How useful is household income as a factor in explaining attainment at school in England? Assessing the Parent Pupil Matched Data (PPMD)

This is a report on the first use of the Pupil Parent Matched Dataset (PPMD) linking household income to the National Pupil Database. Having access to this is very valuable for research, and this report only makes a start in looking at what is possible. The report shows that none of the versions of income available in PPMD (benefits, earned, total and equivalised) is yet completely suitable for substantive analysis. In the linked files, pupils are missing, often in large numbers where adults’ income are not linked, or family structures or second adult incomes are not known. An improved PMMD would be very helpful. It would make the substantive and comparative analyses in this report even clearer and safer. The various versions of income in PPMD are compared, and described in terms of available pupil characteristics. Earned income is deemed the most appropriate to use when considering low incomes and those on benefits. Once benefits, and other forms of unearned income, are added to the total household income, it is less clear who is on low or zero income before benefits (the target of the Pupil Premium policy). Free school meal eligibility is a better predictor of attainment than raw income is, perhaps because the FSM records are more complete. This may also be due to limitations of the income data (see below). However, there is a strong linear (and visual) relationship between income, represented in 20 equal bands, and attainment at school (Key Stages 2 and 4). Thus, income bands appear to be the strongest single predictor of attainment. Using a time series approach it is shown that, with these data, low income pupils have become less clustered in schools since the introduction of Pupil Premium funding in 2011. At KS4, low income pupils have also improved their attainment relative to high income pupils. Both of these outcomes might be the result of Pupil Premium policy, but re probably a little too early. At KS2, low income pupils improved their attainment, but not so clearly relative to high income pupils. To a great extent, the substantive results confirm our earlier analyses based on pupils with long-term disadvantage (but with clear differences between Key Stages). It would be interesting to run these kinds of analysis again if a completer and more accurate version of PPMD could be developed. There is also further work to be done on variations by region and school type, and also further development of the number and type of income bands. Given pupils’ long-term FSM status it would be useful to compare income with indicators of permanent disadvantage.