Years of progressive spending policies targeting schools with the most deprived pupils are being wound back, according to a new report on long-term policy decisions affecting public services.
In 1999, spending per pupil was around 18 per cent higher in the fifth of primary schools with the highest proportion of pupils on free school meals than in the fifth with the lowest share, according to the analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
This rose to 35 per cent higher between 2008 and 2013, as governments prioritised improving attainment in inner-city schools and among deprived pupils.
However, the authors, economists Kate Ogden and David Phillips, say that more recently, “policy has been working in the other direction, undoing some of the previous increases in progressivity”.
In fact, they say, spending per pupil had fallen back to 23 per cent higher in the most deprived schools by 2019.
The authors say this was partly a result of failing to update funding to account for changes in patterns of deprivation, but also because of the introduction of minimum per-pupil funding levels for schools, which “in effect redistributed funding away from schools with deprived intakes to richer areas”.
The national funding formula, aimed at reducing disparities in funding between schools in different parts of the country, has previously been found to have shifted money away from some schools in disadvantaged areas.
Responding to today’s report, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The IFS has effectively laid bare what has gone wrong with the idea of ‘levelling up’ schools in areas that have suffered from historic underfunding.
“That is obviously the right thing to do but the problem is that the overall level of funding is so woefully inadequate that ‘levelling up’ has actually entailed squeezing funding in other schools. It is an absolutely shameful state of affairs.”
He added: “The priority of any government should be to ensure that all schools have the money they need to deliver the provision needed by their pupils, and it should never be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
The IFS report also sets out how education spending has fallen as a share of national income and “is now similar to what it was in the early 1970s”.
This is “a starkly different pattern to that for health spending, which has more than doubled as a share of national income since 1970”, the authors say.
Recent policies ‘undoing’ progressive trend
Education is the second-largest area of public spending after health, amounting to £91 billion in 2019-20, or £1,356 per person, but the report reveals that the extent to which spending is targeted at schools with the most-deprived pupils has moved up and down over time “as political priorities and narratives changed”.
The authors say that, since the early 1990s, public service spending has become more progressive and its redistributive impact greater.
Even as the coalition government enacted regressive tax and benefit policies in the early 2010s, and cut public service spending overall, the authors say it was making much of that spending more progressive, for example through the introduction of the pupil premium in 2011.
However, this trend has changed in more recent years, the report finds.
It concludes: “Government spending on public services amounts to almost a quarter of national income - over double the amount spent on benefits, tax credits and the state pension - which inevitably means it has big distributional implications.
“Over the last 35 years, this spending has not only grown, it has become significantly more progressive.
“More recently, school funding decisions, reforms to student loans, and a planned expansion of free childcare in England are partially undoing this trend towards greater progressivity - even as total spending on public services grows again, and tax and benefit policy has actually started moving in a somewhat more progressive direction.”
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
