Pupil Premium

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I strongly agree, and I welcome the suggestion from Ministers that they are working towards that objective. I also appreciate that, particularly in the current financial climate, it cannot be achieved overnight, but it would be a great pity if, during the five years in which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats form a Government together, we do not see at least some tangible progress towards that object.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I am hugely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I congratulate him on securing this debate. Does he agree that a huge injustice is being done to students who are eligible for free school meals? If they go to school, they get free school meals, but if they go to a further education college, such as mine in Harlow that has 500 poor students who would otherwise be eligible, they are denied free school meals. Is that not something we need to reform urgently?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In a minute or two I will address the reforms that I think are necessary. Happily, the coming of universal credit gives the Government an opportunity to reform the system. Of course, universal credit has great potential for considering household income holistically, and I would like to believe that, at the end of the process, where a student is studying will have less to do with whether they receive free school meals and that their family’s circumstances will have rather more to do with it. I hope there might be a solution to that problem in the pipeline.

There are still significant numbers of children living in poverty who are simply not picked up by the free school meals measure, and therefore they and their schools lose out on the valuable support that the pupil premium could give to them. There are families suffering on cripplingly low wages of just above £16,000—those receiving working tax credits—and there are those for whom the stigma of claiming free school meals is still enough to deter them from doing so, although I do not think the significance of that should be exaggerated.

Receipt of free school meals is simply not an accurate proxy for poverty, so I question the logic of linking pupil premium funding to free school meals. In many constituencies, such as my constituency of North Devon, the link is simply not the way to address the underlying inequalities in children’s attainment relative to their socio-economic background.

Parents who receive income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, income-related employment and support allowance, support under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 or the guaranteed element of state pension credit are eligible to receive free school meals, as are parents receiving child tax credit so long as they are not also receiving working tax credit and have an annual gross income of no more than £16,190.

In its report “Fair and Square,” the Children’s Society found that some 700,000 children living in poverty are not entitled to receive free school meals, in the majority of cases simply because their parents are working. As six in 10 children in poverty live in working families, there is clearly an urgent need to address the situation of those children who do not happen to qualify for free school meals yet grow up in circumstances just as dire as many who do.

In my constituency of North Devon, an estimated 1,400 children in poverty—47% of whom live below the Government’s own poverty line—are missing out on free school meals not because they are not claiming them but because they are not eligible. North Devon has the 30th-lowest wages of all the mainland British constituencies, and the neighbouring Torridge and West Devon constituency is third in that dire ranking.

Pockets of rural deprivation are commonplace in the south-west. They are less easy to spot in small rural communities isolated from urban centres, and they are exacerbated by the high cost of living. Mothers have come to my advice surgery to tell me that they will not take up offers of employment because doing so would cost them their free school meals, as they would be in low-paid employment and in receipt of working tax credit. It does not seem right that, when the Government are doing everything that they possibly can to incentivise work, hard-working parents in need of help from the state to boost their terribly low incomes are deprived of help to feed their children.

The cash value of free school meals is estimated to be £386 a year for a child in secondary school. One can think how the cost will quickly stack up for mothers with several children who are exempt from free school meals, thanks to their low-paid jobs that entitle them to working tax credit. Barnardo’s has calculated that, for a workless single parent with two children, the cash value of their entitlement to free school meals is worth 5% of their income. That money would otherwise be spent on paying bills, financing the rising cost of living and, in rural areas such as North Devon, paying for high travel costs over some distance to and from work and possibly even school.

In summary, free school meals are a blunt measure that fails accurately to represent the extent of rural poverty in areas with traditionally low wages. All that is problematic enough in itself, but the fact that the Government have chosen to target the pupil premium at children receiving free school meals makes the implications go even further than just the immediate family situation.

Schools in areas with high rates of low-paid employment will receive lower pupil premium entitlements than they need to support children from disadvantaged working families. In Devon, where we already suffer with the six worst-funded schools in the country—this addresses the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley)—that is pushing to the brink the capacity of schools to support disadvantaged children. Surely, distributing pupil premium on that basis is widening the attainment gap between rich and poor. The distribution is certainly widening the funding gap because, if areas such as Devon are getting less pupil premium than the national average when, as the second-poorest county in the country, it would be expected to receive far more than the national average, a bad problem is being made worse, which is a terrible pity when the objectives of the pupil premium are so laudable and so widely supported.

The linkage of the pupil premium to free schools meals presents other problems. I have mentioned the residual, underlying problems of having some of the lowest school funding per child in the country. Every pupil in Devon receives £480 less each year for their education than the national average. In 2012-13, that has meant an annual loss in the county of some £49 million. I am not pretending for one moment that that is unique to Devon, and I am grateful to the F40 school funding group, which comprises some of the 40 lowest funded local authorities, for its work in raising awareness of these issues in political circles and specifically with Ministers. However, when small rural schools with a high proportion of children from low income, rural families are not receiving the pupil premium on the scale that they could reasonably have expected, the consequences are felt even more keenly.

What the pupil premium is spent on is also an important consideration because it has the potential to exacerbate the flaws inherent in its link with free school meals. Schools are rightly given a pretty free rein in how they spend the pupil premium allocation, but if they choose to spend it on individual tuition or personalised support, the gulf between children from poor working families and their contemporaries continues to widen even further.

A report by the Association of School and College Leaders published early this year also highlighted that the pupil premium in its current form represents an all-or-nothing approach to additional funding. The report expressed concern about low income families being ineligible for free school meals and called for greater sophistication in the pupil premium policy. No one doubts the clear benefits of the extra support that the pupil premium offers, but it is wrong for a significant number of children to lose out, while their families struggle to stay afloat financially.

What is the solution? Help may be at hand. The introduction of universal credit means that eligibility for free school meals must be revised. The criteria used to define who receives them will no longer exist and the system will have to change. We do not know whether or how free school meals eligibility will be determined with universal credit, but I hope that Ministers will seize this opportunity to improve both the entitlement to free school meals and distribution of the pupil premium. The Children’s Society estimates that if all families receiving universal credit were entitled to free school meals, registrations would increase to around 2.7 million with about 900,000 more children being eligible for the pupil premium than at present. In this financial year, each pupil premium payment is £900, and spreading the same money among more children would dilute the payment, but surely the rationale should be to extend the benefits of extra support to the maximum number of children who need it.

The Children’s Society has also calculated that, based on the 2014-15 allocation of some £2.45 billion, a rate of £918 for each child receiving the payment could be maintained, and would still be a little higher than this year’s figure. I understand why the Government are keen to see the headline rate of pupil premium rising, but there is no point ramping it up if many children who should receive that help miss out on it. Linking the pupil premium to universal credit would provide a more accurate picture of deprivation, so ensuring the inclusion of low income families and reflecting income relative to household need. That would offer greater sophistication and a more holistic view of family circumstances.

The flaws of basing the pupil premium on free school meals have not toppled out by accident, and many of us saw them coming in advance. When all three political parties started talking about the pupil premium or something akin to it back in 2008, I immediately received a telephone call from Devon county council saying, “For goodness sake, flag up to your colleagues that basing the pupil premium on free school meals will be a complete disaster and it will miss its target.” We are rightly proud that we have introduced the pupil premium, but we must take the opportunity of universal credit to adjust to whom it is targeted.

I hope that I have outlined today the case for change in the distribution of pupil premium. Using free school meals to target the payment excludes some of the children most in need of help. Some 1,400 children in my constituency alone, and many more throughout the country, should not suffer the consequences of this clumsy and inaccurate measure to define poverty. Schools with limited resources in some of the worst-funded areas should not be left to cope with the needs of deprived children who do not happen to meet the eligibility criteria. If left to continue in its current form, it will continue to mask inequalities and worsen the attainment gap. I appeal to my hon. Friend the Minister to find the best way to envelope free school meals into universal credit and to ensure fairer and more effective distribution of pupil premium to all who need it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Hancock]

The measure my hon. Friend refers to is one measure of poverty; it is not the measure of poverty. Crucially, however, the link between eligibility for free school meals and poverty is changing with the universal credit, as he said, and I shall come on to that in a second.

My hon. Friend set out what I want to put on record: the link between poverty of income, education or aspiration and the prediction of a child’s future life chances. The issue is important because disadvantage remains strongly associated with poor performance throughout school, a fact that provides the central driving mission of the reforms to education under this Government. We wish to close the attainment gap by improving the quality of education through a range of measures, not least the pupil premium; by improving schools through free schools and academies; and by improving the quality of teachers going into the profession, not only in schools in well-off areas but throughout the country. We in this Chamber agree on that central driver and on the many reforms that are taking place in order to achieve it. The link between free school meal eligibility and underachievement is strong. At every national level of educational attainment, pupils eligible for free school meals are at a lower stage than their peers.

[Robert Halfon]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that also applies to sixth-form students in colleges? Three times as many students at colleges are eligible for free school meals as students in maintained sixth forms. If we are serious about levelling the playing field, should we not concentrate our resources on those most in need, in particular those who go to sixth-form colleges?

[Mr David Crausby (in the Chair)]

Order. The Minister earlier referred to the absence of Opposition spokesmen, but I understand that “Erskine May” notes that these debates are personal to the Minister and the Member, so reference to the absence of Front-Bench spokesmen is not appropriate because they could not speak from the Front Bench in any case.