Government to keep pupil premium eligibility under review

The government has said it will keep eligibility for the pupil premium under review.

Schools can currently get extra money if they have a large number of disadvantaged pupils, including:

• children who are eligible for free school meals or who have been eligible in the past six years
• pupils who’ve been adopted from care or have left care
• children who are looked after by the local authority

How much funding schools get depend on how many disadvantaged pupils they have.

The portion of funding for looked after children and previously looked after children is often referred to as “pupil premium plus”, as they get a higher rate of funding.

Labour MP Matt Bishop has now asked if the government would consider extending pupil premium plus to further groups, in particular:

• children who haven’t been in local authority care
• children in kinship care - those who live with friends and family if their parents can’t care for them

Education minister Catherine McKinnell didn’t rule out the idea and confirmed that eligibility criteria are being kept under review “to ensure that support is targeted at those who most need it”.

Schools have freedom to decide how funding is used

However, she stressed that pupil premium is not “a personal budget for individual pupils and schools do not have to spend this funding so that it solely benefits pupils who meet the funding criteria”. 

“Schools can direct spending where the need is greatest, including to pupils with other identified needs, such as children in kinship care,” Ms McKinnell said. 

“Schools can also use pupil premium on whole class approaches that will benefit all pupils such as, for example, on high-quality teaching.”

Ms McKinnell added that the Department for Education is providing over £2.9 billion of pupil premium funding in 2024/25, which she said would “improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged pupils in England”.

The government has also set up a child poverty taskforce to support the delivery of an ambitious cross-government strategy to tackle child poverty.

According to government figures, child poverty has gone up by 700,000 since 2010, with over 4m children now growing up in a low-income family.

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