Prof Becky Allen (formerly of Education Datalab) gave a talk at ResearchEd last weekend about how Pupil Premium isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and has now written the talk up into a 3 part blog post. Well worth reading.
She notes how pupil premium doesn’t identify the most financially disadvantaged pupils and working poor families miss out. She notes that measuring the gap is meaningless. She also says how the funding has to be targeted at PP pupils only and the impacted evidenced, leading to short term interventionist strategies to a group who don’t have homogenous needs.
She thinks that PP funding should be rolled into general school funding for heads to use as they see fit. I’d worry that if the DfE thinks PP isn’t working they’ll just get rid of it.
One thing that she said at the talk that I found interesting was that the attainment gap at primary is much less than at secondary. This is because lots of families who claim FSM at primary cannot work for childcare reasons. They are not that distant from the job market. By secondary, far fewer families are claiming FSM - childcare is no longer an issue and families that could go back to work have. Families still claiming FSM at secondary are more likely to be strongly distanced from the job market and in a more distinct social group. The widened gap at secondary is not because primaries are better at narrowing the gap than secondaries, not because they teach mixed ability but because of this social filtering.
rebeccaallen.co.uk/2018/09/10/the-pupil-premium-is-not-working/
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Is this the end for Pupil Premium?
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noblegiraffe · 15/09/2018 11:00
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