Pupil Premium

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

It was a pleasure to visit my hon. Friend’s constituency and he was quite right when he wrote to me to highlight the fantastic achievements of this school, which sits in a disadvantaged community and could easily be languishing and struggling, but actually sets incredibly high aspirations, showing that it is possible for schools to deliver. The Government have recently started to publish tables of similar schools, where we look at schools with a similar composition of pupils and look at their performance against other similar schools. That process should encourage schools across the country that are not performing well to look at other schools with a similar intake that are doing a lot better, perhaps visiting them, talking to teachers and finding out what works. This type of school-to-school improvement should be enhanced by the additional measure of information that we are publishing.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I am sure that every Member will welcome the £400 increase in the pupil premium that will benefit primary schools in every single one of our constituencies. With this extra money, however, comes the need for added accountability, as has been mentioned. The Minister says that some schools have closed the gap entirely. When it comes to outcomes for the future, does he view it as the ultimate ambition for every school to have no gap whatever between the achievement of pupils entitled to free school meals and those who are not?

[Mr Laws]

Yes, because the best-performing schools across the country have shown that there is nothing inevitable about those gaps. Many schools have closed the gaps very considerably. The important thing is to make sure that the accountability system is an intelligent one, as it would be possible to close the gap but at a very low level of attainment, while some of the schools that we wrote to this year had high levels of overall attainment but large gaps, so they should have been doing better for their youngsters. Our attention was drawn to schools where there was no gap, but where the attainment of disadvantaged youngsters was not good enough. The accountability will be for the gap, but also for the progress made by disadvantaged youngsters and the level of attainment of disadvantaged youngsters in a school compared with the national average. There will be no hiding place for schools that might otherwise have a small gap but at a very modest level of attainment.