Schools 'should get reward for taking poor pupils'
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
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Children from disadvantaged homes should be awarded a "premium" of about £3,000 a year to make them more attractive to schools to admit, a liberal think-tank says today.
The extra cash, paid on top of the £5,000 allocated to schools for each pupil, would help end covert selection by schools - a practice that has led to middle-class parents snapping up places at the most popular schools, according to a report by Centre-Forum.
The independent think-tank led by a businessman, Paul Marshall, argues that Gordon Brown would be "wasting" his money by pursuing his aim of bringing state school funding up to the level of that in the independent sector. Such a move would cost £17bn.
Instead, Mr Marshall - who is also founder of ARK, a children's charity which is funding several of the Government's privately sponsored academies, argues the pledge should be reserved just for children who come from deprived neighbourhoods.
"Britain is a bastion of educational inequality," he says. "The die is cast at an early age and, rather than recast the die, the English educational system tends to reinforce the advantages of birth. Low attainment in this country is far too heavily a function of background rather than natural ability. The system isn't failing the least able, it's failing the most disadvantaged."
The pamphlet argues that pledging the extra voucher-style premium to poor pupils would only cost £2.4bn - freeing extra resources that could be used to reduce class sizes for the most disadvantaged in primary schools to 20 from their present level of just over 25, and pay bonuses of up to 15 per cent for teachers working in the poorest areas.
"Despite improvements to average levels of pupil attainment since 1997, there remains a large and intractable tail of pupils who consistently fail to meet minimum standards of literacy and numeracy," the pamphlet, Tackling Educational Inequality, argues. "This tail is disproportionately made up of children from economically deprived backgrounds.
The extra cash for disadvantaged pupils would also help schools put on Saturday classes and summer programmes. Research shows that disadvantaged youngsters are more likely to forget what they have learnt during the summer holidays - because of the lack of stimulating learning activities they have in their communities.
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