Sam Ellis has been worrying about even-handedness in school since he was a lad. Instead of concerns about being kept behind in class, he’s now anxious about education funding being reasonable and just or, at least, fairer than it was.

A question of balance

I remember walking in the house complaining loudly that it wasn’t fair that the whole class had been kept in detention for an hour because one kid had been late changing in PE. It was tough as a schoolkid in the 50s and 60s; I don’t think that it is much different now except that it is tougher for the teachers.

My mother’s response to my complaint about unfair treatment was classic Mancunian: “Nobody said it had to be fair,” which loosely translated as, “Shut up and get on with your homework.”

I still worry about fairness. The proposed revision of national funding distribution, the actual revision of local funding distribution that started in 2013 and the simplification of post-16 funding from what one minister felt was ‘Byzantine’ – even though it was arguably the fairest formula we had at the time – is all in the great name of fairness.

Just because it is being branded, hailed and defined as fair does not mean that the output will necessarily be so. Process, however well-intentioned, does not guarantee product.

You can see every day in schools that some colleagues work incredibly hard to, sadly, little effect, either through no fault of their own because of the events that conspire against them or simply because they are pointing in the wrong direction.

I used to see my job as getting colleagues heading in the direction most needed by the school and to limit or remove as many of the things that got in the way of that as I could. Sometimes it was a matter of people and resource management and timetabling in the widest sense; sometimes it was just about removing Shane and some of the mindbenders.

What interests me at the moment, notwithstanding any input, process or level of work involved by the Education Funding Agency (EFA), Department for Education (DfE) or local authority (LA), is the fairness of the result.

Different level of challenge

I am working on the assumption that if a school in one part of the country, broadly similar to a school in another part of the country, gets a different level of funding from the other school then that is because the school faces a different level of challenge in order to meet the same final standard – that presumably is Ofsted grade 1 or 100 per cent of whatever combination of exam qualifications is flavour of the month.

The degree of congruence between those output measures and the education of pupils in terms of their life chances is a whole other discussion that also concerns me, but that is for another time.

If we assume that there is some measure of the additional challenge for which it could be said it is fair for a school to receive additional funding, the questions that follow are: ‘What elements constitute that challenge?’ and ‘How can they be used to assess the fairness of the funding distribution?’

At the moment I am playing around with data on deprivation, sparsity (how far apart schools are) and English as an additional language (EAL). The problem is that like those days spent trying to teach maths to Shane and the mindbenders, I know I am working hard on this but to little effect.

For one thing, most of the analysis you see relies heavily on linear regression. I suppose that is because it is the simplest assumption, and certainly spreadsheet software makes that type of analysis instantly accessible. But what if there is a relationship out there that is not linear? Or what if there is no meaningful relationship at all and this idea that schools need different levels of funding is a sort of Loch Ness Monster – rumoured but never confirmed as fact?

I heard one member of the ministerial team express a view along those lines in the not-too-distant past. It may in fact be almost true if the general level of funding is high enough but we are far from that situation currently.

I will be discussing these ideas in detail alongside some spreadsheet modelling at the next ASCL Council meeting. If you are interested and have a view please email me at: sam.ellis@ascl.org.uk I hope a fair or, at least, a fairer funding distribution does materialise but I think it will be quite hard to get to, a bit like the Higgs boson. Although at least we know that the Higgs boson exists!

• Sam Ellis is ASCL's Funding Specialist
  

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