Review by Natalie Perera

CEO, Education Policy Institute

5 Feb 2023, 5:00

Book

The Review: Making schools better for disadvantaged students

By Stephen Gorard, Beng Huat See and Nadia Siddiqui

Publisher

Routledge

ISBN 10

1032262494

Published

25 Nov 2022

As CEO of the Education Policy Institute, I’m often asked “what impact has the Pupil Premium had?” Mostly, this question comes from a place of genuine curiosity about schools policy from my peers. Occasionally, the question is asked to trip me up, knowing that I and some of my colleagues in EPI had various degrees of responsibility for introducing and refining the Pupil Premium policy while working in the Department for Education.

Irrespective of the motives of the question, my answer has generally been the same. It’s near impossible to evaluate because it was introduced across the country at the same time, so there is no control group. It was also introduced alongside a range of other changes including decreases to core school budgets, the ending of grants for other vulnerable pupils and cuts to wider children’s services.

So, I was very keen to read the latest book by Professor Stephen Gorard and his team at Durham University, which claims to “present the strongest and most up to date evidence so far on how funding can be best deployed to improve schooling and narrow the disadvantage attainment gap” and includes seven whole chapters dedicated to the Pupil Premium.

The book starts with an explanation of why we care about attainment gaps and some of the wider societal factors that drive inequality. Sounds obvious, but the more we can reinforce the fact that so much of what we are trying to achieve sits outside of the control of schools, the better.

There are then a further five chapters on the efficacy of interventions aimed at improving school attendance and attainment. Most of the interventions covered were from studies in developing countries and so the context is not necessarily comparable if you’re looking for ways to improve policy in the UK. Nevertheless, these sections serve as a sobering reminder that access to education cannot be taken for granted in many parts of the world. While a synthesis of evidence can often be dry, Gorard and co present their findings accessibly, in small vignettes with similarities to the EEF’s toolkit.

Gorard and co present their findings accessibly, in small vignettes

On then to the much-anticipated Pupil Premium sections, where Gorard repeats the difficulties in evaluating the policy and pulls no punches in his criticism of reports that have attempted to do so. At the heart of his critique is the fact that persistence of poverty is key and that children experiencing long-term poverty have much lower outcomes than those in temporary poverty. This is, of course, not new and something that EPI has researched for years and, before that, the late, great Mike Treadaway.

So Gorard argues that persistence of poverty, alongside wider economic changes and the prevalence of privately educated pupils, inhibit how we can assess the Pupil Premium and trends in the size of the disadvantage gap. Gorard controls for those factors in his own research and (spoiler alert) uncovers some very positive findings on reduced school segregation. Not a spoiler: the trends in the disadvantage gap vary, with more positive trends in Key Stages 1 and 2, and a more mixed picture in Key Stage 4.

Towards the end, Gorard warns that Ofsted and others are wrong in criticising certain areas of the country (the West Midlands and the North East) for the underperformance of disadvantaged pupils, given that those areas have a large proportion of persistently disadvantaged pupils. Something I think we can all agree with is the implication that policy-makers should be working with these areas to understand better the deep challenges they face rather than “denigrating” them.

Overall, this is a helpful contribution to research on the impact of the Pupil Premium, but it’s important to distinguish between research that aims to isolate the impact of a single intervention (which is Gorard’s aim) and research that is intended to shed light on inequalities and hold the government to account for its overall endeavours.

Meanwhile, my answer to the question about the impact of the Pupil Premium is often: “Imagine everything else over the past decade stayed the same, but there was no Pupil Premium.” This is often met with a thoughtful pause. I imagine much of this book will cause a similar response – as it should.

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