Expenditure and attainment at primary school

This report by the LSE for the DCSF examined whether the dramatic increase in school expenditure in the last 10 years has led to increased pupil outcomes at primary school.

Context:
In much of the academic literature, it has proved difficult to find any positive relationship between school resources and academic outcomes, mainly because of the funding mechanism that exists for schools in England. Local authority grants for education are determined as a basic per pupil amount plus supplements for measures of social deprivation and additional educational needs. Local authorities in turn allocate funding to schools by a formula, which is largely driven by the number of pupils but also gives additional funding for pupils from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or with special educational needs. Pupils with these characteristics achieve, on average, lower results and hence the funding mechanism may introduce a negative correlation between resources and pupils’ performance; schools with more resources perform worse on average.

Key points:
- An increase of £1,000 in average expenditure per pupil (roughly an additional third of current expenditure) implies an average improvement in attainment corresponding to 4.3, 3.5 and 1.9 percent of a level in these subjects (key stage 2 levels).
- It seems to be easier to translate expenditure increases into improvement in Key Stage 2 attainment for English in more disadvantaged schools (compared to less advantaged schools), whereas the opposite is true for Science. For Maths, the effect of expenditure is higher in more advantaged schools, but the differential between school types is not as high as for the other subjects.
- Pupils eligible to receive Free School Meals do seem to benefit more on average from increases in expenditure in terms of attainment in English and Maths. There is less of a differential for Science.
- There is a stronger effect of expenditure on higher ability pupils (on the basis of their Key Stage 1 assessment) across all subjects.
- It would appear that spending on staff (teachers, support staff and other staff) are driving the overall effect. Learning resources are also potentially important for raising attainment in English and Science.
- We conclude that the increases in expenditure probably have been cost effective. To evaluate this fully, future work should investigate whether the effects of increasing expenditure in primary school persist and are evident for pupils when they undertake assessments in secondary school.