Pathetic pupil premium

Jonathan Calder says the introduction of the pupil premium “will not receive a fraction of the attention that the increase in tuition fees has”. If I were a Lib Dem - a fate which nature, in her mercy, has not visited upon me - I’d think this a good thing, because it’s an insult. It will do pathetically little to improve equality of opportunity.
I say this simply because it’s so small. £430 per pupil is equivalent to less than 10% of current spending. It would buy you about three days of tuition at Clegg’s old school.
This puny sum interacts with another nasty fact - that the correlation between school spending and attainment is weak (pdf). Put the two together and the obvious inference is that the premium will have very little effect.
Let’s put this in context. Some US research has estimated that to equalize opportunity between blacks and whites, spending on black pupils would have to be 6-10 times greater than spending on whites. This is because spending does little to increase attainment.
If we assume - heroically, I’ll grant - that a similar multiple will be needed to equalize opportunity between the British poor and the likes of Clegg, then the pupil premium would have to be  over £100,000 per year, more than 200 times its present value.
If you find this implausible, just remember that public schoolboys have the advantages of high expectations, social contacts and good role models, whilst many (not all FFS) of the poor have family circumstances not conducive to learning. To offset these inequalities, given the weak coefficient of attainment on spending, requires a massive rise in spending. 
So, let’s face it. The pupil premium is not about equalizing opportunity. It’s about the coalition giving the impression that they care about social mobility. The fact is, though, that school spending alone - especially this trivial sum - is a weak  tool for improving equality of opportunity.
It’s a good job that social mobility is not a great ideal.

Comments

[Ralph Musgrave]

Speaking as a downwardly mobile ex public school twit, I'm also opposed to social mobility.

[Shuggy]

Completely agree. It would buy you about a week's one-to-one tuition here - provided the member of staff taking it wasn't promoted or at the top of the pay scale. Or perhaps a group of kids whose parents earn less than 16k could club together and have a significantly smaller class for about a term. And how much difference do smaller classes make? Somewhere between not a lot and bugger all, in my experience - although it's worth remembering that smaller classes were another promise that Mr Clegg made in order to get elected.

[Subrosa]

Isn't some of the reason that parents who send their children to private schools ensure they know that they're privileged. Back in the early 50s when I started school we were also told how lucky we were to have education regardless of family financial circumstances.

Now the idea is that education is a right not a privilege. I would argue it's a bit of both. The only 'rights' we have are those which we create by our own efforts. When we use the efforts of others too, then they become part-privileges too.

[Paul Sagar]

Spot On.

[Rob]

A tad harsh - it's a good idea, but the level is set too low.

Is there the beginnings of a pattern here? Along with the universal credit, the coalition does seem to be adopting the idea that the way to deal with poverty is to set up a streamlined process of giving them money, without spending too much time means-testing it. Their problem is that the combination of the deficit and, more meaningfully, the Tory majority within the government, is holding the levels of funding to very low levels. This is pretty much the polar opposite of Brown's government, which contrived to spend as much as (he believed to be) possible in as inefficient and indirect a manner as could be found.

It's not totally absurd to argue that the coalition's mechanisms are better than Labour's were, but their commitment to them is weaker. If I were the kind of prat who likes to "advise" Ed Miliband from the comfort of my armchair, I might tell him to champion these measures but promise to increase the funding.

[ortega]

'...public schoolboys have the advantages of high expectations, social contacts and good role models...

...and the contructivist theories based education that, while favoured by the progressives, has made the education even more clasist (if you resign from teaching anything, you give advantage to those who learn out of the school).
While it is so, it would be more egalitarian to take money from the university (why subsidize the high and middle classes?) and use all the avialable in the first educational steps. Once the teaching model (Gove willing) has been reformed, of course.