Pupil Premium funding has been provided to schools in England since 2011, to help overcome socio-economic segregation between schools, and reduce the poverty attainment gap. Yet there is little evidence such an approach is effective. Some important stakeholders are considering whether Pupil Premium should stop or be re-routed. It is therefore…

This paper is a discussion of the challenges to equity faced by the education and training systems of the 28 EU countries (at time of writing), based on secondary sources and official reports by individual countries. The data are descriptive and simply summarised for this paper. The systems of all countries are fairly similar, modelled on those…

In England, some children have not reached what are considered to be expected levels in literacy and maths by the time they move from primary to secondary school. This is more likely for children living in disadvantaged areas. One proposal to address this is the provision of summer holiday schools for potentially disadvantaged pupils who are…

This article describes the social and economic "segregation" of students between schools in England, and the likely causes of its levels and changes over time. It involves a re-analysis of the intakes to all schools in England 1989-2011, and shows how strongly clustered the students are in particular schools. The pattern for primary-age…