Pupil premiums in education will perpetuate educational failures

Policy Exchange is all the rage in Westminster at the moment, "for mainlining eye catching new policies to the Conservative shadow cabinet", apparently. One of their latest proposals is the pupil premium where schools are rewarded with extra funding if they take pupils from poor backgrounds. This fits the current social narrative where the imperative of every government - that wishes to bask in the approving sunshine of the leftist-establishment - is to cancel out the advantages of a prosperous, stable and responsible home-life in the pursuit of equality. And allocating a disproportionate amount of money to those perceived as disadvantaged is the way to do it, apparently.

Of course, there are many pupils that have a poorer - culturally as well as financially - upbringing and so are less likely to do well at school. Indeed, how is a child meant to do homework properly if their home is a war zone of bile, profanity and neglect. But, the logic that takes this to mean that more money will solve their problems misses the point; more money at school will not affect their home life. The problem is that leftists see every social ailment as one of money. Give anyone more money and everything will be OK. No room for ethos, culture or morality.

One of the reasons for this premium is apparently to give schools an incentive to attract children from poorer backgrounds and thus prevent middle class enclaves and lower class ghettoes from developing. This makes perfect sense if you view the world through a prism of leftist thinking, but what it actually does is distort the way schools and parents interact to provide education for children. Ultimately it prevents the party with the greatest vested interest in good schools - parents - from influencing the education system for the better, thus making it harder for all schools to improve.

As harsh as this may sound, the real effect of this policy is to reward failure and penalise success. If we take failure to mean poverty and social neglect, and success to mean prosperity and social responsibility, then we have the opposite system we should be seeking.

Critics will undoubtedly denounce this viewpoint as anathema to civilised society , but the reality is that this view, in a Darwinian sense, promotes and strengthens that civilised society. If schools are penalised for educating pupils from wealthy households, these households learn a salutary lesson in the futility of responsibility and success - or the more likely lesson is that if they want their children educated well, they need to go private. Conversely, the lesson poorer households learn is that it does not matter what they do because the state will always compensate them.

The pupil premium is a false prophet in the pursuit of educational improvement. In the long run it will make all schools worse. The solution is to allow schools and parents to determine where children are taught in a constructively competitive environment where funding is solely determined by the number of pupils they teach, irrespective of how poor their home life is. To perpetuate the politicisation of education by leftist social ideologues is simply to perpetuate the failings already present in the state education system.