Clegg’s £8bn plan to save poor pupils backfires
NICK CLEGG’S flagship policy to boost the exam results of Britain’s poorest children has been branded a ‘dismal failure’ after swallowing £8.7billion of taxpayers’ money – only to leave the situation worse.
The former Deputy Prime Minister hailed the ‘pupils’ premium’ as an innovative way to close the gap between rich and poor children’s education when he championed it five years ago.
But despite its eye-watering cost – now running at £2.5billion a year – the chasm has grown wider, according to a Mail on Sunday analysis of pupils getting GCSE grades A* to C.
Education expert Professor Alan Smithers said: ‘The increasing gap is very surprising and extremely disappointing. The findings challenge the comfortable assumption that the pupil premium is doing good. The policy seemed to have some impact at first, but this has
Nick Clegg visiting a Chippenham school during last year’s Election campaign not been sustained. It seems that a huge amount of money is being spent to little effect and the Government should examine whether this is a dismal failure and the money could be better spent elsewhere in education.’
However, the Department for Education claimed that the comparison of exam results was ‘misleading’.
Under the pupil premium, schools get an extra £1,320 for every primary-age child, and £935 for every secondary pupil, eligible for free school meals – meaning their parents are on benefits or earning less than £16,000 a year.
Whitehall data shows that the proportion of such children who achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including maths and English, has fallen from 36.5 per cent in the school year 2011-12 to 33.3 per cent for 2014-15. The percentage has also fallen for more affluent pupils – attributed to the exams becoming more rigorous – but not by as much: from 62.8 per cent down to 61.2 per cent.
This means the gap between results for richer and poorer pupils has widened by 1.6 percentage points.
John O’Connell, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘If these figures stack up, it will go to show that problems cannot be fixed by simply throwing more taxpayers’ cash at them.
‘It’s crucial that spending is rigorously monitored to ensure it is actually delivering results.’
The Department for Education said, however, that like-for-like comparisons should not be made over the years because of changes that made exams tougher.
It added that the figures painted a different picture if all the grades – including those below C – were taken into consideration.
Officials are introducing a different measure, called the ‘gap index’, to take account of this, and under this new calculation the gap has narrowed
But Prof Smithers, who is director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the traditional formula focusing on five or more A* to C grades was a more useful measure as that was what colleges and employers wanted.
He added that even the new ‘gap index’ showed only a small improvement, saying: ‘Whatever measure one uses, I would have expected a much bigger impact for the billions of pounds that have been spent.’
The pupil premium was intended as ‘vital support’ to boost teaching for less affluent pupils, such as one-to-one tuition or after-school clubs – but critics fear that funds have been used to plug wider black holes in school budgets.