Recommendation 4

The Department relies on schools to spend funding in line with its intended purposes but has limited understanding of whether they do so. The Department’s policy is to allow schools and early years providers flexibility to use funding according to their local context. As such, more than 90% of the estimated £9.2 billion funding associated with disadvantage is not “ringfenced”, meaning schools can choose how they spend it. However, this also means the Department does not have a good understanding of how schools spend funding and therefore how effectively it supports the attainment of disadvantaged pupils. There is a risk that disadvantaged children may not be benefitting, with 47% of school leaders surveyed by Sutton Trust in 2024 using pupil premium to plug wider budget gaps, up from 23% in 2019. The Department does not have a systematic way to understand how pupil premium is spent, with only 80% of schools sampled in 2023 meeting the requirement to publish 2022–23 strategies setting out how they plan to use funding to improve disadvantaged children’s attainment. Also, the Department is not collecting information on whether schools are providing tutoring, now the National Tutoring Programme has ended. recommendation Whilst retaining the principle of local decision–making, the Department should introduce stronger and clearer mechanisms to understand how schools spend funding. This should include: • collecting data on where schools use disadvantaged–focused funding, including for certain interventions such as tutoring; and • reiterating the need for schools to publish up–to–date strategies for how they plan to spend pupil premium and following up non– compliance.