When I think back to beginning my teacher training, I vividly remember being warned about pupil premium students. They were disengaged, low-attaining and lacking in parental support, I was told, so I should expect the worst from them.
And so, when I began to plan my first lessons, I took this into account. I made sure that all pupil premium students had printouts of the homework and banks of key words. I offered them an opportunity to complete homework with me at lunchtime. I made sure that these students sat at the front of the class and that they were always marked on my seating plans. I worked harder to engage them.
But over the years, I learned that I was wrong to tar all these students with the same brush. In the 2020-21 academic year, more than 2 million students were recorded as being eligible for some form of pupil premium funding in the UK. To suggest that every single one of these students is disengaged, low-attaining and lacking in parental support is simply inaccurate.
Damaging assumptions about pupil premium children
So, where do these ideas about pupil premium come from? Pupil premium is defined by Ofsted as: “funding for children from low-income families who were eligible for free school meals, looked-after children and those from families with parents in the Armed Forces”. Within that definition there is no mention of poor behaviour, disengagement or lack of parental support. These are myths that have built up around pupil premium and have somehow caught on. But they are myths that we, as teachers, urgently need to tackle.
It’s an age-old assumption that pupil premium students always come from working-class backgrounds, have single parents, and are the ones most likely to turn their backs on education and become involved with crime.
Yet the reality we see in schools is often so different.
In the past year, over the course of the pandemic, I’ve had amazingly supportive parents contacting me about their children - many of them the parents of students who require pupil premium funding.
And in my first year of teaching, I taught a student from a single-parent family, eligible for pupil premium, whose mother knew all of the exam boards and dates of the exams. She had printouts of the assessment objectives. She kept in contact frequently and gave me a card at the end of the year thanking me for my support. What I should have said to her was that her input into her son’s education was doing more for him than I ever could.
In my experience, some of the most able students we teach are eligible for pupil premium. The only barriers to success they face are financial ones: access to textbooks and three meals a day.
When we make assumptions about students based on their economic background, we are the ones limiting what they can achieve. Our students are individuals and their circumstances vary in such huge ways. It’s time we ditched the damaging pupil premium myths once and for all.
Shabnam Ahmed is head of Year 13 at a secondary school in Suffolk
This article originally appeared in the 11 June 2021 issue under the headline “Let’s ditch the harmful myths about pupil premium”
