A blog post by Jon Rainford
Jon spent five years at the coalface in education, formerly as a member of support staff in a school for children with special educational needs and latterly as a teacher in a large secondary school specializing in Art and Design. He now works in the field of widening participation to higher education.
As part of their education reforms, the government introduced the Pupil Premium, which is, in their words ‘additional funding given to schools so that they can support their disadvantaged pupils and close the attainment gap between them and their peers’. What I would suggest, however, is that better understanding of how inequality affects young people is the answer to this issue and not funding.