AMs demand action to close education gap

Up to 74% of children who are eligible to receive free school meals in Wales won't
get 5 A*-C grades (including English and maths) at GCSE.
(Pic : alexdonohue.co.uk)

Last week, the National Assembly's Children & Young People's Committee reported back on their inquiry into the educational attainment of pupils from low-income households (pdf).

Aside from quality of teaching and school standards themselves, household incomes are the biggest factor that influences how well a child will progress through school, and how they will perform compared to their peers.

The performance of children who receive free school meals (FSM) is often flagged up as a key indicator to determine how schools are performing overall, while general deprivation has long been linked to under-performance.

The Committee made 12 recommendations, summarised as :

• The Education Minister should review the Foundation Phase to ensure it boosts performance of pupils from low-income families, and make targets for 7 year olds (who are leaving Foundation Phase) more challenging.
• The Minister should report on what the Welsh Government are doing to ensure schools publish how they use the pupil deprivation grant. The Welsh Government should also ensure the pupil deprivation grant is delivering desired outcomes and provides value for money.
• The Minister should clarify where an extra £7.9million for the Schools Challenge Cymru scheme has come from within the 2015-16 budget lines, and clarify how this money is being used by education consortia.
• The Minister should "strengthen and clarify" guidance on how schools charge for educational activities, and clarify guidance issued to schools on how they communicate the educational value of school trips to parents.
• The Minister should report back to the Committee within 6 months on progress made to increase parental engagement.

The Effectiveness of Welsh Government Strategy

The current key priority of the Welsh Government is to improve literacy and numeracy standards, as well as closing the attainment gap between pupils from low-income families and the rest.

In a report on child poverty published in October 2014 (pdf), it was said Wales currently has the biggest such attainment gap in the UK, with only 26% of FSM-eligible pupils likely to achieve 5 A*-C grades at GCSE including English and/or Welsh and maths (known as Level 2 Inclusive), compared to 38% in England. Better-off pupils are said to be twice as likely to achieve 5 A*-Cs, while FSM attainment in Wales was lower than all but six of England's 152 local authorities.

NUT Cymru said that while the policies are "well-meaning and ambitious" there was little in the way of practical guidance. The school inspectorate, Estyn, believe there was a great inconsistency across Wales which require "a large cultural shift", stressing the importance of preventative measures to improve the performance of deprived pupils.

The importance of the curriculum itself was also stressed, with hopes the Donaldson Review (Detention for Donaldson?) would provide an opportunity to test the curriculum's appropriateness for pupils from low-income households. As pupils from certain backgrounds – like travellers, ethnic minorities and special needs – are proportionally more likely to come from low-income households, it's believed tailored support here would help overall outcomes.

At Foundation Phase, there's currently a target to reduce the gap between FSM and non-FSM pupils to 10% by 2017. In 2012 the gap stood at 18.3% and in 2014 was 16.3%. Education Minister, Huw Lewis (Lab, Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney) said he was confident this target would be "breached" and brushed off criticisms that the target wasn't ambitious enough.

The equivalent target at Key Stage 4 (GCSE) is for 37% of FSM pupils to achieve 5 A*-C grades by 2017. In 2012 it was 23.4% and in 2014 was 27.8%. Although there's clear progress, this compares to the non-FSM performance of 61.6%. Again, Huw Lewis said the target was on course to be met due to accelerated improvement.

Respondents questioned whether current methods were really addressing the scale of the change required. Also, many of the interventions will have had a positive impact on all children, meaning all of the figures are dragged upwards by better-performing pupils – whether FSM or not.

The Committee also expected the Foundation Phase to have closed the attainment gap, but it hasn't (Foundation Fazed), though the Minister argued it was never the intention of Foundation Phase.

The Effectiveness of the Pupil Deprivation Grant

The Pupil Deprivation Grant is a Lib Dem policy - currently worth £82million -
introduced as part of a budget agreement with Welsh Labour.
(Pic : Daily Post)

The Pupil Deprivation Grant (PDG) was introduced in Wales as part of a budget deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with just over £82million allocated towards the PDG in the 2015-16 budget. It means schools will receive a £1,150 grant for every FSM-eligible pupil in 2016-17, and as part of the 2015-16 budget deal, has been partially extended to the under-5s.

After year one, the Welsh Government published a report on the effectiveness of the PDG, its key findings being :

• More activity aimed at supporting disadvantaged pupils has been carried out by schools.
• The sums available to schools are "significant", with more than £12,000 granted on average to primaries and £61,000 to secondaries. Primaries focused on literacy and numeracy, while secondaries focused on "pastoral issues".
• Schools are using other grant schemes to complement the PDG, meaning the PDG "relies on the existence of other grants and funds".
• There's ambiguity on where PDG should be targeted, with some schools having a wider definition of "disadvantaged". As a result, only 60% of primary pupils and 72% of secondary pupils benefiting from PDG were FSM-eligible.
• Most teachers believe the PDG is having a beneficial impact, mainly in pupil engagement and well-being rather than attainment and attendance.
• The narrowing of the attainment gap pre-dates the introduction of the PDG, so it's too early to form judgements on its effectiveness.

Welsh Government guidance is explicit – the PDG should only be used for FSM-eligible and looked-after children. Concerns were raised that the PDG is being seen by schools as an extension of current funding arrangements, not a stand-alone programme. This means PDG is being used to fund generic "projects" aimed at raising general attainment, not being targeted as intended.

Huw Lewis said schools should be able to use the PDG in "imaginative ways", but has asked the education consortia to take a close look at how it's being used by schools, while he's also said he has tightened the guidance.

Schools Challenge Cymru

Schools Challenge Cymru was launched last September, with "the aim of improving performance at Wales' 40 under-performing secondary schools". It's based on similar "City Challenge" scheme in London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands – which has had mixed success and outright failed in the Black Country.

£20million has been made available over 3 years, of which some £7.9million has come out of the current education budget (the rest from a Barnett consequential). Each participating school needs to draft an improvement plan and set out the costs of meeting its objectives. The regional consortia will then allocate the money.

The Committee were "open-minded" on whether the scheme is appropriate as it's still in its earliest stages, but they hope the Welsh Government will learn lessons from what happened in England. They had a specific concern on funding, as the £7.9million allocated from the existing education budget could mean money being diverted from other programmes. They want "urgent clarification" on precisely where the money has come from and how it's being spent by the regional consortia.

Delivery of Policy

The Committee were particularly concerned about "hidden expenses" in
education, like school trips with "negligible educational value".
(Pic : adaptabletravel.co.uk)

There were three issues highlighted which will determine whether Welsh Government policies will be delivered effectively.

• School Leadership – Different schools were said to be giving the issue different emphasis, underlining a need for clear guidance and for headteachers/school governors to take a leading role in driving things forward. Pupil tracking data was highlighted as one possible tool, as was continued professional development for teachers.
• Parental Engagement – Schools can't tackle issues surrounding poverty by themselves, so parents need to take an active role in their children's education. Schools in turn need to do better to get parents involved, but the NUT said policies like school banding and truancy fines have damaged the parent-school relationship. Schools also need to let parents know of positive outcomes in the classroom, instead of just contacting parents when something's wrong.
• "Hidden Costs" of Education – This is obviously going to be a huge barrier for children from deprived backgrounds, with parents believing schools assumed they would always be able to afford things like equipment, uniforms or school trips. Even official courses – examples are given of GCSE art and home economics coursework – have costs associated with them in materials etc. sourced by the pupil themselves. It could even influence and limit which courses children take.

The Committee welcomed commitments from the Minister towards improving parental engagement and the positive response from parents on non-educational staff like school liaison officers; but they were "extremely concerned" about what they heard from parents on "hidden costs", in particular expensive overseas trips of "negligible educational value".

Chucking money at the wrong problem?

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the 1984-85 miners' strike.
In many respects, this is just another example of its toxic legacy.
(Pic : The Guardian)

In five or six years time, we'll be looking back on the pupil deprivation grant and determining that, while it certainly had a positive impact, it would've failed – on its own – to close the attainment gap.

Although the Committee's findings are perfectly sound, I'm yet to be convinced this is a school funding issue. You could put five pupils - equipped with nothing more than a pen and paper - in a tin shack with an Oxbridge professor as their personal tutor and they would probably still end up with better educational outcomes than a 30-pupil class eligible for PDG.

This is about the state of the economy as a whole and the fatalism that children are now born into since de-industrialisation. So it's more than fitting that this post coincides with the 30^th anniversary of the end of the miners strike.

A determined child from even the most impoverished backgrounds should be able to achieve in the current comprehensive education system. They don't because, for tens of thousands of children up and down Wales, they have absolutely nothing to aspire to.

They believe things will always be the way they are and don't see the value of education. Qualifications aren't a passport to anywhere anymore. If they're lucky they might find a golden ticket and a way out, but most won't. They'll stay and they'll be left to rot. Their children and grandchildren will too.

All the 5 A*-C GCSE grades in the world won't be able to change that. Neither will chucking money at the problem.