Has Pupil Premium funding improved school outcomes for pupils from low-income households in England?

This paper reports the first substantive use of the Pupil Parent Matched Dataset linking household income for all school pupils in England to the National Pupil Database. There is a strong linear relationship between earned-income bands and attainment at school. Income bands are strong predictors of attainment, preferable perhaps to FSM-eligibility and other indicators of disadvantage in current use. Using a fuzzy discontinuity approach we show that pupils from very low-income households have become less clustered in schools since the introduction of Pupil Premium funding in 2011. Low earned-income pupils have also improved their attainment disproportionately relative to high-income pupils. These results based on earned income confirm our earlier analyses based on pupils with long-term disadvantage. They provide more evidence that outcomes for socioeconomically poor pupils have improved, although it is not clear to what extent the changes can be directly attributed to the in the Pupil Premium policy itself.