Nick Clegg’s summer school idea is neither new nor costed. In all likelihood it will mean a raid on the pupil premium funding pot
When I heard news that Nick Clegg has borrowed David Blunkett’s 1997 summer school idea to give himself something to say in his conference speech, I wondered where the money was coming from.
After all, the coalition has been busy axing Labour’s agencies and initiatives to disguise its cuts to the general school budget and to pay for the much-vaunted pupil premium. And a principle of the premium has been that it is up to heads, not central or national government, to decide how to spend it.
Now don’t get me wrong. Summer schools are not a bad idea, though their impact in the late nineties was not as strong over time as we hoped. I have also long seen a role for earmarked spending when you want to focus on a particular programme or goal. Blunkett used the Standards Fund both to direct a degree of spending on key programmes and to lever in additional resources. A big weakness in the pupil premium has been its lack of leverage or conditionality. But this has not – until now – been the view of the coalition.
So, the summer schools will take £50m from the £1.25 bn pupil premium pot for next year. They will do it by penalising schools that don’t set up summer schools, which is the same as earmarking the funds.
That may not be a huge amount – £50 from each pupil on free school meals, perhaps – but a principle has been broken. When ministers want something else new to announce, the pupil premium pot can again be raided in the same way, especially as its value increases year-on-year (all paid for by cuts in other school funding).
At the same time, the funding consultation – lauded by Clegg in his recent education speech, where he hailed resurgent local authorities – proposes to continue to allow local authorities a significant say over the distribution of school resources, moving away from a national funding formula.
With an increasing straitjacket also being imposed on the curriculum through measures like the English Baccalaureate, is it any wonder that a growing number of school and academy leaders are wondering whether all the coalition rhetoric about greater freedom for schools is increasingly feeling like so much hot air?
This post first appeared on Conor’s Commentary
There was a superb scheme set up by the Labour government in 1997 called “Playing for Success” This initiative used sporting venues as the hook to re engage children and young people who were perceived to be failing in school. Out of school hours programmes and holiday activities were run by the PfS centres. They were extremely successful and over the years raised attainment in Literacy in Numeracy for thousands of children across the country.
Then in March 2011 the budget was cut by the new government and almost all of the centres closed. The loss to these children was enormous. Now post riots we hear of the need for out of school hours clubs and holiday activities! It takes some believing.