In 2014 Nick Clegg told The Telegraph: “The evidence is clear – free school meals will not only save families hundreds of pounds a year but will also have a dramatic impact on how a child performs works in the classroom so that, regardless of their background, every child can have the best possible start in life.”
His “dramatic impact” line was a favourite and often repeated one.
So with a cost of getting on a billion pounds and the big build up how dramatic would the impact of Mr cleggs Universal infant free school meals policy be?
The 2015 key stage one SATs results have just been published and whilst it’s only a year into the policy, any “dramatic impact” should be visible.
Only there isn’t any significant change to attainment.
Whilst the maths and writing results have risen by a single percentage point, reading stayed the same.
There is nothing statistically significant here, it is in keeping with the trend and certainly can’t in any way be described as “dramatic”, never mind £13000 per class “dramatic”
In reality there doesn’t appear to have been any impact, the results are fairly flat and actually don’t prove anything one way or another.
What all this does show is how hard it is to disetangle the specific influence of any one policy on an incredibly complex education system. It is for this very reason the authors of the pilot report, used by Clegg to justify the uifsm, never made any such claims, they understood that many of the interventions that ran alongside the pilot might well have been influential to the output.
The authors didn’t ascribe causation because they knew better.
Mr Clegg however didn’t seem to mind conflating the pilot with his policy and was more than happy to tell anyone who would listen how the policy would result in improvements in attainment.
The reality is now laid out for everyone to see, we have actual data ttelling us little about benefits derived from uifsm, but massive amounts about the people who continue to claim clear or dramatic improvements in attainment are at best over egging, at worst deliberately deceiving people.
“Where’s the beef?” As Walter Mondale once said. Next time someone claims uifsm impacts on attainment, ask for the evidence it does, but be prepared to wait.
Incedentaly the format of ks1 data will change next year so we won’t ever get any more comparable data to show if uifsm has any impact on attainment or not.