The government must come clean about the Pupil Premium money they have saved, says NAHT

In education questions today the government has again been questioned about a change they have made to pupil premium this year which has meant children have not received funding they would normally be entitled to.*

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “The government is giving with one hand while knowingly taking away with the other. A significant number of children appear to have become eligible for help via pupil premium during the pandemic and these children will now not receive any additional funding for another whole year. The children who are losing out are exactly those children most in need of additional support.

“The government may say ‘no child left behind’, but with this simple ‘administrative tidy-up’ they have found a way to snatch back funding from schools and to further entrench educational disadvantage for the poorest families.

“The government must put this right. They must come clean about what they have saved and they must put that money back into schools budgets immediately.”

* Normally schools report the number of pupils they have who are eligible for pupil premium in January. But for the 20/21 academic year the government changed the date for this census to October. This means that any children who became eligible during the intervening time will not receive any extra funding until next year.

In a recent survey of NAHT’s school leader members, which received 1,316 responses, we asked ‘how many pupils in your school became eligible for pupil premium between the October and January census, and will therefore not receive pupil premium for 2021?’

62% of respondents had 5 or more pupils that had become eligible for pupil premium between the October and January census.