Parent Power for all

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the new Parent Power? report published today.

A spate of reports in recent weeks has told differing stories about England’s education system. PISA’s international survey showed a school system that is standing still, with no improvement in our test scores or in our middling position in the ranks of the OECD.

However, the chief inspector’s annual report and the primary league tables last week suggested a more nuanced picture: inner London boroughs improving rapidly and narrowing the attainment gap, leaving many shires and coastal authorities languishing behind.

But while Sir Michael Wilshaw’s view of the ‘unlucky child’ being a victim of geography is backed by the recent improvements in the capital, there is undoubtedly also a case that ‘unlucky’ children lose out on access to many of the most successful schools because they are born into low or middle income households.

That is something confirmed by today’s remarkable new Sutton Trust report, Parent Power?,  by Professor Becky Francis, of King’s College London and Professor Merryn Hutchings, of London Metropolitan University. Drawing on YouGov interviews with 1,173 parents of school-age children, the report shows the extent to which parents’ ability to pick a good school is dependent on ability to pay.

Some of the report’s findings on the prevalence of private tuition or parents’ willingness to pay for private education if they can afford it echo earlier polling for the Sutton Trust and other organisations, including the Independent Schools Council.

The report puts figures on a phenomenon we all know happens, but which has not been properly documented previously, one which contributes to the social segregation and inequality of our education system: the extent to which parents have moved house or used even more unorthodox methods, such as faking piety or accessing an accommodating address in a desirable catchment temporarily in order to cheat the system.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it is the middle classes who have the money and drive to make the move: almost a third of professional parents in social groups A and B has moved to an area which they thought had good schools, and 18% have moved to live in the catchment area of a specific school. A minority of parents with children at state schools also admitted to cheating the system:
·         2% of parents admitted to buying a second home and using that address so that their children could gain access to a specific school, including 5% of the upper middle classes
·         3% admitted using a relative’s address for that purpose, including 6% of the upper middle classes
·         6% admitted attending church services when they didn’t previously so their child could go to a church school, including 10% in the upper middle classes.

However, buying advantage is about more than getting into a desirable home. It is also about extending that advantage through enrichment activities while the child is still at school. And while some enrichment is free to all – open access to museums, galleries or parks, for example – other activities cost money and are disproportionately available to those who can pay for them.

Our report todays shows  that professional parents were also more likely to pay for weekly music, drama or sporting lessons and activities outside school, with more than two-thirds (68%) of professionals doing so compared with 47% of working class parents and 31% of the lowest income parents. The gap was narrower for free cultural activities such as a visit to a museum or gallery than for paid cultural activities like attending a play or a concert.

Addressing such inequalities of access requires action. Of course, councils should do more to tackle outright fraud, but more radical change is needed. The Sutton Trust has long argued that school admissions in urban schools should use ballots (or random allocation) or banding to achieve a fairer intake. Of course, no politician wants to see a revolt by parents who can’t get their children into the school next door, so a pragmatic approach would be to mix places allocated by proximity with those allocated by ballots or banding, as Haberdashers Askes Academies in South London have done.

But opening up such schools is not enough on its own. That’s why, when I worked for Tony Blair, I helped introduce a new right of access – clauses 95 and 96 of the guidance – for pupils eligible for free school meals to free travel to a choice of three schools rather than the one designated by the local authority. These rights are very poorly publicised at the moment. It is also crucial that schools reach out to less advantaged parents, ensuring they are well informed about their options, particularly if they embrace more comprehensive admissions policies.

The enrichment shortfall demands action too. Successive governments have given schools extra money for their poorer pupils, and this Government has codified it and increased the sums available through the pupil premium, worth £900 a pupil this year and £1300 in primaries next year.

The enrichment shortfall demands action too. Successive governments have given schools extra money for their poorer pupils, and this Government has codified it and increased the sums available through the pupil premium, worth £900 a pupil this year and £1300 in primaries next year.

One sometimes forgotten aspect of the London Challenge – the programme that was key to the differential improvement  in London schools – was the London Student Pledge where pupils at the capital’s schools not only benefited from improved teaching and leadership, but they were also promised the chance to go to an artistic or sporting event at a major London venue and the chance to take part in a play and in a public event, all by age 16. Enrichment was part of the package and should be part of the pupil premium deal too.

Parent power has supposedly been around since league tables and Ofsted reports gave parents the right to pick a preferred school. But it has benefited some more than others. True parent power must be about providing fair access to good schools and to the enrichment activities that help to create successful adults.

This post also appears on the Public Finance website.

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.

Making the pupil premium go further

I've written this piece in my capacity as Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust for the first edition of Teaching Leaders Quarterly:

 

Times are tough in schools, as across the public sector. But there is one element of the school budget that is growing, and is set to grow further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, is set to rise to £900 next year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015, the year of the next election. The average school receives £53,000 this year, and more than 2800 receive more than £100,000. The challenge for school leaders is in how to use that money where it will have most impact.

 

The premium was created by the Government to narrow the attainment gap between pupils in receipt of free school meals and their schoolmates, and to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged pupils. Although previous governments have provided extra resources for such pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty, this is the first grant that is paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil, regardless of where the school is located.

 

There is certainly a real issue. England has one of the most divided education systems in the developed world.  Recent research has shown that our schools are among the most segregated in the OECD. According to Department for Education statistics, only 35 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, in 2011 compared to 62 per cent of all other pupils. At the end of primary school, 58 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level in both English and mathematics in 2011, compared with 78 per cent of all other pupils. The premium is intended to narrow those gaps, which despite some small improvements, have remained stubbornly large over recent years.

 

Moreover, England is relatively unusual in having a gap that widens after the start of secondary school. The Government has not ring-fenced the pupil premium money, although schools are now expected to publish details of their pupil premium spending on their websites. The attainment of pupils in receipt of the premium will also be included in the league tables.

 

Nevertheless, with many budgets frozen, it can be tempting for school leaders to try to focus spending on simply maintaining or expanding staff numbers. And it is here that school leaders, including middle leaders heading teaching departments, have a particularly important role.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to be the best bets for boosting attainment.

 

Eight per cent of teachers said the money would offset other budget cuts. 28 per cent said it would either be used to employ new staff or cut class sizes. A further 28 per cent didn’t know how the money would be used.

A more recent survey of 260 school leaders for Ofsted found that only one in ten school leaders said that the pupil premium had significantly changed the way that they supported pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. School leaders commonly told inspectors that they were using the funding to maintain or enhance existing provision rather than to put in place new initiatives. The most common use was to pay for teaching assistants.

Yet the evidence shows that simply employing more teachers or assistants, and deploying them as they have been deployed in the past, is a costly but relatively ineffective way of boosting attainment. Researchers at Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit which a growing number of schools are using to set priorities for the premium. The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most cost-effective strategy identified is improving feedback from teachers to pupils. Providing effective feedback is challenging, but it is important that it is provided well. Research suggests that it should be specific, accurate and clear – in other words, provide an explanation as well as a judgement. It should compare what the student is doing now with what they were previously doing. It should encourage and support further effort, but it should also be given sparingly so that it is meaningful as too much feedback can stop learners working out what they need to do for themselves. Importantly, It should provide specific guidance on how pupils can improve.

Ensuring that feedback is consistently and effectively provided is not a cost-free exercise, but with regular professional development, it is estimated that it would cost £2000-£5000 a year per teacher, or as little as £170 per pupil.

The second most effective approach is what the academics call ‘meta-cognition’, or programmes that teach pupils strategies to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning. This is often referred to in schools as ‘learning to learn’. These strategies involve students being aware of their strengths and weaknesses as a learner, being able to set and monitor goals and having strategies to choose from or switch to during learning activities.

The Toolkit recognises that this is not always easy. A teacher can support pupils’ work too much, so that they do not learn to manage their own learning but rely too much on their teacher’s prompts. The Toolkit suggests that a useful metaphor is scaffolding: you remove the support and dismantle the scaffolding to check that learners are managing their own learning well.

The third approach that is seen as having high impact at low cost is peer tutoring in Maths and English. This can take a number of different forms. In cross-age tutoring, an older pupil tutors a younger schoolmate. The EEF is piloting a project based at Durham University involving ten year-olds acting as tutors in maths for eight year-olds.

Peer-Assisted Learning is a structured approach for mathematics and reading with session of 25-35 minutes two or three times a week. Reciprocal Peer Tutoring sees pupils tutor and be taught by their classmates. The common characteristic is that learners take on responsibility for aspects of teaching and for evaluating their success.

These proven approaches are worth considering by schools as a way of making the pupil premium go far. By contrast, the evidence suggests that, as they are currently deployed, employing extra teaching assistants produces little impact, despite the relatively high cost, and that reducing class sizes could produce learning gains equivalent to three months, but at a much higher cost of £1000-£1200 per pupil on average.

Behind all these approaches is the recognition that at the heart of school improvement lies good teaching – how teachers do their job in the classroom, and how they enable pupils to learn effectively. Strategies focused on improving teaching feature much more highly in the Toolkit than structural changes like block scheduling or ability grouping. Nobody would argue that this is a novel insight. But it now has the benefit of being backed up by all the best international evidence.

Research for the Sutton Trust by leading UK and US academics has shown that English schools could move into the world’s top five education performers within a decade if the performance of the least effective tenth of teachers were brought up just to the average.

For middle leaders that is as much an in-school challenge as one between schools. Variations in teaching quality within schools are often greater than those between schools. So, a strong focus across all teachers on proven teaching and learning strategies could pay real dividends in how much pupils learn and on their results.

Traditionally in Britain there has been too little connection between research and the classroom. Too much research has felt remote from classroom life, and too many teachers have been unaware of the latest research where it could improve their teaching. The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit makes research accessible as never before, and provides leaders with the tools to make the most of limited resources.

When the NFER asked teachers how their school decided which approaches and programmes to adopt to improve pupils’ learning, only 36 per cent of teachers said their school looked at research evidence on the impact of different approaches and programmes.

The Toolkit is recognised by the National Association of Head Teachers, the Department for Education and Ofsted as a good resource for schools in deciding how to spend the pupil premium. Employing its insights could ensure that the premium pays real dividends in the classroom – and for your less advantaged pupils.

Making the pupil premium go further

Most schools face standstill budgets, or real terms cuts. But some of the school budget is growing, and will grow further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, rises to £900 next year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015. The challenge for schools is how to use that money where it will have most impact – and there is a case for incentivising effective practice.

The pupil premium was part of both the Liberal Democrat and Conservative manifestos. It had two important roles: firstly, to narrow the attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and their classmates, and secondly, to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged pupils.

Previous governments have provided extra resources for such pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty. Nevertheless, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that pre-premium extra funding in the system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools. And that has had variable impact.

But this is the first grant paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil, regardless of where the school is located. The Government decided against ring-fencing the premium, relying instead on schools publishing details of spending on their websites and extra league table measures.

But there is mounting evidence that the premium is not being used as intended (nor is there any evidence that is changing admissions behaviour). Ofsted reported last month that often schools did not disaggregate the pupil premium from their main budget, and said that the funding was often used to maintain or enhance existing provision.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to be the best bets for boosting attainment. Many would spend it on staff rather than improving teaching.

But there is evidence of the most cost effective approaches to improving standards. Researchers at Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit which a growing number of schools are using priorities for the premium. The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most effective strategy is improved pupil feedback, which should be an important part of a school’s drive to boost the quality of teaching and learning. Other low cost proven methods include teaching pupils to learn effectively and peer tutoring, where young people help each other to learn.

Of course, a growing number of schools are already turning to the Toolkit for ideas, and a new version will be online early next year. However, there is surely a case for the Government to help give proven ideas a further boost.

As the size of the pupil premium pot grows, why not use some of it to match fund schools’ spending on proven strategies? It is not as if the Government is opposed to ring-fencing any of the premium; Nick Clegg has used it to fund summer catch-up schools.

So, why not have a pot which schools where schools could double a proportion of their premium provided they spent it on a menu of proven activities? With a little extra incentive, ministers might find that the pupil premium went a lot further.

This post also appears at the Sutton Trust blog.

Clegg's premium needs a harder edge to succeed

Last week Nick Clegg renewed his coalition marriage vows with David Cameron at a tractor factor in Essex. Today, the Deputy Prime Minister has reaffirmed his faith in the pupil premium as a great engine of social mobility, at a primary academy is Islington. Nobody could seriously oppose the pupil premium - indeed, it was as much part of the Conservatives' 2010 manifesto as it was that of the Liberal Democrats - but one can reasonably ask how much difference it will really make.

The pupil premium was supposed to rise to as much as £2500 per pupil by 2015, though changes to its calculation and topslicing mean it will probably be nearer £1200 - there will only be £2.5bn available in the last year of this Parliament and £1.25bn is being spent when it is only £600 in the next school year. Yet, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, extra funding in the current system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools, funding almost double that attached to non-deprived pupils, on average. And there are still huge variations in performance between them. As Clegg himself pointed out in his speech,  

There are now 440 secondary schools - one in five - where disadvantaged pupils are doing better in their GCSEs than the national average for all children.

What that suggests is that they perform worse in four in five schools, despite their existing £2000-£3000 premium. Clegg has sort of recognised that a big problem with the premium is the lack of levers to ensure that schools use it to improve teaching for disadvantaged youngsters. So he has announced details of summer school funding and a sponsored competition for the best ideas on using the new premium. Summer schools were an idea of David Blunkett's first year in government - indeed they may even have been his first initiative - and while they had some positive results, they were no panacea. The contest may spur some good ideas, but it is still likely to leave most schools using the premium to plug the gaps left by the Government's cuts in the rest of the school budgets: again, the IFS has shown that around three-quarters of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools are seeing real terms cuts, though with lower salary inflation, the figure falls to 55% of primaries and 70% of secondaries. An NAHT survey recently found similar concerns.

Clegg says that Ofsted will be reporting on how the pupil premium is used. But unless there is a link between the premium and some narrowing of the gap in Key Stage 2 or GCSE results for poorer pupils (with no loss of performance at the top end) then the pupil premium is unlikely to achieve much at all in the majority of schools and for most disadvantaged pupils. The Government already publishes a lot of this data: why not say that a significant proportion of the premium after three years is dependent on better results for those from poorer backgrounds? The premium needs such a harder edge if it is to succeed.

Primary schools: the right target?

Today's primary school league tables reveal that there are 1310 schools - about 1 in 12 of those reporting results - that are below the Government's floor target of 60% of pupils getting a level 4 in English and Maths. The government is right to focus on attainment at the end of primary school, as those not reaching this standard are unlikely to get good GCSE results later on. They are also right to include a progress measure within their target to address those schools that are coasting.

Floor targets were introduced by the Labour government and have been a significant success story, particularly in secondary schools, where they have helped raise the game of many. After the substantial improvements in primary school results between 1995 and 2000, the result both of stronger accountability measures and the emphasis provided by Labour's literacy and numeracy strategies, there were substantial improvements in test scores in both English and Maths. And while progress slowed for several years in the early 2000s before the Rose report renewed an emphasis on phonics, today's results show 82 per cent reaching Level 4 in English and 80 per cent in Maths (and 74 per cent in both). In 1995, the figures [pdf: Table 1] were 49 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. Whatever today's failings - and there are still a quarter of pupils who are not making the grade in one or both subjects - it is no mean achievement of thousands of schools and their teachers.

The problem is greatest for the poorest students in the weakest schools. Analysis for the new Educational Endowment Foundation based on last year's data has shown that only 40% of pupils on free school meals in below target schools gain a level 4 in English and Maths compared with 57% of FSM pupils in other schools and 81% of those not receiving FSM in non-target schools. Those are huge gaps, and a lot of work will be needed to close them.

The Government has rightly extended the academies programme to the primary sector, and is requiring the worst primaries to become academies. It is right to want them to link with strong sponsors. But it needs to strike a balance here: there are to be 1000 National Leaders of Education by 2015, and many of those can provide the challenge and help needed to improve schools, especially those that are improving and are close to the target. Mergers and federations provide opportunities that schools may embrace for financial as well as educational reasons. With a still limited capacity among sponsors, their efforts need to be well focused on the persistent low attainers and to be properly targeted.

But ministers have also missed a trick with their pupil premium. It was announced this week that the premium paid for FSM pupils will rise from £488 to £600 per pupil in 2012-13, with eligibility extended to those who may previously have been in receipt of free school meals. The slow rate of increase suggests it is unlikely the premium will reach Nick Clegg's promised level of £2,500 a year by 2015, but more importantly there are far too few levers with the premium, as there is no element of reward or sanction linked to the performance of FSM pupils. Ministers are very keen on the power of accountability, but ignore its lagging effect. More improvements could be secured if schools could see that the premium was genuinely linked to progress.

The basics matter enormously, and the biggest gainers from an emphasis on improving them will be the poorest pupils in these target schools. But the Government must make better use of its limited levers and restricted remaining resources if it is to be successful.

70% of secondaries face cuts to fund the pupil premium: but will it work?

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report on Trends in education and schools spending (pdf) cuts through the coalition's dissembling about what is being spent in education. Its findings - that most schools will experience real terms spending cuts from 2011-12 - will come as no surprise to headteachers and governors, but gives the lie to the idea that education expenditure has been 'protected' under the coalition.

Of course, after real terms growth of 5.1% a year from 1999-2009, it would be unsurprising were education spending to be frozen at a time of economic austerity. But the IFS says that it will be cut by 3.5% per year between 2011-2014, the largest cut in education spending since the 1950s. Indeed education as a share of national income will fall to 4.6% by 2014-15, its level in 1999. Of course, the coalition has been careful (most of the time) to distinguish between education and schools spending. And the IFS concedes that schools spending will only fall by 1.2% in total whereas government spending on higher education will fall by 40% as fees replace HEFCE funding, and spending on early years and youth services will fall by 20%, even though early years education has the greatest impact on a child's development. The decision to scrap EMA and reduce sixth form spending to that of colleges means that 16-19 funding - particularly in schools - will fall by 20% in real terms. Education is clearly no longer regarded as an investment in the future, and its contribution to economic growth is being actively discounted.

But it is worth reflecting further on the impact on schools spending, because it is here that that coalition has been unequivocal in its commitment to maintain expenditure. There is a cash freeze on per pupil spending, which, with inflation at 5%, equates to a cut of 5% in real terms, although this is somewhat mitigated by a freeze in teachers' pay. But the commitment to 'maintain' schools spending is only achieved through the pupil premium, which is being funded by the raid on early years (including Sure Start), 16-19 and youth services. It is clearly not being funded from outside the education budget, as the coalition claimed would happen. The pupil premium is universally regards as a good thing but the IFS drily reflects that "this will add somewhat to the already considerable additional money provided for the poorest pupils by the current school funding system." Having dropped plans for a proper National Funding Formula, the pupil premium could simply add an extra layer of funding for the very poorest schools, but will leave significant regional and local funding disparities untouched.

So, the one area of growth is the pupil premium. And it is here that the coalition is on shakiest ground. Although the premium is presented as a great Liberal Democrat advance, it was actually in the Conservative manifesto too, but what both parties lacked was a clear idea of how the premium would advance the goal of improved attainment for the poorest pupils. Some changes have been made to admissions rules to allow schools to recruit more pupils entitled to free school meals, and to show in the league tables how effective they are at narrowing attainment disparaties. But the premium suffers from a potentially fatal flaw: there are no plans to reward success or penalise failure. In other words, there is no real incentive or leverage behind it.

This makes the IFS analysis all the more important in this aspect of coalition policy. They point out that extra funding in the current system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools, funding almost double that attached to non-deprived pupils, on average. Without leverage or incentives linked to the premium, it is unclear how a premium currently worth £488 per pupil, rising to £1600 by 2014-15 will provide the right incentives. The absence of a national funding formula means that it will be some time before the existing deprivation funding is consolidated within the pupil premium, thereby allowing a more substantial identified sum for each child. Even then, the first year of the premium, where take-up was less than expected, has shown the flaws in using the FSM measure, which has a considerable stigma attached to it in some communities. If the pupil premium is to achieve what is intended for it, ministers should allow it partially to reflect success in narrowing attainment gaps, and they should look at an alternative measure for its distribution.

But what it will mean, according to the IFS analysis, is that around three-quarters of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools will see real terms cuts over the next four years, though with lower salary inflation, the figure falls to 55% of primaries and 70% of secondaries assuming the same inputs. Only those with substantial numbers of poorer pupils - especially primary schools - will see any increase. In other words, the pupil premium is partly funded by cuts in the majority of schools. This could certainly be presented as redistributive. But inputs are not enough: if the premium is to succeed, it must clearly show substantial improvements among the pupils to whom it is attached. After all, there are a lot of losers helping to fund those inputs. And the least they can ask for is that their sacrifice produces results.

Clegg's summer school pupil premium raid another reduction in school freedoms

When I heard news that Nick Clegg has borrowed David Blunkett's 1997 summer school idea to give himself something to say in his conference speech, I wondered where the money was coming from. After all, the coalition has been busy axing Labour agencies and initiatives to disguise its cuts to the general school budget and to pay for the much-vaunted pupil premium. And a principle of the premium has been that it is up to heads, not central or national government, to decide how to spend it.

Now don't get me wrong. Summer schools are not a bad idea, though their impact in the late nineties was not as strong over time as we hoped. I have also long seen a role for earmarked spending when you want to focus on a particular programme or goal. Blunkett used the Standards Fund both to direct a degree of spending on key programmes and to lever in additional resources. A big weakness in the pupil premium has been its lack of leverage or conditionality. But this has not -until now - been the view of the coalition.

So, the summer schools will take £50m from the £1.25 bn pupil premium pot for next year. They will do it by penalising schools that don't set up summer schools, which is the same as earmarking the funds. That may not be a huge amount - £50 from each pupil on free school meals, perhaps - but a principle has been broken. As ministers want something else new to announce, the pupil premium pot can again be raided in the same way, especially as its value increases year-on-year (all paid for by cuts in other school funding). At the same time, the funding consultation - lauded by Clegg in his recent education speech where he hailed resurgent local authorities - proposes to continue to allow local authorities a significant say over the distribution of school resources, moving away from a national funding formula.

With an increasing straitjacket also being imposed on the curriculum through measures like the English Baccalaureate, is it any wonder that a growing number of school and academy leaders are wondering whether all the coalition rhetoric about greater freedom for schools is increasingly feeling like so much hot air?

This post also appears at Public Finance and has been highlighted by Polly Curtis on her Guardian Reality Check blog.

Gove's schools 'revolution' needs to be more than a rhetorical numbers game

Last week the Government unveiled its new Admissions Code with further fanfare about its supposedly revolutionary potential. There are a few useful changes, and the odd perverse one. It makes sense to combine a permissive attitude to the expansion of good schools with the opportunity for academies and free schools to prioritise pupils on free school meals (though why voluntary-aided church schools are excluded is not explained). The Schools Adjudicator may not be able to investigate concerns off his own bat, but will now cover Academies and must respond to complaints from anybody, not just other admissions authorities. Oddly, area-wide lotteries are banned, though banding stays and schools may run their own independently-supervised lotteries; again, a change lacking logic but seemingly based on one study of the Brighton experience, which was in reality as much about addressing middle class grievances as reducing social segregation. Parents have a bit longer to appeal against admissions offers and teaching staff can be prioritised in school admissions policies even where there are no shortages.

What is remarkable about the code, besides the admirable sub-editing job performed on its overlong predecessors, is how much it retains of that which Labour introduced. In reality, most school admissions will continue to place priority on distance and siblings, while new selection is still outlawed, and the coalition must hope that enough free schools are established and that the improvements of the last decade continue apace so that dissatisfaction in urban areas with admissions is reduced. But of more importance to their stated priorities is the extent to which the new Code linked with the pupil premium, school structural reforms and changes to accountability combine to improve social mobility.

And, on that, the jury is still out. The rhetoric has certainly been bracing, and the Government's media cheerleaders have become over-excited at the pace of academy conversions. But there are a number of important issues that need to be addressed if the rhetoric is to affect reality on the ground.

First, the pupil premium is too low this year at £430 per pupil to make much difference, especially as schools are coming to terms with other budget cuts. The premium should reach £1600 by 2014-15 and may then have a bigger impact, but a lot will depend on how schools are held accountable for its results. The league tables may include measures of achievement and progress for poorer pupils, but it will be the value attached to such measures in the Ofsted inspection framework that matter most: the new league table measures will not greatly affect parental choices in themselves.

Second, the structural reforms are certainly a victory for advocates of greater independence and diversity - I would certainly count myself as one. But with a few admirable exceptions, most of the 40 planned free schools will do little for the poorest students, however much they satisfy middle class or religious parental aspirations. And most converter academies are converting so for financial reasons. There is little sign that the DFE is using Michael Gove's initial commitment to ensuring strong system leadership from the new academies, within funding agreements for example. Meanwhile, the Government has diverted time and effort to the legal process of academy conversion from the far tougher job of turning around failing schools, even though the £25,000 grant available to converters should cover their legal costs. It insults the intelligence to pretend that the hard grind needed to turn around or replace failing schools is comparable to the fairly simple, financially persuasive and legal process required for successful schools, and without the same drive that Andrew Adonis brought to sponsor-led reform, there will not be the gains that were made by Tony Blair's Academies. Liz Sidwell is making a good start as Schools Commissioner, but the DFE effort as a whole needs to focus on the hard rather than the easy wins. Inputs are not the same as outcomes.

And finally, the changes to the Admissions Code are, understandably, permissive. But the pupil premium offers a chance to use some leverage. Prioritising poorer pupils in successful schools could be one of a menu of possibilities linked to a higher premium in the future. As could becoming a National Leader of Education, or successful curriculum innovation. But without some conditionality, the pupil premium is in danger of being a damp squib. Unless it does so, the Treasury will start to question the value for money in continuing to raise the level of the premium at a time of austerity.

The coalition has made a lot of noise about social mobility. It has ostensibly put some money where its mouth is, with the pupil premium. But it has not - as yet - joined the dots of its various policies to ensure that it makes the impact it says it wants to see in the results achieved by the poorest pupils. It must start to do so.

How Labour should respond to Gove

I've written a feature for the June issue of Progress magazine on how Ed Miliband should respond to the coalition's key school policies.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, sees himself as Blairite school reformer. By expanding academies, maintaining minimum exam standards for schools and strongly embracing school standards, he is certainly echoing many of the themes that characterised New Labour's approach to ‘education, education, education'.

But he has also downplayed Tony Blair's linking of investment to reform. And while this may be harder with fiscal restraint, the coalition can be challenged on its stated objectives. It is here - rather than in attacking its main policy planks - that Labour should focus its opposition.

Gove's education reforms have three main elements: structural reform with more academies, including new ‘free schools'; a drive on academic school standards; and a pupil premium - extra cash for pupils in receipt of free school meals - to fight poverty. Only the last was a key Liberal Democrat policy, but all were central to the Tories' manifesto. Gove is essentially implementing a programme developed for him in opposition by the Policy Exchange and Reform thinktanks.

Blair aimed for 400 academies by early this decade. But these were primarily replacing failing secondary schools or providing new opportunities in disadvantaged areas. Gove has allowed primary and special schools to become academies, and any school can apply for academy status, with those rated ‘outstanding' or ‘good with outstanding features' by Ofsted able to do so almost automatically without a sponsor. This, rather than an expansion of sponsor-led academies in deprived areas, supported by universities and educational charities like Ark and Harris, is what has led to an expansion from Labour's planned total of 272 academies in September 2010 to 629 in April 2011.

At the same time, Gove is promoting ‘free schools'- parent-promoted, faith-led or sponsor-led new academies - but has been hampered by the groundwork and funding. At most, a dozen seem set to open this year. So far the initiative has produced few radical new ideas: most planned schools could have opened under Labour and some are simply resisting local authority reorganisations.

Labour needs a careful, subtle response to those policies, perhaps employing a three-pronged approach. First, it should query the balance of government resources being used between sponsor-led academies in deprived areas and helping good schools convert. The really hard work lies in getting weaker schools to become academies with good sponsors. Only with the recent appointment of former academy leader Liz Sidwell as schools commissioner has Gove turned his mind to this tougher task.

Second, Gove has said that when outstanding schools become academies they should be required to work with a weaker school. Labour should press for strong partnerships, like those being promoted by the headteachers' and principals' organisation, the National Leaders of Education, but they should be a clear part of academy funding agreements.

And third, Labour should use the free school model, refocusing it on transforming curriculum choices for all and providing better schools in deprived areas. At present, as with academies, it has become too much of a numbers game.

Gove's approach to standards and the curriculum has been strongly academic. His promotion of a league table measure that he calls the ‘English Baccalaureate'- awarded to pupils gaining good GCSEs in English, maths, science, languages and history or geography - has shown that only 15 per cent of pupils nationally reach this standard. However, the proportion gaining good grades in English and maths has risen from a third in 1997 to 55 per cent thanks to Labour reforms. But rather than criticise efforts to toughen standards which parents support, Labour should champion a tough ‘technical Baccalaureate' as an alternative that rewards practical and vocational success alongside English, maths and science. Gove is surely right to acknowledge the need to improve standards faster to meet international competition; Labour should help develop consensus on what this means in practice, challenging the narrowness of the education secretary's measures but not his ambition for higher standards.

Finally to funding, where the coalition is weakest. Its much-trumpeted pupil premium is worth only £430 per pupil on free school meals this year, barely replacing other cuts in schools with large numbers of poorer pupils. Despite promises of no cuts for schools, shadow education secretary Andy Burnham has shown average per pupil cuts of 3.9 per cent over the next three or four years alone, with another National Association of Head Teachers survey showing as many losers as winners. Labour cannot easily promise to restore such revenue cuts, but it can reasonably question the government's approach to the pupil premium and schools capital.

Labour has failed to quantify the extra help it provided to pupils in poorer areas, and its impact -the reduction in schools with fewer than 30 per cent of pupils gaining five good GCSEs in English and maths from 1600 in 1997 to fewer than 100 today. The party should embrace the concept of the pupil premium but set higher expectations for its use. Schools should receive a higher premium where they successfully improve overall results and narrow gaps in achievement. Those that fail to do this should see their premium reduced.

With capital, nobody could oppose efficiency efforts, but Labour should criticise the demise of formula capital, as proposed by the recent James review. By providing a typical secondary school with £150,000 a year to spend on maintenance and smaller development projects, school independence and responsibility are enhanced. This year's cuts to on average £25,000 a year greatly reduce those freedoms. Labour should champion independence here while holding the coalition to account on its wider plans for school spending.

Burnham has successfully tackled key Gove failings, including the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, where there has been a partial U-turn. But his tougher task will be building on New Labour's education reforms to show clever, strategic and forensic opposition to an education secretary whose stated ambitions may be Blairite, even if his execution is otherwise.

Schools face big cuts not budget protection

Until I saw yesterday's schools settlement, I knew school budgets would be cut next year, but expected them to be mitigated by a Minimum Funding Guarantee, probably set at zero per cent. Having seen what is actually proposed - a flat Dedicated Schools Grant at local authority level and an MFG of -1.5% at a time when schools are likely to need at least 2% to stand still even with a pay freeze (to cover inflation, increments, 2010-11 pay rises and national insurance) - it is clear that schools that are not cushioned by a significant pupil premium will face cuts of around 4% in their 2010-11 budgets. There will be additional cuts in school sixth form funding that are not protected by the MFG.

This is not the real terms protection that the Chancellor promised in his spending review. Far from it. What it will mean in reality is that a typical secondary school with a £5-6 million budget and limited numbers of FSM pupils will lose around £200-250,000, the equivalent of around five or six teachers' jobs or 10-12 support staff. Primary schools will lose a similar proportion of their budgets, and potentially of their staff. If a 1500 pupil school has 15% of its pupils in receipt of free school meals, it will be mitigated to some extent: it will only lose £116-£166,000, or three or four teachers, or 6 or 7 support staff. Some schools may be cushioned by reserves this year and may make savings through shared services, but the impact is still likely to be harsh. There are also big cuts in funding for 'early intervention' including Sure Start, despite promises to protect under-threes funding.

Across the country, it could still mean the loss of tens of thousands of school staff, since over 80% of school budgets are spent on staffing. At the same time, schools' formula capital is being slashed with just £195 million to be allocated across all schools compared with £959 million this year, which is a cut of 80%. That is the cruellest cut of all: formula capital had allowed schools to undertake vital repairs, a crucial lifeline with Building Schools for the Future sidelined.

To imagine that schools will now joyfully be using their pupil premium for anything other than plugging the gaps in funding caused by these cuts is fanciful, especially in the absence of any ringfencing for the money. It is a bad settlement for schools, and the poorest pupils will suffer too, with fewer teachers and crumbling buildings.

Perhaps it would not have appeared quite so bad if ministers had been straight during the spending review. They weren't: they misled schools into believing that their funding would be protected in cash terms, assuring specialist schools and school sports partnerships, for example, that the removal of ringfencing simply meant they would have the chance to spend the cash as they liked. They said nothing about formula capital or Sure Start cuts. Now all we see is yet another Liberal Democrat and coalition promise broken.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

Paltry premium could prove a hollow victory for Clegg

The coalition has finally come clean on the size of the pupil premium. For 2011-12, it will be a mere £430 per pupil, though it will probably increase over the new four years to over £1700 a year, less than the £2500 originally envisaged by the Liberal Democrats. The premium will be paid to pupils whose parents earn less than £16,000 a year, and will not initially be weighted, so it will be on top of existing core budgets. But Danny Alexander was mistaken on Marr to imagine that the premium will make much difference in the schools that receive it.

Here's why. At the same time as the Government is introducing the premium in April, it is also making a whole series of other changes to school funding. First, it is scrapping specialist schools cash and funding for sports partnerships. That alone is worth £129 a year to every pupil in over 90% of secondary schools, not just the minority with low family incomes. Then it is likely that a series of other grants for standards will also go, worth significantly more per pupil. Finally, while it is true that salaries will be frozen next year, schools will still face the in-year costs of this year's settlement which runs from September 2010, the increase in National Insurance rates and the cost of incremental pay drift.

More importantly, while the government has removed lots of grants it is not giving them to schools to spend as they choose - a freedom they pretty much enjoy as it is - instead it is redistributing less of the cash to local authorities to allocate according to their own formulae, which will see plenty of losers. Specialist school funding, for example, may be part of the Dedicated Schools Grant baseline but there is no guarantee the same schools will get the same amount of cash. Unless any minimum funding guarantee ensures that schools get at least 1% more per pupil - including those grants in the school baseline - and the pupil premium is on top of that there will still be plenty of cries of pain from schools next year. And here's the rub for jittery Conservative and Lib Dem MPs: the decision initially to allocate the pupil premium as a straightforward top up means that the biggest losers are likely to be high-achieving schools in their constituencies, even if they benefit in the longer term from moves to a National Funding Formula.

But that's not all. There will be a double whammy for school sixth formers, particularly those from poorer backgrounds. First there is the indefensible decision to scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance, which provides 16 and 17 year-olds from families earning below £20,000 a year with £30 a week in term time - around £1200 a year or nearly four times the pupil premium - to pay for travel, books and equipment while they are studying for A levels or BTECs in school or college. There is no pupil premium for poorer sixth formers. For schools there is also a move to equalise college and school sixth form funding (reducing the latter by £200 a year) which will add further to a picture of widespread school cuts next year. Indeed scrapping the EMA in 2011-12 covers most of the first year pupil premium costs: a case of robbing one group of poorer pupils to pay another.

So, Danny Alexander was making a huge mistake this morning trying to pretend that schools will not pay for the pupil premium with big cuts. They will, as will older brothers and sisters of those who may get the premium. Michael Gove has already conceded there will some cuts. But because ministers have been trying to underplay them, the shock will be all the greater for coalition MPs next spring. The paltry premium is unlikely to do more than plug some gaps. It will seem a very hollow 'victory' for Nick Clegg at that stage.

The devil is in the detail

The coalition is in trouble on several fronts. Boris has started his re-election campaign with a vengeance, out-Kenning Ken on the curbs on housing benefit. The plans to restrict child benefit to basic rate taxpayers are proving rather more complicated than they were presented. The politics of both policies is probably right, despite Labour's objections, but the government have erred because of a fundamental weakness: their inattention to detail.

I started to notice this in some of the consultation papers they issued, notably that on the pupil premium. The consultation paper says very little about the detail of the premium, leading the TES and John Howson to assume today that it will benefit some schools to the tune of £1 million while leading to many losers. The same inattention to detail compounded the agony of the Building Schools for the Future and GP fundholding announcements.

Had they thought things through with their housing benefit changes, they would have put a higher cap for inner London or applied the policy only to new applicants, and that would have forced Labour to say whether or not they opposed a change they long wanted to make themselves. At the same time, they would have applied sanctions for continued unemployment to JSA rather than housing benefit, something they could only have done if they guaranteed them at least one job offer or a community alternative. Instead, they have succeeded in giving Boris Johnson a fillip and uniting Lib Dems, Labour and inner London MPs against a policy that sounds harsher by the day.

There are similar problems on child benefit: for parties that criticised the complexity of Gordon Brown's tax credits to apply new layers of expensive bureaucracy - which will be trebled with separated couples - is bizarre. But it suggests that they have assumed that if they have an idea, they just need to announce it and the details will worry about themselves. With six years experience as an adviser in government, I can share a little secret: they won't.

Which brings me to the pupil premium, the next accident waiting to happen. I think a pupil premium is a good idea. But, let's not forget that in practice Labour shifted large sums to schools - far more than the maximum premium - with large numbers of pupils on free school meals, which is why their budgets are already significantly higher than others. If funding for schools were rising across the board and there were a genuinely open admissions system, it would make sense simply to have a pupil premium starting at say, £1000 a year, rising to £2500 a year for every FSM pupil by 2015, as the Liberal Democrats envisaged it. Since it isn't, this could cause chaos in coalition constituencies.

For not only is funding not rising, but the government has slashed a host of grants including specialist school funding and school development funds upon which all schools relied. The local authority is to be allowed to redistribute this money (with the local school forum) as it sees fit. Local formulae already build in significant premiums for poorer pupils. So the only way to avoid complete chaos in the school system and an uprising among government backbenchers that would make this week seem like a picnic, is to build in a minimum funding guarantee assuring all schools that they would get at least a standstill per-pupil budget (bearing in mind the teachers' pay freeze) for the next four years. And even then, the likelihood is that schools will simply see the premium as a replacement for other cuts and it will have no effect on narrowing the attainment gap, unless there are other levers and sanctions, such as published data on FSM pupils' achievements by school and financial penalties for those not improving poorer pupils' results.

Either the government opts for simplicity - earning education secretary Michael Gove his inner Aneurin Bevan as the editor of the TES has it - or complexity that keeps restive backbenchers and anxious headteachers happy. This week should have taught the coalition a lesson that they seem not to have learned before now. The devil is definitely in the detail.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

The dangers of a paltry pupil premium

I've written this piece for the Public Finance blog on the problems that could arise if the Government gets it wrong on the pupil premium and school funding:

Today’s reports about Departmental warfare with the Treasury over the cuts are hardly a great surprise. But what will disappoint many in schools is the suggestion in The Guardian that the pupil premium, the Lib Dems’ flagship schools policy, may be less than £1000 a year – compared with the £2500 promised in the Lib Dem manifesto – and that the Treasury is expecting the Department for Education to stump up much of the cash itself.

This should not be a great surprise at all. While ministers have set great store by David Cameron’s declaration at PMQs, early in the coalition’s tenure, that the money would come from outside the education budget, the department’s consultation on the Pupil Premium suggested that a number of existing pots currently going direct to schools were for the chop. The Treasury was never likely to allow a substantial premium without DFE paying a large part of the cost.

The July consultation document suggested that the government would ‘mainstream relevant grants’ into the dedicated schools grant, leaving local authorities to decide on its ultimate distribution. This would likely include at least the School Development Grant, School Standards Grant and School Standards Grant (Personalisation). For many schools, the value of these grants is already significantly more than the value of a likely pupil premium. At the same time, the consultation is clear that the Government wants to ensure that the real beneficiaries of the premium are outside inner city areas, where funding may be kept down over time as the government moves towards a national funding formula.

A pupil premium is a good idea, as is a national funding formula. But trying to introduce the latter and move towards the former in these cost-cutting times is a recipe for political disaster: the vociferous losers will shout louder than the relieved winners. And the row over BSF funding may pale by comparison.

Paying the premium

I have an article in this morning's Independent on the challenges facing the coalition in introducing a pupil premium:

The coalition has made improving social mobility one of its central planks. The new Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has declared he wants to close the gap in results between the richest and poorest. Paying schools more for each disadvantaged pupil on their rolls is their big idea to achieve it.

A pupil premium is not a bad idea. As the Lib Dems envisaged it in their manifesto, it would provide schools with an extra £2,400 a year for every poor pupil on their rolls, at a total cost of £2.5bn. While the coalition agreement endorsed a "significant" premium, it declined to specify a sum, though it did promise it would be funded from outside the schools budget.

But unless a pupil premium is wholly new money, is linked to strong outcome measures related to social mobility and to a much more equitable approach to school admissions, it is unlikely to achieve its objectives.

We must probably await the autumn spending review to see how the premium is to be funded. Ministers will need to rebuff Treasury efforts to get them to raid pots like the Standards Fund to pay for it. Schools already facing tight budgets will not see the premium as significant extra resources if it simply replaces existing money, even if it is on top of their general budget.

The coalition plans to move to a national funding formula. As it does so, because Labour increased school budgets fastest in poorer areas over the last 13 years, the biggest long-term beneficiaries of the premium are likely to be schools in Tory and Lib Dem constituencies in the shires, places where schools with small numbers of pupils on free school meals receive no extra funding for those pupils.

Yet money is not in itself a panacea. During Labour's term, while some indicators of social mobility improved, according to research by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, there is still a fourfold achievement gap between children of graduates and non-graduates.

Labour's big improvements occurred specifically through programmes with tough targets, like inner city academies replacing failing schools, or the London Challenge initiative where the best heads helped weaker ones. They did not occur uniformly, or simply because they spent more money on schools in disadvantaged communities.

If the coalition is serious about narrowing the gap, it has to do more than put its money where its mouth is. Schools must say how they'll use the extra cash to narrow the gap. In this era of greater freedom, nobody would suggest that ministers should specify how this must be done (and there is no evidence that cutting average class sizes, as Nick Clegg has suggested, would make much difference). Schools should decide how to spend the premium, but they should publish their proposals in their development plan, which should be published online.

They should also be held accountable. The Government should publish information about variations between pupils of different backgrounds within schools in the annual league tables, and ensure they are considered by Ofsted. They should make clear to schools that don't reduce these variations over time that they'll lose the premium. Unless there is a consequence to failure, exhortation will not be adequate.

But that's not enough. Ministers want schools to seek out pupils from poorer backgrounds and believe that the premium will be enough to persuade them to do so. If schools have been blatantly fiddling their admissions criteria, this may indeed by the case.

Separate research by the University of Buckingham for the Sutton Trust has shown that the country's top 164 comprehensive schools took only 9 per cent of children from income-deprived homes, although they drew pupils from areas where about 20 per cent were income-deprived. It may be that these schools are getting around the tough admissions code and the schools adjudicators. More likely they're using proximity and sibling rules to decide who gets in. Poorer families are losing out.

In most cases, if schools are applying admissions criteria based on how near pupils live to the school or the numbers of brothers and sisters there, they have little scope for manoeuvre. Unless these schools allocate a significant proportion of their places through a lottery open to all – with practical advice to poorer parents on how to apply – or through fair banding across all abilities, the pupil premium will do little to enable poorer children to attend the best schools.

And at a time of increasing austerity in the public services, even the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, might himself start to question whether it is really delivering value for money.

Getting the levers right

I have written this piece on the Coalition's flagship schools policies for today's TES:

Education Secretary Michael Gove plans a speedy introduction for the new Con-Lib coalition's two most radical school reforms: a pupil premium giving schools extra money for disadvantaged pupils, and the expansion of academies. At the same time, he wants to raise standards in exams, scrap targets and improve accountability.

The pupil premium and "free schools" plans are both good ideas. Indeed, Mr Gove freely admits drawing on Tony Blair's school reform plans. But unless he gets the details and the levers right, he won't achieve the improved standards and fairer funding he hopes to deliver.

Mr Gove wants outstanding schools to become academies as a right. This appeals to many former grant-maintained schools, as their funding would come from central rather than local government. Second, he wants any schools failing for more than a year to be closed and replaced by academies, echoing Labour's approach. And third, he wants parents, teachers and charities to promote new "free schools" similar to the Swedish model.

But the policy details matter as much as their radical intent. Former schools secretary Ed Balls made two excellent schools into academies - Outwood Grange College in Wakefield and Greensward School in Essex. In return, they established trusts to help weaker schools to improve. Mr Gove should use this model as a lever to gain more improvement by making the most of our best heads. That way he can link greater freedoms with higher standards.

With free schools, he faces different problems. Some parents' and teachers' groups will be attracted to working with education providers to develop free schools. But the policy could prove just as attractive to unviable small schools threatened with closure and to controversial faith groups.

A schools commissioner - a post Mr Balls scrapped - is vital to encouraging new promoters, particularly in disadvantaged areas, and to ensuring that any public money spent on building or refurbishing the new schools is not wasted. In the absence of for-profit schools - a crucial element in Sweden - it is taxpayers, not the providers, that fund the risk.

And there are some levers that Mr Gove may be tempted to ignore, but would be unwise to. I'm all for a bureaucracy bonfire: most Treasury-driven targets were counterproductive, and Mr Balls exacerbated some. But floor targets have been New Labour's unsung success, and Mr Balls rightly extended them.

These are minimum standards, such as the expectation that all schools achieve five good GCSEs for at least 30 per cent of their pupils. They have seen the number of below-target secondary schools fall from 1,600 in 1997 to 247 last year, with similar gains in primaries. Mr Gove might adapt these targets to include science or languages but he shouldn't lose them completely.

The pupil premium was presented as a Liberal Democrat victory in the coalition negotiations. In truth, it was favoured by all three parties. The big difference was that the Lib Dems had put a £2.5 billion price tag on its delivery. By contrast, the Conservatives had hoped to deliver the premium through savings elsewhere and they saw it as a lever to encourage good schools to recruit poorer pupils.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the Lib Dem version could provide schools with an extra £2,400 for each pupil in receipt of free school meals. However, the existing system also provides substantial extra resources for these pupils, amounting to far more on average. But it is concentrated in areas with the greatest disadvantage, whereas the coalition proposals would fund poorer pupils in leafier shires and suburbs as well.

So the Treasury will surely demand a rationalisation of existing funding before introducing the premium. However, this could create plenty of noisy losers as well as quietly grateful winners, as schools rely on pots like the Standards Fund to support the curriculum and staff posts.

Charles Clarke experienced this problem when he tried to reform school funding as education secretary. Schools will need to be given additional grants to compensate for increases in inflation, so their baseline budget doesn't fall in real terms. Otherwise there really will be frontline cuts.

Both flagship policies are supposed to increase social mobility. But if schools aren't open to poorer pupils, this is hard to achieve. Mr Gove supports a non-selective admissions code, but opposes measures that would genuinely open schools to all.

Unless good schools, including the new academies, open a significant number of places to all applicants, using either academic banding or random allocation, the reforms will do nothing for social mobility. Most admissions will continue to be based on siblings and the ability to afford nearby houses. The coalition may not want to force the issue, but it should encourage open admissions through its funding agreements.

Finally, Mr Gove wants to tighten exam standards. He can do so with three simple steps: a single exam board for England, to stop schools shopping around; a big cut in modularity in GCSEs and A-levels, with more marks for final exams; and a reduction in repeats. However, he should be careful to avoid adding complexity to accountability like Mr Balls' report cards.

Mr Gove should also be wary of changing the timing of primary school tests or fiddling with the league tables. By adding English and maths to the five GCSE benchmark, Labour has created a relatively robust measure. More data should be published, but the Government shouldn't obscure data that most people can understand - or that allow its record to be judged.

Get these things right, and the pupil premium and free schools can make a real difference. Get them wrong and coalition ministers will be desperately seeking new initiatives a few years down the line - and wondering why.

Back to basics?

I've written this piece on the new Government's education policies for the Public Finance blog:

The huge rainbow has been removed from Sanctuary buildings, the headquarters of the reborn Department for Education, as civil servants work hard to remove any trace of Ed Balls’s old children’s department. Michael Gove, the new education secretary, has managed to keep his programme largely intact in this week’s coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats. Now all he has to do is implement his plans for free schools, a pupil premium and more rigorous standards.

Gove said in his first message to staff at his new Department that he wants it to refocus on supporting teaching and learning. The department may be slimmed down in the forthcoming Spending Review, but it also seems set to regain responsibility for a slimmed down curriculum from the soon-to-be-scrapped Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority. There will be changes – sometimes more cosmetic than real – to suggest a tougher approach to school discipline and more rigorous exam standards.

But the real challenges will come with free schools and the pupil premium. The coalition agreement says that academy expansion will come in response to parental demand. The reality is that it is likely to come through an extension of the existing academies programme, with failing schools given just a year to shape-up, and by allowing successful schools to acquire academy freedoms. Where there is parental demand – with a few high profile exceptions – it may often be about keeping open otherwise unsustainable small schools or opening minority faith schools. Gove’s real challenge will be in engendering a genuine enthusiasm for a policy seen as the most radical in his party’s manifesto, and he will need to re-establish a schools commissioner, a Blair innovation quietly abandoned by Balls.

The pupil premium was an idea in both the Liberal and Conservative manifestos. In their manifesto, the Liberal Democrats costed the proposal at £2.5 billion. It may be less come the spending review. Schools currently receive most of their funding on a per-pupil basis. Local authorities create a ‘fair funding formula’ to take account of issues such as deprivation or pupils with special needs. While there is currently substantial extra money allocated to schools with significant numbers of disadvantaged pupils, there is no automatic additional per pupil sum available to all schools. The Liberal Democrat proposals could have provided an extra £2,400 per pupil on free school meals.

Additionally, it is not clear how it would be distributed. At present, national government makes allowances in its dedicated schools grant for additional needs but the formula is determined locally. As part of the spending review, there could also be a look at the range of additional resources made available for deprivation and initiatives, and the pooling of these into a pupil premium. An important reason for the premium, in Conservative eyes, was its potential to incentivise good schools to take more disadvantaged students. The premium would provide extra resources for such pupils in the suburbs and shires, as well as inner city areas.

However, unless the government can countenance a move towards a more open fair admissions policy – with more ability banding and lotteries to enable a wider range of pupils to apply to good schools unhindered by narrow catchment areas – it is hard to see how the premium could have this desirable impact. Many academies currently use such admissions criteria, but they are unpopular with middle class parents who find that living near a good school no longer guarantees a place there.

But while implementing these policies is one thing, ensuring that they impact on standards is another. Labour had far too many targets, but those that achieved minimum standards were an unsung success, lifting thousands of schools in deprived areas. Without such floor targets and with less curriculum control, the new government will need to be sure that its levels of accountability provide the degree of demand and responsiveness necessary to lift standards further. Strong levers matter as much as radical policies.

Playground politics

I have the cover feature in this week's Public Finance on the battle between the parties on education:

The economy might be the big election issue but another equally bitter battle is being fought over education, as two Oxford contemporaries traduce each other’s policies. Schools Secretary Ed Balls scorns his Conservative shadow, Michael Gove, for planning a ‘free for all’ and ‘spending cuts’, while Gove denounces his opponent’s ‘bureaucratic’ policies and ‘dumbed-down’ curriculum.

In truth, both policies throw up serious questions. There are differences in approach. Balls warms to local authorities more than Gove. He has chipped away at the freedoms of academies – the state-funded independent schools that were the centrepiece of former prime minister Tony Blair’s school reforms – while rapidly expanding their number. His legislation would entrench Labour policies in ­‘guarantees’ to parents. Gove has pledged to ‘break down barriers’ – often set by local authorities – to allow new schools and free academies. His ‘draft manifesto’ on education confirmed plans to support 220,000 new school places in the poorest communities.

In fact, many of Gove’s ideas build on Labour’s policy architecture. Allowing ‘outstanding’ schools to become academies provided that they support weaker schools replicates a model already adopted by Outwood Grange College in Wakefield and Greensward School in Hockley, Essex. A requirement that failing schools become academies within a year unless they improve echoes Labour’s National Challenge, aimed at lifting the minimum achievement in secondary schools. Even Gove’s plan ‘to break down barriers to entry so that any good education provider can set up a new academy school’ reflects a growing role for not-for-profit sponsors in academies and trust schools. So much so that Gove’s internal critics argue that unless he allows profit-making providers, as in Sweden, he will find it hard to effect the radical change he seeks.

According to Anna Fazackerley, head of the education unit at centre-Right think-tank Policy Exchange: ‘A significant number of potential multi-academy sponsors say they have been put off by the inability to make a profit.’ However, Gove is keen to avoid charges of ‘privatisation’ in an election campaign.

Equally, teacher training reforms dubbed ‘brazenly elitist’ by Conservative leader David Cameron are less radical than their sales pitch. The headlines focused on a plan to bar the dwindling number of third-class degree holders from teaching but the main pledges echo Labour ideas. Paying off the student loans of top mathematics and science graduates is worth around £2,000 a year to a new teacher, but would replace £5,000 golden hellos. The Tories would also expand ­Labour’s Teach First programme for top graduates and rebrand existing programmes to attract experienced ­graduates as Teach Now.

Bigger differences lie in the parties’ approaches to funding and accountability. Labour has significantly increased spending on schools: real-terms funding per pupil has risen by 85% since 1997, while capital spending has grown six-fold. And, although this spending spree is coming to an end, Chancellor Alistair Darling was persuaded by Balls to announce that school spending would increase by 0.7% a year in real terms in 2011/12 and 2012/13. Balls doesn’t rule out cuts in quangos or in other education programmes, though he has yet to emulate Lord Mandelson’s university and college cuts. The National College for the Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services has urged efficiencies in schools through federations and structural change, and the Department for Children, Schools and Families has ­published its own money-saving guide. This has angered heads’ leaders. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says: ‘Heads, quite rightly, feel insulted by this attempt to decapitate schools.’ A freeze on teachers’ pay and lower employer ­pension contributions also seem likely.

Yet while Labour has given some commitments to school spending, the Tories have not. Without such guarantees, they are likely to require even bigger cuts than Labour, which will make it harder to afford their two main commitments – the extra school places in poor areas and paying schools a premium for disadvantaged pupils.

The Tories say they need to make these pledges because Labour has failed on social mobility. A Higher Education Funding Council for England report did show that a fifth of the poorest youngsters now go to university, compared with an eighth in 2004. But the proportion of better off undergraduates has grown slightly faster, so the gap has not narrowed.

In terms of secondary schools, Balls says his National Challenge programme is making a difference. Its target is that by 2012, 30% of pupils in all schools should gain five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics. In 1997, 1,600 schools (half the total) did not achieve this. By 2009, the number had fallen to 247, and schools in the poorest areas are improving twice as fast as those in better-off areas. However, Gove argues that Labour’s approach is not feeding through into university success. Despite the reported improvements, he calculates that the number of boys at Eton public school with three As at A-level in 2009 – the minimum required for elite university courses – is still greater than the total number of boys in the state school system on free school meals who gain three A-levels.

His concerns are shared by Alan Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister. In a December report, he said: ‘If the growth in social exclusivity is not checked, it will be more and more middle-class children, not just working-class ones, who will miss out.’ He wants radical measures to improve social mobility, such as the pupil premium and vouchers for parents in areas with lots of failing schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown rejected Milburn’s more controversial ideas, but backed other proposals, such as paid internships to improve access to professional jobs.To be fair, more poor pupils – ­measured as those receiving free school meals – are going to good state schools, according to a 2008 study by the Sutton Trust. The number attending the top 200 comprehensives has risen by 44% in the past ten years, although the overall number of children receiving free school meals has fallen by 18%. However, while the numbers are up, the proportion of poor pupils in those schools is still only 7.6%, against the national average of 13.6%.

Gove argues that a pupil premium would encourage good schools to ‘work particularly hard to attract’ poorer pupils. The Liberal Democrats agree: their leader Nick Clegg confirmed last week that he would spend £2.5bn on the premium, funded from ‘savings’ in the education budget and limiting tax credits. But there are big questions over how the Tories would fund the premium and their other ambitions. They have said they would divert funding from Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme to pay the capital costs of their 220,000 new school places.

But this would be a costly intervention. Primary rolls are starting to rise again, but secondary rolls are set to fall by 55,000 until 2015 before rising again. Gove has confirmed that he plans to take school place planning out of local authority hands, and approve new schools directly in Whitehall. This will effectively encourage surplus places, so the extra ­revenue costs could exceed a billion pounds a year. The pupil premium could prove even more expensive, as many believe even the Clegg figure underestimates what it would cost. At present, schools in deprived areas or with large numbers of deprived pupils get the extra funds based on national and local formulas, whereas other schools with a smaller proportion of disadvantaged pupils get nothing extra to pay for them.

This means there are only two ways to fund the policy: find extra money at a time when cuts seem likely or redistribute existing budgets away from disadvantaged inner-city schools to more prosperous suburban and shire schools and local authorities. The Conservatives have not said how big their premium would be, but if it is to be introduced at any meaningful level – many say this should be an extra £2,000 or 50% of per pupil funding – the redistribution could be substantial. Such changes can produce a huge outcry from the ­losers and little thanks from the winners, as Charles Clarke found as education secretary in 2003 when he made more modest reforms to make school funding fairer. So significant financial compensation would be required to reduce such losses. Doing this at a time of financial restraint would be no easy task.

Alongside funding, an ideological battle is taking place over how to make schools accountable for pupil performance. The National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers are balloting their members to boycott this year’s English and mathematics tests for 11-year-olds. Both Balls and Gove have tried to appease the unions with respective proposals to increase teacher assessments and test children at the start of secondary school instead. But whoever wins the election, schools will have to be more accountable to those they serve.

Labour’s Children, Schools and Families Bill proposes minimum ‘guarantees’ for parents and pupils in everything from ‘good behaviour, strong discipline, order and safety’ for pupils to opportunities for parents to be involved in their child’s learning. Many of the proposals included in the 88-page consultation document ­issued after the Bill’s second reading reflect existing entitlements. Those that are new include a promise of one-to-one ­tuition, tougher home-school agreements and a report card on the schools for parents to supplement existing league tables.

However, many schools believe that the legislation is too bureaucratic and lacks the money to fund the guarantees or the means to enforce them. Dr John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told MPs: ‘[There is] potential in an increasingly litigious society for parents to take up an awful lot of head teachers’ time in disputing what are rather uncertain and woolly guarantees.’ The Tories would rely instead on published data, including results from new reading tests for six year-olds, and tougher Ofsted inspections. But an absence of legal levers could prove problematic when it comes to what schools teach. The headmaster of ­Harrow public school, Barnaby Lenon, echoed Gove recently with claims that too many state schools were cramming their pupils with ‘worthless qualifications’ to boost their league table rankings. And the Tories have argued that the increase in the proportion of pupils gaining five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics, from 35% in 1997 to 50% in 2009 is devalued because pupils are ­taking easier exams.

The Conservatives would exclude vocational qualifications from league tables and could give extra credit to harder subjects. Yet despite arguing that schools should teach all pupils languages and history to age 16, they would not require them to do so. Instead, they hope a combination of league table, Ofsted and ­parental pressure would do the trick. Some schools would choose a more academic curriculum, but a growing number prefer to focus on employability and research skills.

And the fate of ­languages provides a cautionary tale. When Estelle Morris, as education secretary, decided in 2002 to give schools the freedom to drop modern language lessons for 14 to 16-year-olds, she urged them to apply the change selectively as a way of enabling a minority of pupils to do more vocational subjects. In fact, the proportion of pupils sitting a language GCSE has fallen from a peak of 78% in 2001 to 44% in 2009. Recent pressure from ministers and published data have not increased the numbers. ‘The lesson,’ says Morris, ‘is that the consequence of giving schools greater freedom – on this or on anything else – is that they will sometimes make decisions with which the rest of us might not be thrilled.’

Both parties face problems with their attempts to create dividing lines. Balls’ bid to win parents’ support risks unleashing new bureaucracy on schools at a time of tough spending choices. Gove might find that exhortation is not enough to promote freedom and tougher standards simultaneously. And as both parties’ plans come under increasing scrutiny, they will face growing pressure to explain exactly how they will fund and achieve their ambitions.