The Government “sprayed around” more than £700 million a year to raise standards in areas of low achievement, instead of concentrating it on schools in greatest need, said John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

He told the association’s annual conference in Birmingham that the money should be redirected to help children who had fallen furthest behind in their studies. The 300 secondaries in greatest difficulty should be funded at the same level as private schools.

“Resources must be targeted accurately and without waste — not the inchoate mixture of government initiatives that have sprayed funds around in recent years like Dick Cheney on a quail shoot, but targeted on students with the lowest prior attainment, wherever they are at school,” he said.

“This is a direct challenge to central government to look at the £702 million that it currently spends on Excellence in Cities, Leadership Incentive Grant, Fresh Start, the Secondary Performance Project and the Key Stage 3 national strategy, and reallocate it more precisely to reflect low prior attainment in both urban and rural settings.”

Mr Dunford said that there should be a “special focus” on the 300 schools that had “the greatest distance to take their pupils from their attainment on entry to a respectable clutch of qualifications at the age of 16”.

They should have the same funding per pupil as independent schools so that they could hire more and better teachers, and reduce class sizes from an average of 17 to 10 students. Initiatives such as Excellence in Cities, which aims to boost urban achievement, had spread money across whole areas such as Birmingham or Manchester instead of responding to the needs of individual schools.

“Because the area covered by any one Excellence in Cities grant is drawn so widely there are inevitably some schools in that area that need additional funding a lot less than others,” Mr Dunford said. There are some high-performing schools in Excellence in Cities areas that would be the first to admit that they are not as much in need of additional funding as other schools.

“The Leadership Incentive Grant is another example. I recall a head coming to me quite embarrassed that they were going to get this extra £115,000 a year in their school because they happened to be in an area where there were other schools in difficulty. We ought to look at whether we are spending this money as efficiently as we could and whether we ought to target this money better on schools of maximum disadvantage.”

Reform was particularly important because the Government’s next Comprehensive Spending Review in 2008 was unlikely to be as generous to education as the previous two. Redistribution of funding would have to take place over time to prevent some schools falling into difficulties.

Heads at the conference said that government rules on grants often took little account of individual circumstances. For instance, schools with 20 per cent or more pupils eligible for free school meals, a measure of poverty, received an extra £120,000 a year. But those just below this threshold got nothing, while schools with far more pupils on free meals received no extra money to reflect the increased challenges they faced.

Mr Dunford also demanded radical cuts in the amount of examining in schools.

Spending on exams had risen to £600 million annually, he said, adding: “Our bloated examination system is a waste of scarce national resources, teachers’ time and students’ opportunities.”

Many public exams could be replaced by assessments within schools carried out by specially trained teachers whose judgments would be checked by external monitors. League tables should also be reformed to show results for schools that worked together rather than for individual secondaries competing with each other.

WHERE THE MONEY GOES

Government grants paid to secondary schools:

Excellence in Cities;
Leadership Incentive Grant;
Fresh Start;
School Standards Grant;
Targeted Improvement Grant;
Secondary Strategy School Targeted Support;
Key Stage 3 National Strategy: Behaviour Improvement Partnerships;
Ethnic Minority Achievement;
Extended Schools;
School Improvement Partners;
Music Services;
Playing for Success; School Meals Grant;
Education Health Partnerships

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