As a former schools minister, it’s always a pleasure and a relief when you can see that a policy you helped to develop or implement has survived the extraordinary ministerial and policy churn that seems to characterise modern government.
That is how I feel about the pupil premium - now well into its second decade of existence.
When I became schools spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats in 2007, I inherited the idea of the pupil premium from my predecessors and our party leader, Nick Clegg. But it was then an idea, not a detailed and costed policy.
A small group of us developed the detail, and it then transitioned from a policy paper to our manifesto, to the coalition agreement in 2010 and then to implementation.
In opposition, one of the questions we had to ask was how large (ie, expensive) should the premium be.
How big should the pupil premium be?
There is no perfect or easy answer to this, but we settled on a figure that would allow us to state that the total funding that disadvantaged pupils would receive in state education would be the same as the average funding rate received by pupils in the independent sector.
This was designed to help schools to close the disadvantage gap. Pupil premium pupils are on average 18 months of learning behind other pupils by age 16.
Stripping out boarding fees from the independent sector funding rate, we came up with a figure, in 2008, which meant that the total cost of reaching this aspiration would be £2.5 billion per year.
This seemed a large number, and that was certainly the view of George Osborne, who was chancellor when we negotiated the coalition agreement. However, my party insisted that we would not water down the pledge, and the rest (as they say) is history.
Today the pupil premium continues, and it still costs a similar amount - around £2.9 billion per year - after just a couple of small upratings since 2010.
Tackling the poverty-related attainment gap
So, should we be content? Perhaps not. Because although closing the funding gap in 2008 meant spending £2.5 billion, since then the cost of meeting this aspiration has soared. We have had around 15 years in which state school funding per pupil has flatlined, while independent school funding has increased significantly, year by year.
If we did the same calculation today, we might well need a pupil premium around three times the size - closer to £7.5 billion - dependent on the precise methodology of calculation.
At the very least, this situation reminds us just how much the pupil premium has declined in real terms because of inflation. But it also tells us that the forces of inequality in society are very powerful, and need actively combating. It is surely time to review the funding for tackling disadvantage in education to see if policy and levels of funding are fit for purpose.
As part of such a review, there are other questions that we ought to look at.
Changes to education funding
Our work at EPI highlights not just the gap between the average attainment of children receiving the pupil premium and that of other students but just how much wider the gap is for children in persistent poverty.
Children who are poor for 80 per cent or more of their time in education are fully two years behind non-poor pupils by age 16. Those pupil premium students who spend only 20 per cent of their time in poverty are, by comparison, one year behind. Should there not be a factor in the pupil premium that takes persistent poverty into account? This is worth considering and could help schools and localities with very high longer-term poverty.
What else? Well, the case for extending the pupil premium into the 16-18 phase seems strong, given how low funded this phase is and how wide the gap remains. And though we introduced an early years pupil premium during the later stages of the coalition, it is arguably far too small to make a difference.
I’m proud of the pupil premium and welcome its long-term survival. But it is now time to review its scale and design, and to equip our schools, colleges and early years providers with the funding they need to return to the national mission of closing the gap, after six years in which progress has first stalled and more recently been reversed.
David Laws is executive chairman of the Education Policy Institute. He was schools minister from 2012 to 2015
