While previous and current standards for the achievement of Qualified Teacher Status in England have required teachers to know and understand how particular characteristics or circumstances may create barriers to learning, initial teacher education (ITE) programmes have not always included a strong and explicit focus on issues of social justice. The introduction of the Pupil Premium Grant (specific funding for schools intended to support the education of students in receipt of free school meals) and associated accountability measures, requiring schools to audit and evaluate the impact of their spending, has provided both a new stimulus and new opportunities to ensure that trainee teachers understand the nature and impact of poverty on young people and are equipped to work effectively in overcoming the barriers to academic achievement that it may present. This impetus has coincided with a profound and rapidly accelerating transfer of responsibility for the training of new teachers from university-school partnerships to school-led (and often entirely school-based) forms of provision, which makes it particularly important to understand more about how those in school who will assume these responsibilities, both understand the experiences and educational challenges faced by children living in poverty and equip trainees to respond effectively to them. This paper, examining the operation and impact of an extensive school-based investigative task focused on the use of the Pupil Premium Grant (currently used within a well-established ITE partnership) therefore focuses, first, on the perspectives of the school-based teacher educators ̶ analysing how they conceive of the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes and how they encourage beginning teachers to engage with and respond to the specific challenges that it presents in their school context ̶ and, second, on the experiences and developing understanding and attitudes of the trainee teachers as they engage in and report on the task.

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