Recommendation 3

Disadvantage is a gradient, not an ‘either-or’ of FSM-eligible or ‘advantaged’. To support disadvantaged White pupils the Government must refine its key measures of disadvantage and widen public access to its statistics. This should be done in a way that protects pupil anonymity as a priority, for example by redacting figures where they reflect very small groups of pupils. Particularly importantly, the Department must consistently publish statistics that are as locally targeted as possible, at least at local authority or constituency level. These statistics must underpin the targeting of all interventions to those communities that most need them. In the short term, the Department should learn from the former Children’s Commissioner’s approach to capturing disadvantage by including statistics on the length of time children are FSM- eligible, and how other forms of disadvantage (for example, SEND, care experience, and local levels of deprivation) interact with this status. In the long term, the Department should work with other parts of Government to build a more sophisticated measure of how poverty affects children. This could draw on initial work by the Social Metrics Commission to develop a metric of poverty that provides a better understanding of the nature of poverty by drawing on lived experience and identifying those least able to make ends meet.