Forget the pupil premium - getting rid of selection and balancing intakes is a much better approach
Not much is being said about the pupil premium at the moment. A big part of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, it survived the coalition agreement, but was barely touched on in the Queen's speech and is currently overshadowed by the rush to create thousands of new independent state schools.
It does serve one useful purpose though – cover for the Lib Dem leadership, now having to explain away the shredding of a carefully crafted pre-election pledge that every school would come within the oversight of its local authority.
As long as the detail of the pupil premium remains hazy, Nick Clegg and others will argue that the potential unfairness of a two-tier system of "free" schools and the rest will be mitigated. Once more detail emerges, that argument may be harder to sustain.
No one could disagree with the principle of spending more on the poorest children, but it is not a new idea. We already have a funding system where money follows pupils and is weighted for deprivation. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies paper found that there was a considerable premium already in play for pupils on free school meals, largely funded by specific funding streams introduced by the last government.
But as yet, we have no idea of how much the coalition pupil premium might be. The figure used by the Lib Dems in the election campaign was £2,500 per pupil in addition to existing spending, a hugely expensive plan that would involve cuts in other areas.
The Tory election commitment was vaguer and allied to promises of a complete overhaul of school funding, possibly leading to a single centralised funding formula and no role for local authorities, an entirely different proposition that would create winners and losers at a time when all schools are facing real-terms cuts – a political challenge not to be taken lightly.
Then there is the question of which children would get it and whether it would work. The Lib Dems favour all pupils on free school meals. But when the centre-right Policy Exchange looked at this policy in 2008 it suggested that free school meals were "too crude a measure" to judge deprivation. Children on free school meals are not one homogenous group. Some are in more need of extra funding, others may be in need but not claiming free school meals.
The extent to which extra per-pupil funding translates into better outcomes is also hotly contested. There is no guarantee that schools would spend the money wisely. Moreover, many of the factors influencing a child's life chances lie outside the school gates.
Some estimates suggest the premium would need to be tens of thousands of pounds per pupil to really make a difference, but if that investment comes at the expense of other initiatives to support families and attack child poverty, it could be counter-productive and no better than a forensic assault on the quality of teaching in the most disadvantaged schools.
Finally, would a pupil premium deter "cream skimming", the blight of the English school system, or prevent the "sifting" of disadvantaged pupils that goes on in the American charter schools, where parental contracts ensure they catch the most aspirant families at the expense of the rest?
Advocates of the premium claim it would help to raise standards for poorer children by creating more balanced intakes in all schools, or offering incentives for outside providers to start schools in poor areas, although freedom to make a profit underpins this assertion.
My guess is that substantial sums of money would be needed to overcome the present league table incentives to weed out the most challenging children. Surely a simpler and cheaper way to balance intakes would be to reform the admissions system, starting with the abolition of all selection by ability and aptitude.
One of the curses of the modern fast-moving political/media age is the ease with which superficially seductive ideas get absorbed without proper scrutiny, by legislators as well as the public. The idea of a pupil premium raises big questions that an honourable government should be able to answer before it encourages thousands of schools to opt out, based on incentives in a school funding system that may be obsolete in five years' time.