‘You can’t show impact with a new pair of shoes’: negotiating disadvantage through Pupil Premium

Abstract

The Pupil Premium policy was introduced in 2010 by the UK coalition government to tackle the attainment gap disproportionately affecting children from low-income families. Semi-structured interviews and policy documents are examined for the way the policy has been enacted in a single comprehensive secondary school in England. In 2014, this school had a lower population of Pupil Premium pupils (18%) compared to (29%) nationally and (25%) countywide. Despite this, the study provides evidence that the Pupil Premium has become invested within and gives rise to, a number of neoliberal techniques, technologies and practices. The study bridges insights from Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ and Ball et al.’s work on policy enactment to provide an in-depth, grounded analysis of the way the policy plays out within this school’s context. It argues that the combination of national accountability measures used to show impact for Pupil Premium, and the school’s ongoing struggle to raise overall attainment, leads school leaders and staff members to rethink the concept of disadvantage for their school population. This results in disadvantage being reconceptualised to fit a matrix of moral/pastoral obligations and efficiency/economic competitiveness, in which the tensions between these two orientations are uncomfortable and unresolved.

Keywords:

• Pupil Premium
• governmentality
• analytics of government
• disadvantage
• social policy
• enactment theory

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. I also thank Sam Sellar and Andrew Wilkins for commenting on an early draft.

Notes

1. This data was attained from the following Department for Education source which tabulates pupil numbers from the school census (retrieved 24 May 2017): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-conditions-of-grant-2016-to-2017.

2. This guidance page can be found at (retrieved 24 May 2017): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/pupil-premium-information-for-schools-and-alternative-provision-settings#history.

3. The Department for Education explained this measure as ‘an attempt to quantify how well a school does with its pupil population compared to pupils with similar characteristics nationally’ (DfE 2010, 68). In compiling league tables in relation to pupil progress, such a measure took into account things such as gender, eligibility for free school meals, first language, ethnicity and the level of deprivation in the area where a pupil lives. In 2010 the Coalition government scrapped the measure and the most current indicator at the time of writing is Progress 8 which looks at attainment scores and progress across a number of different school subjects.