What we learned about Pupil Premium at the Inside Government conference

At the end of January, we attended the Inside Government conference, ‘Pupil Premium: Ensuring the Best Educational Outcomes in Secondary Schools’, to see what we could learn about Pupil Premium strategy from the experts.

We heard keynote speeches from Sonia Blandford, Founder and Chief Executive of Achievement for All, and Thomas Martell from the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), as well as a talk on ‘Establishing a Comprehensive Pupil Premium Strategy’ from the Deputy Director of the National Education Trust, Marc Rowland.

On top of that, we also heard from a collection of Pupil Premium Award winning schools presenting case studies of what has worked in their settings, but more importantly, how and why it worked for their particular setting.

Can grammar schools really improve social mobility?

Image credit: Pixabay

Within hours of its publication on 12 September 2016, the DfE’s consultation document ‘Schools that work for everyone’ was at the centre of a political storm regarding its aims to “relax the restrictions on selective education”.

The opening sentence of the Green Paper sets out “the government’s ambition to create an education system that extends opportunity to everyone, not just the privileged few”. Can the grammar school renaissance really improve social mobility for all?