Yorkshire schools in line for £50m pupil premium payouts

SCHOOLS in Yorkshire will receive more than £50m to help educate children from the poorest backgrounds through the new pupil premium next year, according to official figures.

Payments of £430 per child will be made to schools for every pupil they have who qualifies for free school meals or who has been in care. Schools will also get £200 for every child who has a parent in the armed forces.

The pupil premium was a manifesto pledge of both coalition parties before the election, the Liberal Democrats promising an extra £2.5bn for the fund to help support schools that teach pupils from the most deprived backgrounds.

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Figures released yesterday show 133,570 pupils across the region qualify for support through the new premium and schools in Yorkshire are set to receive £56m in 2011-12.

This includes 125,910 pupils on free school meals and 3,350 armed forces children.

Although this is a new funding system, there remains a question mark over whether it is actually extra money for schools.

The pupil premium is coming from the main revenue funding budget for schools, and education chiefs in the region have already warned that some primaries and secondaries will actually be worse off as a result of cuts elsewhere.

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Calculations by the Yorkshire Post revealed last month that the pupil premium would result in more than £50m being paid into schools in the region. This is set to increase year on year until 2014-15 as the overall national budget for the pupil premium rises from £625m in 2011-12 to £2.5bn in four years’ time.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said the funding was aimed at ensuring schools were “engines of social mobility”.

He said that in one school year group just 45 of the 80,000 pupils who received free school meals across the country had made it to Oxford or Cambridge.

He added: “This is not good enough and addressing this disparity is a top priority of the coalition Government.

“It is for this reason that we are implementing a pupil premium, to ensure that extra funding is targeted at those deprived pupils that most need it.”