A report out today calls for a 16-19 student premium to tackle the sizeable attainment gap facing disadvantaged 16–19-year-olds.
Following recent research which has shown disadvantaged students are 3.2 grades behind their peers by the time they finished 16-19 education.
The gap is wider still for disadvantaged students in long-term poverty at almost four grades, and the harmful effects of disadvantage continue to affect students’ longer-term outcomes on entry to the labour market. Disadvantaged young people earn around 10 per cent less by age 28 than young people from non-disadvantaged backgrounds, even when holding constant their educational attainment both pre- and post-16
the report makes recommendations to the new government about how a new student premium might work, who would be eligible and the likely costs.
The report recommends that the student premium should be based on student-level and area-level measures of disadvantage.
This would be additional to existing 16-19 funding and would be a fixed, per-student amount received by institutions.
Setting the student premium at an initial rate to match the secondary school pupil premium, the policy would cost around £340 million annually and support 28 per cent of 16-19 year old students.
