This NFER report looks at the long-standing gap in education outcomes between pupils from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers in England.
While it is crucial that there are well-targeted and effective strategies to help those who need it most, an unintended consequence of the Government’s roll-out of Universal Credit (UC) is that it will become increasingly difficult to understand how the performance of disadvantaged pupils is evolving over the next decade.
Transitional arrangements introduced to ease the roll out of the new Universal Credit system could significantly change the number and types of pupils considered to be disadvantaged and the composition of the group from 2023/24 onwards.
It will be increasingly difficult to tell whether trends in the size of the disadvantaged pupils’ attainment gap are being driven by changes in the composition of the disadvantaged group, economic conditions or real changes in attainment.
This is crucial as it will be impossible to identify whether there is any genuine progress in reducing the gap. It will also affect the targeting of funding (e.g. the Pupil Premium) to schools.
The report suggests the Department for Education could draw on data from the Department of Work and Pensions to identify pupils’ household income.
The report also suggests a ‘continuity measure’, which would identify what the disadvantage status of pupils would have been in the absence of the UC transitional arrangements. In other words, it would only identify pupils as disadvantaged if they actually met the underlying eligibility criteria for being considered as disadvantaged at that given point in time.
The third suggestion put forward in the report is for the government to consider a measure based on average point scores in maths and English for KS4 achieved by pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, compared with their peers. These scores could be presented on a consistent scale to mitigate the influence of changes to the curriculum or assessment. This would also enable comparisons between the size of the gap in primary and secondary education.
Recommendations for Policy:
- The Government should explore the feasibility of establishing a household income-based measure of disadvantage for the future.
- The Government should explore the feasibility of introducing a ‘continuity measure’ of disadvantage from 2024 onwards. This would be based on the underlying eligibility criteria for free school meals and remove the effect of the transitional arrangements.
- The Government should consider replacing the current rank-based disadvantaged pupils’ attainment gap measure with a simpler metric based on average point scores.
Conclusions:
Changes to FSM eligibility pose a challenge to understanding the extent to which the relative attainment of disadvantaged pupils is improving over time. The recent extension of the UC transitional arrangements until March 2025 from March 2023, has only prolonged this challenge for even longer12. They also provide an opportunity to consider how we might improve on the current system by making it more meaningful and efficient in future.