Hansard

We are delighted that the Liberals have chosen this topic for debate, because it is incumbent on all of us, ahead of the election, to set out our manifesto stalls with regard to addressing the attainment gap. All parties in the chamber agree very much on the need for additional funding, but clearly there are sharp differences about its allocation.

The pupil premium is part of that debate. I know that the Liberals like to claim credit for the measure, but I have to correct them on that; it is actually a long-time Conservative pledge, and I have the evidence to prove that right here. The policy has some very specific advantages in doing two things: first, identifying those most in need; and secondly, creating the incentives to ensure that every effort is made to target resources on the pupils in question. I notice that, in response to Willie Rennie just last Friday, the cabinet secretary said that the policy is

“neither costed nor proven to work.”

I want to challenge her on that, given that the facts—or most of them, anyway—prove otherwise.

Before I do so, though, I want to flag up the academic work of Sue Ellis and Jim McCormick, both of whom are, I think, respected as much by the Scottish Government as by the rest of us. That work clearly shows that the majority of deprived children do not live in the most deprived areas, which means that the usefulness of the Scottish index of multiple deprivation is very limited, given that it targets the whole school or, in some cases, the whole local authority by postcode. As Iain Gray and Liam McArthur have made clear, the benefit of the pupil premium is that it follows the individual child—although there is one proviso to that, which I will come to in a minute.

In England, the 2015-16 pupil premium varies from £935 to £1,900 per annum, and that money is paid to pupils who have been eligible for a free school meal in one of the six previous years. The money is paid directly to the school on behalf of each recipient pupil—which amounts to three out of 10 pupils in England and Wales—and it can be spent by the school in a way that best fits the pupils concerned. As for Iain Gray’s comments about not banking the money, I think that there is a way round that.

Recently, there has been a great deal of attention on helping schools to focus individually on the most disadvantaged pupils. Indeed, the reports from the vast majority of headteachers make it very clear that a high proportion of them have clear evidence that the pupil premium is working for the most disadvantaged. Of course, that can be measured, more than anything else, by the outcomes in these schools. The minister will perhaps be interested to read the 2015 Sutton Trust report, which helpfully provides some of the evidence that we need to ensure that the policy can be taken forward.

The cost of pupil premiums in 2014-15 was £2.5 billion, which was 6 per cent of the total schools budget down south, but the important thing is that schools are held absolutely to account—if necessary by the Comptroller and Auditor General—for exactly how they spend the money. There are no edicts from local or central Government. There are no right answers, but there is full autonomy and accountability.

One of the best and most important lessons to be learned from schools in England is that it is entirely up to the schools not to treat disadvantaged pupils as a homogeneous group. There are other advantages, but I will not go into them just now. The Liberals probably would not accept them, because they involve the provision of greater incentives to those who are at the cutting edge of encouraging academies and free schools. That is perhaps more a debate for down south, but it is nonetheless important in principle for up here, particularly at a time when we have more parents—who, incidentally, are wedded to the best values of the state sector—wanting some diversity in the state provision of schooling. That is something that the Scottish Conservatives want.

Both the Labour Party and the Liberals have committed to much higher tax rates in order to fund education. The Scottish Conservatives will not do that. We have based our costings on the Scottish Parliament information centre figures and the Scottish Government figures that were produced at the end of last year, which include the £100 million that has been promised for the attainment fund, and we have related that to the supplementary financial memorandum to the Education (Scotland) Bill that was published last week. In that memorandum, the Scottish Government acknowledges that there are clearly significantly increased costs, so it is presumably in the business of providing that money.

To our minds, the basic amount would be £136 million. I am happy to put on the record how we calculated that.