A Conservative levelling-up scheme designed to boost outcomes in education priority areas is set to end, leaving councils drawing up their own plans to informally continue the work.
In 2022, the then government announced the education investment area (EIA) programme – which prioritised 55 towns and counties with the lowest results for several grants.
As part of that, 24 were later classified as priority education investment areas (PEIAs), places with high levels of deprivation as well as low achievement.
They were allocated a share of the £42 million local needs fund, used to pay for bespoke interventions to improve attainment in the PEIAs through to the end of March 2025.
At the time, the schools white paper said this would aim to address “entrenched underperformance, including in literacy and numeracy”. But the funding for the priority areas will not be extended after the end of this month.
Challenge Partners CEO Dr Kate Chhatwal chaired Liverpool’s PEIA board, which consisted of local heads, council officers, the Department for Education (DfE) and the Education Endowment Foundation.
It used its £3.7 million share of the local needs fund to commission programmes to boost attendance and early years speech and language communication.
Councils seek to continue initiatives
Chhatwal said a local organisation is now working with the council to see how the different initiatives might be continued.
Meanwhile in Sandwell in the West Midlands, council papers published ahead of a meeting in January show the area was allocated £2.9 million through the local needs fund to improve maths “in targeted schools”, along with primary and secondary English attainment.
The authority “will need to consider how development to date could be sustained and how this could continue to be funded and delivered” now that funding is ending.
It was suggested that the council’s school improvement team could “lead on future development, building on that established via the PEIA programme… potentially in collaboration with other local partners”.
But minutes show “the results from schools [have] not been validated yet”, which meant the impact of the PEIA “funding and programme had not been fully calculated”.
Priority schools also had access to the attendance mentoring pilot, which will continue for another three years although it only covers 10 areas. They are also still part of the wider education investment areas, but the government has remained tight-lipped about their future.
Two schemes benefiting these schools – Connect the Classroom and levelling-up retention payments – are continuing, however. A DfE spokesperson highlighted free breakfast clubs and increasing pupil premium funding.
The government’s new school improvement (RISE) teams “will take this further… tackling the biggest challenges as we break down barriers to opportunity”, they added.
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