The Department for Education introduced pupil premium in April 2011 as funding that helps schools support their disadvantaged pupils to close the achievement gap between them and their peers. The Pupil Premium is allocated to schools with pupils on roll that have been eligible for free school meals at any time in the last six years and children who have been looked after by the local authority continuously for more than six months.

While anticipating the release of new data on the performance of disadvantaged pupils, we have examined the gap in the achievement of 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics between all pupils and disadvantaged pupils from the 2011/12 academic year. You can see the infographic here. The average gap in the achievement of 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics between all pupils and disadvantaged pupils is nearly 24 percentage points in England, but it varies greatly across the regions.

The smallest gap in achievement between the two groups, 15%, is seen in London. At the same time, the highest percentage of all pupils and of disadvantaged pupils achieving 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics is in London; 62.3% of all pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 achieve 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics and 47.5% of disadvantaged pupils do so. London schools have been praised for successfully closing the gap in the past decade, and this is often attributed to the London Challenge project that started in 2003 and ran for several years.

Aside from London, the other regions have similar levels of performance in terms of the gap between the groups. The gap is relatively small, close to 22%, in the West Midlands where 59% of all pupils achieved 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics and 37% of disadvantaged pupils did so. In the other regions, the achievement gap ranges between 26% and 28%. The largest gap is in the South East, where 60% of non-disadvantaged pupils achieve 5+ A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics, but only 28.4% of the disadvantaged pupils achieve this threshold, which is the lowest of any region, giving a 32% gap.

The Pupil Premium was allocated for the first time in the 2011/12 academic year, and the amount of funding has increased since then. In the coming few academic years we will start to see what effect the pupil premium funding has had, as the 2011/12 figures relate to students who would have only had one year of support from this funding.

Consequently, we would expect to see the gap close further in the 2012/13 academic year results. The figures for the performance of disadvantaged pupils in the 2012/13 academic year are due to be published within the next two months, and you can look forward to another of our Big Numbers series devoted to this topic. We will analyse the change in the GCSE achievement gap between the 2011/12 and 2012/13 academic years in the first months of next year.    

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