Why not have pupil premium rewards too?

In my latest Sutton Trust post, I welcome increased pupil premium accountability, but wonders why ministers don’t also reward schools that successfully deliver for their disadvantaged pupils.

News that the Government is finally putting flesh on its pupil premium accountability measures should mean that the ministerial subsidy for poorer pupils starts to acquire some teeth. On Tuesday, Schools Minister David Laws announced that Ofsted would place greater emphasis on schools’ performance on disadvantaged pupils. Schools where those students were not making good progress could lose their outstanding status.

He also detailed new ways that schools would be held accountable in performance tables for the performance of the one in five pupils who are eligible for the £900 a year grant, which goes both to pupils on free school meals and those who have recently been eligible. On average schools receive £5000 a year per pupil through the dedicated schools grant, but some inner London councils get more than £7000 per pupil.

Statistics show that 38.5% of these pupils reached the five good GCSE benchmark in 2012 compared with 65.7% of other pupils, a gap of over 27 percentage point. In future, the league tables will include data on the attainment of disadvantaged pupils, their progress and the gap with their peers. So that schools with small numbers of pupil premium recipients are more fairly held to account, there will be three year rolling averages alongside data for individual years.

Add to that the appointment of the former headteachers’ union leader John Dunford as a pupil premium champion, and the package is undoubtedly a considerable advance on a situation where schools were effectively left to spend the extra cash as they chose.

To be fair, the National Foundation for Education Research survey of teachers for the Sutton Trust his year showed that teachers – and heads in particular – are starting to turn to research, particularly the Sutton Trust/Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit, in deciding how to spend the money.

67 per cent of school leaders – up from 52 per cent last year – said their school now consults research in deciding their pupil premium priorities. 43 per cent of school leaders whose schools consider research evidence use the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit. Schools are less likely to spend the money on reducing class sizes – a relatively unproven method – and more likely to spend it on early intervention (proven, but expensive) and one-to-one tuition. However, the most cost effective measures, such as training to improve feedback between teachers and pupils, an important part of teacher development, are also still relatively rarely cited too, as are peer-to-peer tutoring schemes, where older pupils typically help younger pupils to learn.

A separate independent evaluation by social researchers TNS-BMRB and the universities of Manchester and Newcastle for the DFE this week suggested that 45 per cent of schools use academic research and 70 per cent use evidence to inform spending decisions. Three quarters of school use additional staff to support disadvantaged pupils.

The pupil premium is one of the Government’s most important flagship policies, as important to the Liberal Democrats in the coalition as Free Schools are to the Conservatives, though both policies featured in the manifestos of both parties as well as the coalition agreement. 

That makes it all the more surprising that ministers didn’t go further in their announcements this week and start to tie a proportion of pupil funding to school success in meeting the measures against which schools will in future be judged. To be fair, it is unclear that the pupil premium will rise much above its current level of £900 per pupil. George Osborne merely said it would keep pace with prices, in his Spending Review statement. It had been expected to increase to £1200 a year by 2015.

But as the Government moves towards a National Funding Formula – also announced by the Chancellor - it will need to decide how to allocate the substantial extra resources already allocated by many local authorities to schools with large numbers of disadvantaged pupils. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that pre-pupil premium extra funding in the system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools.

If the Government really wants to incentivise more effective use of the premium, it should consider rewarding schools that do well in the new league table rolling average measures, and provide them with additional funding that they can use to reward the staff responsible or to make other improvements within the school. Such team-based rewards can be more popular and much less expensive than performance related pay for individual teachers.

The right rewards with advanced accountability could combine to give the pupil premium real teeth.

Testing teachers

I wrote this blog post for Independent Voices on why improved test scores are a far better measure of success than student surveys

Good teaching is at the heart of good schools. We have done a lot to improve the quality of new teachers, but there has been much less focus on the quality of the existing workforce. Yet, while 35,000 new teachers enter the profession each year, the teacher workforce is 440,000-strong.

Schools need to make the most of teachers’ talents if young people are to get a decent education. For a disadvantaged pupil, an excellent teacher can deliver the equivalent of 1.5 years learning in a year, whereas a poor teacher contributes just half a year: the difference is a whole year of a child’s education.

That’s why it is important we evaluate the contribution that teachers are making and can make with the right support. A new Sutton Trust study, Testing Teachers, shows that the contribution that teachers make to improving exam and test results is the most reliable way to predict a teacher’s long-term success.

The study, by Richard Murphy of the London School of Economics, drawing on the latest international research, shows that improved test scores are nearly twice as effective as student surveys and nearly three times more effective as classroom observations.

But schools can’t simply look at a single year’s test scores to assess performance. A reliable and fair approach requires a sensible combination of these and other measures taken over several years, and might also include teachers’ contributions to sports and school trips.

When Labour introduced performance related pay in 1999, it did so within a very bureaucratic framework that didn’t work as intended in most schools. By contrast, the education secretary Michael Gove is hoping that leaving schools to develop their own systems will improve results and see the best teachers more effectively rewarded.

But without the right systems in place, schools may be no readier to do so now than they were in the past. So what are the characteristics of an effective system of teacher appraisal?

Most importantly, it should involve clear standards, fairly and consistently applied. External advice can be helpful in getting this right, and could assure staff of its fairness and governors of its robustness.

Teachers or school leaders involved in evaluation should be properly trained, and should discuss their evaluation fully with the teachers concerned.

When using exam or test results, it is important to focus on value added rather than absolute results, as they are the most objective and comparable assessment of a teacher’s contribution. It is also important that the baseline for such comparisons is sufficiently robust.

With classroom observations – where teachers or school leaders witness teaching in practice – the report suggests that those designed to help a teacher improve should be carried out separately from those used for appraisal, as this is more likely to promote honest feedback.

Pupil surveys can also be used – particularly with older pupils – as they are the ones in most day-to-day contact with teachers, but when they are they should be clearly structured, be age appropriate, and should complement other measures.

Getting all this right can have real benefits for pupils and teachers alike. Earlier research for the Sutton Trust has shown that if we were to raise the performance of the poorest performing tenth of teachers to the average, we would move into the top rank of the OECD’s PISA tables internationally.

But there is a more compelling reason: by improving the quality of our teachers collectively, we can ensure that every child has a decent education, and is not held back by poor teaching. That is a goal well worth pursuing.