Educational Attainment (Disadvantaged Pupils)

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed; there are issues of that nature—a wide variation—throughout the country. Sometimes it makes sense to look at this issue at the regional level—for my hon. Friend, that would be Yorkshire and the Humber—and in other cases it makes sense to look at individual local authorities. Sometimes we must actually drill down lower still.

In general and on average, if a child lives in a richer area they are more likely to go to a school judged good or outstanding by Ofsted than if they live in a poorer area. Ofsted’s report last year, “Unseen children”, highlights that point well. The report shows that the gap between the proportion of schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management in the poorest parts relative to the wealthiest parts is biggest for primary schools in the south-east and east midlands, and biggest for secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-east. It is interesting that the report highlights how different areas have the biggest gap for primary and secondary schools. The area with the starkest difference is probably the north-east, which has the biggest gap of all between the proportion of secondary schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management, whereas for primary schools it is the top performer in the entire country. The blended average of those two gaps ends up being quite good.

Another problem is the fact that within otherwise wealthy areas there is a danger that poorer children can be overlooked. I said at the start of my speech that it is counterintuitive in many ways, but it seems to be true—at least to an extent—at both school and area level, that a child from a disadvantaged background is best off being in a place where there are either hardly any other children in that category or loads of them. They are worse off if they are somewhere in the middle range.

Ofsted has just started publishing regional-level reports, and of the south-east it said that

“the poor performance of small numbers of pupils entitled to free school meals is lost in the midst of otherwise strong performance by 16-year-olds.”

Of course, there are exceptions, and I was delighted to note that one of the schools singled out in that report as doing particularly well in that regard was Bohunt school in my constituency, which the Secretary of State visited a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, there is a problem in the south-east overall with children eligible for free school meals. The report says that

“pupils eligible for free school meals in the South East attain at levels below the national figure for similar pupils in every single local authority in the region.”

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I realise that education is a devolved matter for Northern Ireland, but he is painting an image mirrored across all regions of the United Kingdom. North and west Belfast are the worst areas we have in Northern Ireland for numbers of children eligible for free school meals, perhaps because of the troubles. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that every child, whatever their background, deserves a proper education?

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is of course quite right. He will understand that I cannot comment in detail on the figures for Belfast, but I agree with his sentiment. In fact, one could argue that the worse off and more difficult a child’s background, the greater the moral imperative for politicians to ensure that a good school is made available.

A number of questions arise on within-school underperformance. How should the pupil premium be used? If a school has relatively small numbers of disadvantaged children, what is the best way to use pupil premium moneys to benefit them? We know that, in general, whole school improvement programmes tend to disproportionately benefit the better off—although they may be beneficial overall, they are less likely to be beneficial in closing the gap. When a school has smaller numbers of disadvantaged children, specific, targeted interventions become quite difficult. Interventions are presumably not targeted at pupils because they are entitled to free school meals—that would be both difficult and rather divisive, and not something we would want.