Does ‘the gap’ matter to children eligible for free school meals?

via CMPO Viewpoint (A Blog from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation) by Rebecca Allen (first published on the IOE blog)

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Minister for Schools, has been making a series of speeches over the past month about "closing the gap" in the attainment between pupils from deprived and more affluent backgrounds. Yesterday, he warned that schools should not be judged as outstanding by Ofsted if they failed to close the gap, a goal that sounds fair and even laudable in principle, but I believe is rather unfair in practice.

The "gap" is the difference in GCSE achievement between the average for pupils who are eligible for free school meals and the average for those who are not. Pupils eligible for free school meals have similar characteristics across schools since they all come from families claiming some sort of benefit. The problem is that the background of pupils who are not eligible for free school meals (FSM) will vary considerably across schools, since the group includes both those with bankers and with cleaners as parents.

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Who is eligible for free school meals? Characterising free school meals as a measure of disadvantage in England

an article by Stephen Gorard (University of Birmingham, UK) published in British Educational Research Journal Volume 38 Issue 6 (December 2012)

Abstract

This paper presents a description of the background characteristics and attainment profile of pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) in England, and of those missing a value for this variable.

Free school meal eligibility is a measure of low parental income, widely used in social policy research as an individual indicator of potential disadvantage. It is routinely treated as context for judging both individual and school-level attainment, as an indicator of school composition, and has been proposed as the basis for the pupil premium funding policy for schools.

Knowledge of the quality, reach and limitations of FSM as an indicator is therefore fundamental to accurate decision-making in a number of important areas. This paper uses a national dataset of all pupils (PLASC) for 2007. It looks at the relationship between different indicators of pupil background and attainment to help decide how useful FSM remains in relation to its suggested alternatives, and how to handle the crucial question of missing data and to describe more fully than previously the national picture of who is eligible for free school meals.

The results show that, while the distinction between take-up and eligibility has been eroded, FSM remains a useful and clear stratifying variable for pupil attainment patterns in school, linked to type of school attended, school mobility, living in care, special needs, first language and minority ethnic group. The pupils missing FSM values fall into two groups, based largely on their type of school and how long they have been there.

One group attends fee-paying schools and is most similar to non-FSM pupils elsewhere and could be aggregated with them in future analyses that do not want to omit them.

The remaining missing FSM pupils form a deprived and perhaps super-deprived group. These should not be omitted, nor assumed to be like non-FSM pupils, as currently happens in official school performance figures in England in a way that disadvantages schools with very deprived intakes.

The proposal here is that missing FSM pupils in state-funded institutions should be treated in future as a third distinct group. If these issues about missing data are resolved, and other limitations accepted, FSM remains a better indicator of low socioeconomic status than the current alternatives discussed in the paper.

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Pupils not claiming free school meals

a research report (DFE-RR235) by Samaira Iniesta-Martinez and Helen Evans for the Department for Education published November 2012

The aim of this paper is to present estimates of the numbers and proportions of pupils who are entitled to receive free school meals (FSM) but are not currently claiming.

Key findings

• Benefits data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) suggests that around 1.4 million (21%) of children aged 4-15 in England are entitled to receive FSM.
• School Census data shows that around 1.2 million (18%) of 4-15 year old pupils in maintained schools are registered to claim FSM.
• Therefore around 200,000 pupils (3% of all pupils aged 4-15) appear to be entitled but are not claiming FSM.
• This means 14% of pupils entitled to FSM are not claiming them.
• In the South East and East of England nearly one quarter of entitled pupils are not claiming FSM, which contrasts sharply with the North East where the equivalent figure is 2%.
• At local authority (LA) level under-registration rates range between 0% and 33%. LAs with the highest under-registration rates are Buckinghamshire and Richmond (both 33%), and Suffolk and Surrey (32%).
• The proportion of pupils entitled to FSM decreases with age: 24% of 5-year-olds are entitled compared to 18% of 15-year-olds.
• Of those pupils entitled to FSM, the proportion not claiming FSM is the same for both primary school and secondary school aged pupils.
• Analysis using survey data suggests that pupils with the following characteristics, which are not directly linked to the FSM criteria, have lower likelihoods of claiming FSM. This is after other characteristics have been taken into account:
• pupils living in a less deprived area;
• pupils attending schools with a lower school FSM rate;
• pupils from families with higher status occupations (i.e. professional rather than routine occupations);
• pupils living in a family with higher parental qualifications; and
• pupils of Chinese ethnic origin.
• There is some evidence to suggest that families entitled to FSM while in some part-time work are less likely to claim FSM than those on out-of-work benefits.

Full text (PDF 30pp)

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