We need positive discrimination in our schools. Unless there’s strong positive discrimination in place, I don’t see how anything is going to change for the better for disadvantaged pupils. 

If you use pupil premium funding the conventional way - you buy in resources, improve the quality of teaching or interventions, reduce class sizes - these all have the byproduct of also helping advantaged children. It doesn’t close the gap, because advantaged children are gaining just as much benefit as those that are disadvantaged. If you put advantaged children in a smaller classroom, they’re going to make more progress than children with a low amount of social and cultural capital. 

How do we help disadvantaged children, if we also help the advantaged ones? Those with advantages are always going to get more out of anything we do than those who are disadvantaged. They’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. 

Positive discrimination for disadvantaged pupils in schools

In our school, we offer after-school tuition just for pupil premium children. If we did it during school hours, they’d miss out on a lesson - it would be at the expense of PE or art or science or whatever. But that’s where that deficit comes from: having to make choices that an affluent family doesn’t have to make. 

While it’s possible to narrow the intellectual gap down - or at least to make sure it’s not widening - very little work is being done to reduce the gap in social and cultural capital. And I think that massively disadvantages children. 

The only thing I can think that works, therefore, is positive discrimination. If you’re not being anti-disadvantage, then you’re being pro-disadvantage. 

I’ve never thought like this before. I don’t know what’s changed me - perhaps a combination of Covid and successful global activism over the past year. 

And yet, if you talk to headteachers, that’s a really unpopular opinion. There’s an idea that every child deserves absolutely equal access to everything - down to sports days not being competitive. 

I do believe that in theory. But, unless disadvantaged children have experiences that the other children don’t receive - whether social, cultural or even residential - then how do they get back what they’ve missed? It’s OK to positively discriminate. 

No one wants to admit not having the same experiences as others

We could start just by giving every primary school a minibus. Our school was given a minibus recently, and we’ve started offering morning pick-ups to all our SEND pupils or pupils with poor attendance - also children who have long-term illnesses, or whose parents have medical or mental health issues. One of my midday supervisors drives around in the morning and picks them up. That’s 15 or 16 children coming to school every day, who might not have done so otherwise. 

We could create a blueprint for art visits, theatre visits and residential visits. Service, volunteering, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Really try to push maximum involvement in those opportunities. 

And then, I thought, we could send certain children on trips. We’ve started taking children to football training with the Savage Foundation at Macclesfield FC in the evening - something they’d not had access to before, but which many affluent children (including my own) take for granted.

We’re also taking 15 children hiking for the day with their teacher: we put 15 pupil premium children in the minibus and took them to the Peak District. What better use of their time and staff time could there be? It gives them an experience that a lot of other children have had already. 

We once took all the junior pupils hiking in the Peak District, and that didn’t work nearly as effectively for the pupil premium children. The pupils whose families go to the Peak District regularly had all the gear, the snacks - everything that goes with that. And those who have been hiking before end up trying to be helpful and nice to those who haven’t - they want to explain things for them. 

But no one wants it pointed out when they don’t know something. You don’t want to admit that you haven’t had the same experiences that other people have had - that you’re at a disadvantage. So the disadvantaged kids will sometimes try and blag it - then they’re put in a difficult situation in front of their classmates.

So, increasingly, I do believe that they need to be positively discriminated for by us. They’ll benefit in ways that will only become apparent later.

Mark Unwin is headteacher of Handforth Grange Primary School, in Cheshire. He tweets as @misterunwin