teacher classes for their PPA time and short term sick leave.

I would just like funding to be used appropriately and there appear to be some fairly vast anomalies.

There is a link between parental qualifications and attainment, whether we like it or not. Of course there are plenty of people who do well despite ( or even because!) their parents not having any qualifications, including myself (both parents left school at 14)but there is nontheless a link.

I live in an area of the country which has the lowest secondary attainment and tertiary attainment in parents of children at primary in Britain. It DOES impact on learning at home. I have seen parents who cannot read to their children, parents who cannot help with homework at all, parents who can't write in the school journals. All of this in itself is not a problem, many parents with no English manage perfectly, we know. But often, this comes hand in hand with a lack of aspiration, and a lack of support for the school from home. The child isn't expected to attain. I come across this daily and it's very saddening.

I know it isn't the case with every family, but it is with some, and any marker that picks up those children and gets extra help is worthwhile, in my view.

This report on social mobility is worth reading.
www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/education-vital-social-mobility_tcm8-20069.pdf

sheridandHowever when these findings are shouted from the rooftops as being the norm, is does not do very much for aspirations.

It is important not to hold on to any prejudice when encountering very individual children with differing needs.

It's not shouted from the rooftops though. It's insiduous, and it's often ignored. I'm never prejudiced, and every day any prejudices I might have are challenged and revised. But it is an issue i've come across, and it is an element we should consider when trying to encourage aspirational feelings in a child.

sheridand . I'm afraid some within the teaching profession do feel they ought to be compensated for teaching anything outside a very narrow band, which they consider the norm.

In this way the research just adds fuel to their fire, instead of spending the money as it is intentioned, on the target group, they decide it is up to them to apportion it more 'fairly', according to what they consider is the 'greatest need', so all can benefit.

This is what I consider to be insidious.

I'd love to know how you'd find out who had no qualifications as obviously most would proclaim that they had zero qualifications and be encouraged by schools to do so.

It would cost millions to check every educational establishment and cross reference.

Also I have to say a lot of quite bright people have few qualifications for a variety of reasons and success in school often boils down to attitude and work ethic(from the child itself and the pushy parents we all love to hate) hence the success of schools in China where a lot of people are poor.You can't compensate for lack of work ethic as that goes across all economic thresholds and really where do you stop.

I think best idea is the scheme in place- pp for those living in poverty,far easier to legislate.

You are joking - right ?

If not YABVVVVVVVVU

I asked this earlier but received no response. Does anyone know what will happen regarding calculating PP when all KS1 children can receive FSM from Sept?

instead of spending the money as it is intentioned, on the target group,

I realise you have issues about the use of the funding attached to your child's statement. You should, however, try to avoid reading that over into other fields.

Pupil premium is not individually assigned, and is not intended to be. It is based on the observation that schools with larger numbers of children eligible for PP have more need of funding to deal with issues of deprivation.

The accountability is on "narrowing the gap", and on a statement of how the money is used. There is no, repeat no, part of the funding arrangements for pupil premium that mean the money can only be spent directly or indirectly on the children who are the precise heads that were counted. Those children must benefit and be the focus. But if other children benefit as well, that is fine.

I don't have issues any longer. It has all been resolved, thankfully friday.

Just going on what some of what WooWooOwl said. She obviously does not agree with the premiss behind PP and what ColdLightOfDAy said earlier. Of course they would say their schools do spend the money on the target group and just happens to benefit others however the argument for using 1 to 1 TAs funded entirely out of an individual child's Statement is scarily similar.

mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/1862438-Teachers-do-not-adhere-to-Statemented-1-to-1-support-do-not-believe-in-sub-levels-make-APP-assessments-up-How-much-of-what-parents-are-told-by-schools-about-teaching-is-a-box-ticking-exercise

This thread is very lengthy but holds some parallel reasoning. I can just see how it might happen within this culture.

mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/1862438-Teachers-do-not-adhere-to-Statemented-1-to-1-support-do-not-believe-in-sub-levels-make-APP-assessments-up-How-much-of-what-parents-are-told-by-schools-about-teaching-is-a-box-ticking-exercise

Proper link.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/1862438-Teachers-do-not-adhere-to-Statemented-1-to-1-support-do-not-believe-in-sub-levels-make-APP-assessments-up-How-much-of-what-parents-are-told-by-schools-about-teaching-is-a-box-ticking-exercise

Try again!

Having listened to some of the anecdotes on here and other threads, I take on board the good things that can happen through giving genuinely decent to good schools more money through PP's etc, and I'm not having a problem with that,

but for those who only have access to poor schools who use questionable methods, pressure on parents, and figure fiddling to show how they are benefitting pupils whilst refusing to meet the most basic stuff:

RISE report ...... concluded that what happens at home is 4 times more influential that anything that happens at school. FOUR TIMES!

Thank the God of your choice for that! But what a shame that our schools are telling some of us the opposite and we don't know not to believe them!

Maybe those of us with low education (and I'm not talking about 5 GCSEs, which would be considered good going round here) who can show what we'd do with vouchers for educational /enriching stuff, should be allowed direct access to some of this funding?

It might turn out we can offer FOUR TIMES the value when given the wherewithal instead of being milked as cash cows to prop up the status quo.

I agree Just.

I would like to see some genuinely useful Adult Ed courses round my way too. How on earth can we encourage literacy at home when the nearest literacy course for the kids mums is 20 odd miles away at an unreasonable hour, with no buses to it? There is a real lack of literacy and numeracy courses that are genuinely useful for parents. My local AE unit offeres plenty of stuff for the elderly watercolour enthusiast, but if you left school unable to read, there's nothing.

Why on earth can't the colleges offer catch up courses during morning playgroup sessions or similar? I'm tutoring a friend in maths because she lacks a GCSE, and really stopped learning any maths at all after the age of about 9. She's desperate to catch up before her son moves onto areas she can't cope with, but there's no courses for her. She works part-time, and there are no free courses unless you are in receipt of certain benefits. Even if she were, ebign carless, she couldn't get to them!

I do think that some sort of scheme in which schools can offer loans of material would be great too. We have lots of sets of HF words, literacy toys and so on which are locked up at the end of the day, if we had the cash we could have a loan collection too.

Just going on what some of what WooWooOwl said. She obviously does not agree with the premiss behind PP

It's not that I disagree with the idea of the PP used to close the educational gap between disadvantaged children and everyone else. What I disagree with is the idea that only children whose parents have a low income are worthy of intervention when they need it.

Some of this opinion comes from personal experience, some of it seems to me to just be common sense.

I see children struggle at school just because they don't have the academic ability for whatever reason, and some of them are given quite a lot of help, some are given next to none. The children whose parents don't work or work very little are not more deserving IMO, not when it comes to taxpayer money. And quite often, they need the extra help less than other children whose parents either earn quite a lot, or earn just over the threshold for benefits that entitle them to FSMs.

The assumption that parents who have virtually the same income as someone on benefits that will qualify them for FSMs don't need trips to be paid for as much as the ones who work less or not at all boils my piss. And the way the PP is administered does make that assumption.

It also assumes that parents who earn more are going to be parents that put time and effort into their children's education, which isn't always the case, especially in cases where those parents are working all the hours they can so they stay off benefits.

The pp as it is is basically incredibly unfair, and that's why I have a huge objection to it.

I can't disagree there WooWoo but what do you do with this?

If you decide to play the system, it just perpetuates the view that children who are in receipt of FSMs are the most disadvantaged because the PP is targeted at this group. Their attainment is not valued in it's own right, even if they received no personal benefits from the PP. This does nothing for their aspirations which in then in turn could lead to poor attainment, not because they were more disadvantaged from the outset but because other people assume they are.

So there is no option other than to spend PP on raising the attainment of the target group, quite specifically. The sorts of intervention, if appropriate, will more accurately portray their needs, nationwide.

And if children have SEN, help should be funded from the SEN budget.

Not seeking help for SEN from the SEN budget just lulls the SMT into thinking they can lower the budget for SEN in order to channel it elsewhere.

What I disagree with is the idea that only children whose parents have a low income are worthy of intervention when they need it.

You should fit a good smoke alarm, because it'll only take a spark and all those straw men are going to go up in flames.

"What I disagree with is the idea that only children whose parents have a low income are worthy of intervention when they need it"

Well, that's good- because everyone else would disagree with that too. If anyone had actually ever suggested such a thing. Which they haven't. So that's all right then.

Well I lost track of this thread about 16 pages ago but even my dcs' not-amazing school has a range of interventions across all attainment and parental income levels.

Ofsted is expecting all children to make at least expected progress. Schools don't have the option of not intervening, trust me.