Students who don’t get a good English or maths GCSE grade in their first attempt are required to continue to study these subjects in post-16 education. But the proportion of these students who then go on to get a good pass is worryingly low. In 2022, just 15.2 per cent of learners resitting their maths GCSE gained a Grade 4, while just under a quarter (24.1 per cent) did so in English.
There are many factors that contribute to this. Our recent review found that the ability of post-16 settings to recruit, retain and develop a highly skilled workforce was the biggest barrier to making sure that learners receive high-quality teaching. It also highlighted a lack of “well-developed evidence-informed programmes and interventions” to support learners and professional development for those teaching resit classes.
There’s a clear need to focus time and resources on finding on how best to support these learners – and the practitioners and colleges teaching them – at this critical and final stage of compulsory education. Our expanded focus on the post-16 sector will aim to fill some of these evidence gaps, as well as providing direct support to colleges and their staff teaching resit classes.
But funding for post-16 settings is also an issue, with colleges receiving a base rate of £4,753 per learner this year, compared to the £7,690 that secondary schools get for every pupil.
The Basic Maths Premium pilot
To find out how additional funding could best support resit learners, the Department for Education launched the Basic Maths Premium pilot. It aimed to find out whether different approaches to providing settings with additional funding could support the maths outcomes of GCSE resit students. Post-16 settings that signed-up for the project were randomly assigned to one of three different models:
- £500 paid upfront per each eligible student
- £250 paid upfront per each eligible student, and £250 paid per student who achieves a pass in their level 2 maths resit (grade 4 in GCSE or Functional Skills)
- £500 paid per student who achieves a grade 4 in their maths resit
This week, we published an independent evaluation of the project, led by a team from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).
What did they find?
Overall, they found that none of the models led to an improvement in maths resit attainment. While this is disappointing, it’s important to note that the evaluation faced multiple challenges, meaning we shouldn’t make a conclusive judgement about the effectiveness of the three approaches.
What were the challenges?
Crucially, the first two funding models were affected by delays in colleges receiving the guaranteed payments from the Education Funding and Skills Authority, an executive arm of the Department for Education. This made it difficult for the evaluators to judge their impact, as it’s likely that the spending was used to benefit students in later cohorts rather than the group the evaluation focused on. Separately, the evaluation was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption to exams.
There were also challenges in creating a robust comparison group. The nature of the project meant that all eligible institutions were allocated to one of the three funding models. As such, the comparison group was made up of settings not eligible for additional funding, so there were several marked differences in the characteristics of settings in the intervention and comparison groups. This further exacerbated the difficulties the evaluators faced in making an accurate estimation of the impact of the pilot.
What can we learn from this evaluation?
Despite these challenges, the evaluation still gives us some useful learnings that policymakers can draw on when considering how funding can support post-16 resit learners.
1. Additional funding was largely used on staffing costs
The most common use of the additional funding was on increases to teaching and support staff. In follow-up interviews, heads of maths also reported using funding to help reduce class sizes or introduce specialised staff to support resitters in one to one or group settings.
2. Payments need to be timely
Delays in the guaranteed payments form the Education and Skills Funding Agency caused some difficulties for settings, as they were unable to access the additional resource as originally anticipated.
3. Payment by results created uncertainty for settings
The process evaluation found that settings who were allocated to the group that were paid the full £500 for every learner that went on to pass their GCSE maths found it difficult to finance upfront payments to support teaching and learning. This was largely down to uncertainty over how much additional funding they would receive.