The new government’s policies for schools are getting under way – with potentially dire effects on poorer children. On the one hand, ministers are pressing ahead with the creation of a schools “market” – applications for so-called “free schools” are now open, and the academies bill, which is focused on creating many more academies outside local authority control, has begun its parliamentary passage in the Lords. On the other hand, investment which would help the poorest is already under attack: funding for free school meals has been axed, money for school IT has been cut, and considerable anxiety has been expressed about the fate of the Building Schools for the Future programme, which concentrated funding on schools in poorer areas first.
It’s impossible for the government to argue that such an approach shows it has the best interests of every child at heart. Dressed up as a focus on academic excellence, in reality it favours families with the resource and the capacity to take the best out of the system, and risks leaving children from poorer backgrounds in poorly funded, under-resourced schools. That will exacerbate rather than narrow the disadvantage that a family’s economic circumstances mean for children’s attainment.
It’s already well documented that children from low income families do less well at school than children of similar ability from better off homes. Despite rising standards under Labour, at three years old children from poorer backgrounds are already one year behind their wealthier counterparts, and by the time they reach secondary school the gap has increased to two years. High-performing children at primary school who come from poor backgrounds have a much lower chance of achieving good GCSEs at secondary school than children from wealthier families.
Schools need to do more therefore to compensate for the effects of income inequality. The much promised pupil premium (though so far without any hard cash figures attached – we wait to hear if it will be adequately funded) could go some way to address that imbalance, and we should welcome it when it comes. But other government policies pull in precisely the opposite direction.
First, diverting funding to the new academies and the new free schools threatens to drain resources out of the system, leaving children in schools that have not opted out with less well-funded support. And it is the services which matter for poorer families – school travel, school meals, library services, music and sport facilities, provision for special needs – which will suffer as central local authority funding is reduced. These are the services that poorer families are more reliant on, since poorer parents are less likely to have the means to provide them for their children themselves.
Second, priority to becoming a new academy is to be given to schools which already have the best-performing records, meaning extra resources will go first to the schools that are already doing well. Money that could for example support additional teaching, one to one tuition and tailor-made learning activities will end up in already high-performing schools, rather than those schools with more disadvantaged intakes, whose pupils need more support.
Third, worries exist about admissions and exclusions policies in the new academies and free schools. Ministers say the new schools will be subject to the admissions code, but the reality is that we can expect is a situation where schools rather than parents are the ones who get to choose. That will be exacerbated by new rules allowing selective schools to become academies and thus secure additional resources – something Labour’s policies did not allow. Yet as experience already shows in my own constituency, where selective education continues, it is in results for the poorest children that we see greater underperformance. Now resources could be further skewed away from those whose achievement is already lowest.
Ministers will of course argue that a combination of increased parental choice and more resources and incentives for the best performing schools will drive up academic excellence, draw in more parents and reduce socioeconomic disadvantage. But the driving factor behind low educational attainment is poverty, and directing extra resources at high performing schools in practice means more resources going to those who are already more advantaged, widening the attainment gap.
As the Local Government Association has warned, a two-tier education system is likely to be the outcome – and rising inequality will be the inevitable result. If Ministers were serious about driving up the academic attainment of all children, and reducing inequality, they would ensure that their policies and their spending plans prioritised poorer families first.
After thirteen years of new labour I’m willing to wait and see, because in the end the education in this country has not improved much from my days in the sixties.
Has new labour done a good job, well if you mean building schools under PFI, and hospitals for that matter.
I’ll wait and see, before I decide which is best
We should priorities the ‘poor’.
But let’s remember that as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson pointed out in their recent book ‘The Spirit Level’ everyone benefits from a more equal society. Narrowing the income divide is vital.
The comments on the threat to the poor are sound but what this policy is doing is even more horrific. It is destroying the State education system. Under Labour for the last decade we have had investment, rapidly rising standards and an increasingly professional workforce now we will have school budgets cut so savagely that schools will go far the additional 10/15% of local authority money that can become theirs if they are an academy.
Once cut off from local control and accountability it will be open house on admissions and even top up fees to create a pseudo privitisation without its major personal financial burden. Academies will be state schools only in their money base because they will be outside state, or even parental control.
At the moment 7% of children are educated privately this policy could create a whole new tranche of state/private academies that blast this figure skyhigh. Of all the Tories policies this is the most dangerous for our nation’s future.