The introduction and nationwide implementation of the Pupil Premium policy in 2011 was a major policy initiative by the then Coalition Government to address socio-economic segregation between schools in England, and reduce the persistent attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Over the past fifteen years, the policy has undergone some modifications to maintain its suitability for addressing educational disadvantage. In the presentation, I will provide an overview of the policy, discussing its evolution, challenges, and the limitations of evaluations so far. This work presented will be based on analysis of the Pupil Parent Matched Dataset (PPMD) dataset on household income in England, linked to the National Pupil Database (NPD) including the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC), from 2008 to 2022. The PPMD dataset identifies pupils within the education system from low- or modest-income households who are not already captured by the Department’s existing measures of disadvantage, such as free school meal (FSM) eligibility. Data on children and young people aged 2 to 19 was transferred from the Department for Education (DfE) to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for matching, using personal characteristics sourced from the NPD/PLASC. This is the first time that such a dataset has been made available by the DfE for research, and so the project involved considerable preliminary consideration and cleaning.

Teams link: teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_N2YzZmIwNjQtMTE2Ni00NTJhLWIxN2QtMzMxMjNhZTk5Njk2%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%224003529c-f252-47aa-8e83-ce1eff28df4a%22%7d

Meeting ID: 345 429 387 280
Passcode: ae7Jg6kV