Schools are set to gain £120 million to help disadvantaged pupils - but teachers and heads are being told that they have a professional obligation to consult research evidence before spending the money.

The government’s pupil equity scheme - which gives schools around £1,200 in 2017-18 for every child claiming free meals - will make more than 2,300 schools up to £354,000 a year better off (see graphic, below).

However, according to one of the UK’s top experts on improving the attainment of disadvantaged children, money on its own rarely makes a difference.

That is the view of Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, which has aimed to influence how schools south of the border spend their pupil premium - the English equivalent of the pupil equity fund - since it was launched in 2011.

The evidence about what works in closing the attainment gap has been “locked away in secret gardens”, says Sir Kevan (pictured, below). Such findings have been known about in universities but, to a large extent, this valuable information has not filtered through to schools and classrooms.

The EEF has attempted to tackle this by creating a “teaching and learning toolkit” that summarises international evidence, telling schools about the effects of different interventions - from increasing homework to parental involvement.

Toolkit for the job

The toolkit is based on 10,000 research studies and is constantly updated. It tells teachers how many extra months of learning that different approaches might lead to, how costly they are and how secure the evidence is. It is also free and launched in Scotland this week. Sir Kevan says: “We are filtering the evidence to see the extent to which it is of relevance to Scotland, and where we find studies done in Scotland, we will be bringing them to life.”

The Clackmannanshire synthetic phonics programme (see “How good evidence can help shape educational outcomes” box, below) had a huge impact on teaching across Britain and the world, he notes. So the Scottish version of the toolkit will not just be about access to other people’s evidence, but reminding teachers of the educational research that has been done here.

However, there has been no move by the Scottish government to fund the new educational research that makes up such a big part of what the EEF does south of the border.

The EEF received a founding grant of £125m from the Department for Education in England and has so far spent more than £75m supporting 127 programmes. It has also published 60 reports and looked at the evidence on marking and the impact of breakfast clubs, Saturday schools, online reading support and using texting to engage parents.

Trials currently underway in England could be extended to Scotland, so that researchers could draw specific conclusions about what works in our schools and the EEF could fund our universities to take forward innovative ideas. Of course, if the government wants that, it will have to pay for it, says Sir Kevan.

‘What seem like quick wins turn out not to deliver what you thought’

He continues: “The case [to do that] will become overwhelming because, as soon as you give money to schools, they will start doing really interesting things and that will need to be verified before saying to other schools, ‘Pick it up and run with it’.

“There’s an obligation on all of us to be sure we are doing no harm and to make sure, if things work, that we have the capacity and design to allow other schools to adopt [them].”

Gerry Lyons is the head of the school set to benefit the most from the pupil equity fund. Come April, St Andrew’s Secondary in Glasgow - which has a roll of 1,750 with approximately 30 per cent of pupils on free school meals - will be £354,000 better off. It is a significant amount of money, says Lyons; the school budget, with employee costs taken out, is usually about £100,000 a year.

But heads want evidence about what works, he says: “Whenever I come across something like this, there is a combination of excitement about the opportunity, but also apprehension about making sure it’s spent well and that we make things better - and they stay better.

“We want to be going forward with activity and approaches that the evidence base says works. To me, that’s crucial, so that we are not just having random thoughts about ‘let’s have a go at this or that’. In the 21st century, we want to be better than that - it is important this is not a big bang and then a fading away.”

Finding value for money

St Andrew’s Secondary, situated in the east of the city, already has an impressive attainment record. Lyons joined in 2011 when 21 per cent of pupils went on to higher education; this year, the figure was 45 per cent.

Back in 2011, a third of pupils left school with one or more Highers; today, 61 per cent achieve at least one Higher.

“On all the big measures, we have improved every year for the past five years without additional funding,” says Lyons.

The tough economic climate has made schools cannier, he continues: “One thing the budget restraints have done is to make headteachers more focused on value for money and being efficient in our use of it. I will be holding on to that attitude.”

Investing in staff development will be a big focus for St Andrew’s, Lyons predicts, but he stresses that he will be carrying out a thorough analysis of the school before he parts with a penny.

A lot of fallacies exist about what works, Sir Kevan warns. When the pupil premium was introduced in England, there was a move towards using the money to employ more teaching assistants, he says, but having more adults in the classroom can mean the time that disadvantaged pupils have with their well-trained teachers is diluted.

He continues: “The evidence is very, very clear: unless you train, deploy and support these people with great care, they will make very little difference.”

The same goes for introducing Saturday schools or summer schools or cutting class sizes or investing in iPads. They are intuitively appealing ideas but the evidence is patchy, Sir Kevan adds. He says: “There are a lot of fallacies - what seem like quick wins - but they turn out not to deliver what you thought.”

The EEF has identified 10 priority issues for schools: pupils’ character; parental engagement; developing independent learning; pupil engagement and behaviour; feedback and monitoring pupil progress; school organisation; literacy; science; numeracy; and staff deployment and development.

Of these, Sir Kevan chooses to home in on the quality of teaching and learning, which is crucial, he says: “It’s the quality of the teaching that is the real question - how do you help the teacher develop, improve and enhance their teaching?”

But what does all of this mean for the 113 Scottish schools that received nothing through the pupil equity fund, or for those that received very little?

Sir Kevan points out that England spends £2.5 billion on the pupil premium, but a total of £37bn is invested in education. In Scotland, the pupil equity fund is worth £120 million but overall we spend about £5bn a year on education.

It is not the pupil equity fund that is most important, but the whole education budget, he says: “It’s how you spend all of it that really matters.”

@Emma_Seith

For more information on the EEF’s work in schools, visit their website at educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk