Pupil premium policy ‘needs reviewing’
NORTHERN EDUCATION leaders have called for an urgent review of the pupil premium policy after a new report revealed the attainment gap between poorer pupils and their more affluent peers has stopped closing for the first time in a decade, with indications it may now be widening.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) think-tank’s findings are likely to cause alarm given the stalling of the gap occurred before the coronavirus pandemic had hit the education system.
A statement from the Northern Powerhouse Education Consortium said the pupil premium policy needs to be “reformed urgently” if it is going to help young people growing up in areas with the highest levels of long-term deprivation.
Fiona Spellman, chief executive of the Yorkshire charrty SHINE, added: “This report shows that there is still much work to do to close the attainment gap for children from disadvantaged backgrounds... The current Pupil Premium policy does not provide sufficiently targeted support for children experiencing long-term disadvantage, and the accountability system ignores the enormous impact of children’s experiences beyond the school gates”.
The Education Policy Institute
(EPI) findings said the analysis highlights that policymakers have not succeeded in responding to earlier reports warning of a major loss of momentum in closing the gap.
Researchers found that disadvantaged pupils in England are 18.1 months of learning behind their peers by the time they finish their GCSEs – the same gap as five years ago.
The EPI’s findings also show that the gap at primary school increased for the first time since 2007.
The report concludes: “The gap between disadvantaged pupils and their non-disadvantaged peers has stopped closing. This was the worrying position from which the school system entered the many challenges of the pandemic and lockdown in 2020, which are widely expected to worsen disadvantage gaps.
“The gap has now begun to widen across all three phases of education that we consider in this report – the early years, primary school and secondary school.”
Researchers found that the gap for the most persistently disadvantaged pupils, already twice the size of the gap for the least persistently poor pupils, has increased in every year but one since 2014.
“This suggests that progress in closing the gap has not trickled down to the most persistently poor pupils,” the report said.
David Laws, executive chairman of the EPI, said: “This report highlights that in spite of the Government’s aspiration to ‘level up’ opportunity, the education gap between poor children and the rest is no longer closing, for the first time in around a decade.”
Henri Murison, the director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, added: “This report adds to the weight of existing evidence that children in many northern towns and inner cities, prior to the Covid-19 epidemic, have become the left behind generation – deserving of much, much better.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Education said: “While the attainment gap had narrowed since 2011, many have had their education disrupted by coronavirus, and we cannot let these children lose out. Our £1bn Covid catch-up package will tackle the impact of lost teaching time.”