1.On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Department for Education (the Department) and the Education Endowment Foundation.1 We also took evidence from two head teachers, one from the Charter Academy, Portsmouth, and the other from the Berwick Academy, Berwick-upon-Tweed.
2.The Department is responsible for educating almost 7.0 million children aged between 4 and 16 who attend publicly-funded schools in England. Some 2.0 million (29%) of these pupils come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Such pupils tend to perform poorly in public examinations relative to other pupils. The Department aims to raise disadvantaged pupils’ attainment and reduce the gap between these children and their peers. In 2011, the Department announced new funding for schools, the Pupil Premium, which specifically aims to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.2
3.In 2014-15, the Department distributed £2.5 billion of Pupil Premium funding to schools based on the number of disadvantaged pupils that are on each school’s roll. The Department expects schools to use the funding to support disadvantaged pupils to achieve more, but schools are free to decide what to spend the money on. To help schools use the Pupil Premium well, the Department encourages school leaders and teachers to use robust evidence of what works and has funded a new charity, the Education Endowment Foundation, to improve the evidence base.3
4.At the time of our evidence session, the Pupil Premium had been in operation for four years. Initial results show the attainment gap is starting to close in some schools, but it is clear that the full impact of the Pupil Premium will only be seen in the longer term.4 Since the introduction of the Pupil Premium, the gap has closed overall by 4.7 percentage points in primary schools and 1.6 percentage points in secondary schools (Figure 1). However, the overall gap remains large: in 2014-15 there was a 13.7 percentage point gap at primary level between the number of disadvantaged pupils and their peers who achieve level 4 or above in reading and maths. In secondary schools, the equivalent gap–in the numbers achieving five or more GCSEs at A*-C including English and maths–was 27.4 percentage points. The attainment gap reduced most between 2011 and 2012, with smaller changes since. The Department expects the gap to close at an increasing rate up to 2023–the year when eligible pupils will have been funded for their entire education.5
Figure 1: Changes in the attainment gap between 2011 and 2014
Primary pupils achieving level 4 or above in reading and maths |
Secondary pupils achieving five or more GCSEs at A*-C grades including English and Maths |
|||
Year |
2011 |
2014 |
2011 |
2014 |
Pupils eligible for Pupil Premium (%) |
62.2 |
73.0 |
36.1 |
36.5 |
All other pupils (%) |
80.6 |
86.7 |
65.1 |
64.0 |
Gap (percentage points) |
18.4 |
13.7 |
29.0 |
27.4 |
Figures may not sum due to rounding
Source: C&AG’s report, Figure 11, based on Department for Education’s attainment data
5.When the Department implemented the Pupil Premium it said that it expected the policy to have a significant positive impact on the attainment gap; in primary schools by 2015 and in secondary schools by 2020. But the Department has not yet defined the level of impact that it would see as ‘significant’. The Department told us that it was a fair challenge in the NAO report for it to be clearer on how long-term progress will be measured. It said that the previous government was wary of setting targets in this area and that the approach now being discussed with Ministers was not to set targets but to look at benchmarking against international comparators, with a view to “being as good as the best in the world”. The Department told us that performance was currently around the OECD average in terms of the gap between disadvantaged and average performance.6 The Education Endowment Foundation also explained that it had developed a tool for schools to compare their own performance against that of schools with similar characteristics. It told us that its ‘families of schools’ database, designed to put schools in touch with others that have similar characteristics, was proving hugely popular.7
6.The attainment gap is a limited measure and the head teacher witnesses told us that there were other important measures they employed in order to know that they were having an impact. They informed us, for example, that they were also interested in interventions which improved attendance and raised the aspirations of disadvantaged pupils.8 The Department explained that these characteristics were pre-requisites for good attainment, but said that it intended to continue to focus on attainment as its principal metric in future. We also heard that the Department was funding the Education Endowment Foundation to research interventions that have an impact on resilience, self-regulation, and confidence, in order to understand more about how these best support improved attainment.9
7.We asked the Department what the scope was for widening the measurement of success of the Pupil Premium. The Department responded that it had so far focused unashamedly on exam performance. But it added that it would be looking increasingly at destination measures; to judge the whole education system, and particularly those interventions supporting disadvantaged pupils. The Department said it would, in future be able to look at, for example, whether interventions resulted in higher employment and less chance of being NEET.10 We also asked the Department for an update on progress in improving the quality of careers advice, following this Committee’s recommendation in January 2015.11 The Department told us that it had launched a new careers and enterprise company, which would be working alongside schools to create a network of enterprise advisers in every local enterprise partnership area. The Department told us that these advisers’ role would be to support schools to have strong and relevant careers programmes for young people aged between 12 and 18.12
8.We also heard from head teachers that they welcome the autonomy to use the Pupil Premium where they feel it will have the biggest impact, and they cited the contrasting examples of, in one case buying a bicycle to help a young carer get to school, and in another providing music tuition to encourage a pupil to persevere with his GCSEs.13 The Department commented that “there was a balance to be struck between the freedoms that we want to give individual schools to deal with the challenges of individual pupils and what we require nationally”. In the absence of clear trends or a clear sense of what it would be reasonable to expect schools to achieve in terms of closing the attainment gap, we challenged the Department to explain how it could hold schools to account effectively for their use of the Pupil Premium. It explained that the accountability system was based on comparative performance data and Oftsed’s judgements of effectiveness.14 The head teachers we spoke to said they felt that the system held them to account sufficiently for their use of the Pupil Premium, particularly through the annual report they were expected to produce about its use. However, the National Audit Office found that there was weak compliance with this method of reporting, with only one third of schools fully adhering to requirements.15
9.The Education Endowment Foundation described to us how it was supporting schools to use the Pupil Premium more effectively by building the evidence base for what works. We were told that the Foundation was initially allocated £125 million of government funding but that it would end up spending more like £220 million on its activities thanks to fundraising. It explained that much more needed to be done because the evidence base for helping disadvantaged pupils had been very small to begin with. However, it also accepted that it needed to do more to present and share evidence in ways that schools could easily use.16 Some 64% of school leaders were now using the Foundation’s toolkit to inform decisions about Pupil Premium funding. But we heard that some schools did not use evidence effectively, for example not changing the way they use teaching assistants to help disadvantaged pupils in line with the Foundation’s recommendations.17
10.We were concerned that there were no consequences for schools that failed to use the Pupil Premium effectively. Where it has been identified that a school has failed to use the Pupil Premium well and a Pupil Premium review has been recommended, the review is not mandatory. In the experience of our head teacher witnesses, it was the schools that perform poorly who were less willing to seek out advice and one said “I cannot understand why any head teacher would not want to use that audit”. They were in favour of more compulsion for schools to have such a review–in 2014, only 37% of schools that had been recommended a review had one. Also, in some areas, there were insufficient experienced and accredited Pupil Premium reviewers to carry out such work. The reviews are an important part of helping weak schools to learn from good practice elsewhere.18
11.We asked the Department about its plans to make sure that there were good-quality teachers in deprived areas. It told us that it has a number of initiatives in place to attract teachers to schools in such places, particularly in shortage subjects like maths and physics. The Department explained that, as well as Teach First, there were other programmes that sought to get good teachers into schools where they could make the biggest difference. It has started a talented leaders’ programme which aims to get the best school leaders to work in the most challenging schools, and is considering the development of a national teaching service to get the best teachers to work in the most challenging places. The Department did not want to speculate on why so few schools had used their pay freedoms to pay higher salaries to attract better teachers.19
12.We asked the Department about how the Pupil Premium compared to other programmes that had been used in the past to increase attainment in disadvantaged areas, for example the “Excellence in Cities” programme. The Department explained that the main difference was that the Pupil Premium supported disadvantaged children wherever they were, while other programmes had tended to focus on parts of the country where they were present in large concentrations.20
13.We heard evidence that disadvantaged pupils from some geographical areas continue to face greater challenges than others. We heard that deprived rural and coastal areas can have especially entrenched social problems that impact on the ability of schools to help pupils progress quickly.21 We were also told that in certain circumstances some similarly disadvantaged children do better than others, for example disadvantaged children do better in schools where they are present in very low or very high numbers.22 The Education Endowment Foundation has done work on, for example, raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils who have English as a second language. But it also made clear that there was more work to do. Pupils from some backgrounds attain very well, most strikingly Chinese pupils. We identified that there could be an opportunity to learn from particular groups, ethnic or otherwise, in which smaller gaps exist between disadvantaged and other children.23 In terms of social mobility it is important that this is properly investigated, rather than just being accepted.
14.The Education Endowment Foundation told us that research shows family engagement and family motivation is highly correlated with attainment at school. The National Audit Office similarly found that 91% of school leaders saw parental engagement as a barrier to closing the attainment gap of some disadvantaged pupils. However, only 57% of these leaders had an intervention in place to address this concern.24 The Department said that there was an ongoing debate within the schools sector about whether supporting pupils ‘beyond the school gates’ was an appropriate job for schools. However, it acknowledged the importance of the NAO’s finding and said that it wanted to look at it further because what successful parental engagement actually looks like is under-researched.25 The Department also told us that successive governments have put considerable resources into intervening earlier, a lot of which was about tackling the root causes of poor outcomes.26
15.The Education Endowment Foundation also told us that it had a number of studies looking at different ways of promoting parental engagement to see which approach works best. Both the Foundation and the head teacher witnesses told us about innovative practices to get parents more involved, for example parenting classes and sending text messages to parents informing them about positive or interesting things that their children had done.27
1 C&AG’s Report, Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils, Session 2015-16, HC 90, 30 June 2015
2 C&AG’s Report, paras 1-2
3 C&AG’s Report, paras 3, 5
5 C&AG’s Report, paras 20, 3.7
6 Qq 40-41; C&AG’s Report, paras 21, 1.7
11 Q 97; Committee of Public Accounts, 16– to 18–year–old participation in education and training, Thirty-first Report of Session 2014–15, 22 January 2015
15 Qq 21-22; C&AG’s Report, para 17
17 Q 65; C&AG’s Report, para 12
18 Qq 6-10; C&AG’s Report, paras 18, 2.31
24 Q 83; C&AG’s Report, para 2.7