Press
Schools study backs 'pupil premium'
Publication: |
The Financial Times |
Link: |
|
Author: |
Jon Boone |
Date : |
17th July, 2007 |
Relates to : |
Publications: Tackling educational inequality |
Schools should be given financial incentives for recruiting children from the most deprived backgrounds, a leading hedge fund manager says in a report on Tuesday.
The “pupil premium” would make children from poor homes more attractive to schools that tend to avoid taking such youngsters who drag down league table results, he argued in the study for liberal think-tank CentreForum.
Paul Marshall, the chairman of Marshall Wace Asset Management, said the voucher-style system would give extra money to schools with a large proportion of deprived children.
They could spend those extra resources on measures designed to improve results such as smaller class sizes at primary level. Other ideas include weekend classes and bonuses to top teachers in the most challenging schools.
The pupil premium would also scrap the role of town halls in distributing the £2.4bn spent on deprivation funding. The report claimed local authorities were failing to perform that function accurately.
Mr Marshall, who also chairs CentreForum, said even though the budget would have to be doubled to £5bn it would provide better value than the government’s education spending plans of raising levels of spending per pupil in state schools to match those of the private sector.
“That would cost an extra £17bn a year and would be potentially wasteful in the light of government research which shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between resources and attainment for the most affluent third of schools,” he said.
The report says that despite steady improvements in average levels of pupil attainment in the past 10 years an “intractable tail” of pupils who consistently fail to meet minimum standards of literacy and numeracy remains.
In 2006 only 44 per cent of pupils achieved five good GCSE grades in subjects including English and maths. The situation is far worse for children eligible for free school meals, a frequently used indicator of deprivation: only 19.5 per cent secured five good GCSEs.
Mr Marshall said current targets, which demand that schools have a minimum of 30 per cent of pupils achieving five good GCSEs by 2008, were woefully under-ambitious.
“The problem is politicians want targets that can be achieved within the couple of years they are in office, rather than the more long-term policy ambitions which our country needs.”
In return for doubling deprivation funding schools should also accept new policy initiatives designed to drive up results, including learning lessons from US charter schools that have succeeded in delivering excellent results in the poorest neighbourhoods.
It would also include making better use of the sort of data-analysis technology commonplace in the City and other parts of society. Mr Marshall said the “data revolution” should be extended to schools, with continuous analysis of pupils’ work allowing heads to asses both pupils and teachers.
Ofsted should award kite-marks to schools on the quality of their data management systems, he said. Targets should be monitored by a new Educational Standards Authority, independent of the existing Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.