The pupil premium is a good idea. on Next Left we raised two cheers for Nick Clegg’s flagship policy, pending the missing funding details.

The pledge was to protect the schools budget in real terms, and find “additional” money for the premium, with it being made very clear 10 days ago that this was “additional” from outside the DFES budget.

Unfortunately, the pledge that the funding would be “additional” to the DFES budget got lost between a major speech on the Friday before last and Wednesday’s CSR.

Some people are in denial about this and some aren’t. Compare and contrast.

Clegg secures £7 billion pupil premium as addition to schools budget, 16th Oct.
Today Clegg repeatedly described the funds for his fairness premium as “additional” – making clear he wants the money to come mostly from outside the education department rather than merely outside the schools budget by cutting “non-essential” education projects such as youth clubsand after-school activities, as had been suggested.

As Allegra Stratton reported, Clegg cleared this use of additional with Osborne – and with Cameron’s blessing – but it came as news to those further down in the Treasury process. Clegg had insisted that he had to make the speech on the final Friday (before the details were settled) as the last possible “good news” moment before all of the attention turned to the cuts announcement.

Clegg clearly expected Osborne’s clearance for the public commitment to entail a commitment to honour it. Alas, not.

Yesterday the Guardian reported Michael Gove admitting the pupil premium was not new money

“At the moment we’re consulting on how the people premium, which is the additional money, the additional £2.5bn that we’ve made available for the poorest students, will be allocated, and it depends precisely on whether or not we allow the people premium to go to slightly more children, or we target it very narrowly on the very poorest. Depending on that, you can then make a calculation about which schools will find that they’re actually losing funding, and which schools will find that they’re gaining funding.”

He later insisted that though “quite a bit” of the £2.5bn will come from the welfare reforms announced last week: “Some of it comes from within the Department for Education budget, yes.” He insisted that the schools budget safeguarded and that the savings would come from elsewhere in the DfE’s £67.3bn, which also funds children’s services and support for families and older teenagers.

And contrast that with the supremely creative accounting of former LibDem Chief Secretary David Laws. Laws explains how he did it in yesterday’s Guardian – Why I’m proud of the pupil premium

Some people have tried to make mischief by claiming that the pupil premium is not additional money. This is nonsense. Without the pupil premium, I suspect that the budget for schools would have been based on a per pupil cash freeze for the period up to 2015. That would have meant a real cut in schools funding over the next few years. Instead, schools funding will rise by 0.1% (above inflation) each year until 2015 – that is a major achievement when the budgets of some departments are being cut by as much as a third. This is also a real-terms guarantee which the last Labour government was not able to make … It would, however, be a terrible mistake to think that the main purpose of the pupil premium is to protect schools from cuts.

This is ludicrous. Laws claims that the pupil premium is additional money by hypothesising that there would have been a 9% real terms schools budget cut without it (despite the separate pledge to protect the schools budget).

He then claims that the schools budget is pretty much exactly the same (a smidgeon higher) in real terms, in order to support an argument that the purpose of the premium is not to protect schools from cuts, at the same time as arguing that this is precisely what it has done.

Yet Laws’ sleight of hand doesn’t stop there.

Schools funding is down in real terms, overall, since the 0.1% real terms increase applies only to current spending, with schools capital spending down by as much as 60%. And per-pupil funding will certainly fall since the increase in projected pupil numbers is much greater than the “real terms” current spending increase anyway.

Laws writes that he would like the pupil premium to rise to £5 billion a year in the next Parliament. Again, a laudable goal. But his current methods would suggest there is little or no barrier to achieving that overnight, by simply moving the furniture around again, albeit with a very limited impact on disadvantaged students.

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A longer version is at Next Left

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   How the Libdem 'pupil premium' vanished into thin air http://bit.ly/90TAvE

2. John West

   RT @libcon: How the Libdem 'pupil premium' vanished into thin air http://bit.ly/90TAvE

3. Rachael

   RT @libcon: How the Libdem 'pupil premium' vanished into thin air http://bit.ly/90TAvE

4. Warwick Mansell

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5. Ellen Power

   RT @warwickmansell: Informative/passionate blogs on pupil premium: http://bit.ly/aXewvt, http://bit.ly/b2CkaI, http://wp.me/p10nY1-3D, h …

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7. sunny hundal

   @ewanhoyle @DuncanStott not exactly http://bit.ly/90TAvE

8. sunny hundal

   @CllrIainRoberts http://t.co/W7R43pNL