School Accounts

What is Pupil Premium?

The Pupil Premium is an addition to the schools budget designed to ensure that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most.

A good education is essential in improving young peoples’ life chances. The Pupil Premium Grant is an allocation of funding, additional to the main funding a school receives, in order to support children who may be vulnerable to underachievement

The government determines that this includes children who:

  • have been in receipt of free school meals (FSM) in the past 6 years
  • are from low-income families
  • are looked after (CLA) or adopted from care
  • are from a defence force background (Services)

Please visit the Local Authority website by clicking here to check if your child is eligible for the funding.

Schools receive the following funding annually:

  • £1,345 for each child registered as eligible for free school meals at any point in the last 6 years
  • £2,345 for each looked-after pupil who:
    • has been looked after for 1 day or more
    • was adopted from care on or after 30 December 2005, or left care under a special guardianship order or a residence order

Our Pupil Premium Strategy is based on the long-term approach to pupil premium planning recommended by the Department of Education (DfE) and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).  Please click here to see our Pupil Premium strategy.

Our Philosophy

We believe in maximising the use of the pupil premium grant (PPG) by utilising a long-term strategy aligned to the School Development Plan. This enables us to implement a blend of short, medium and long-term interventions, and align pupil premium use with wider school improvements and improving readiness to learn.

Overcoming barriers to learning is at the heart of our PPG use. We understand that needs and costs will differ depending on the barriers to learning being addressed. As such, we do not automatically allocate personal budgets per pupil in receipt of the PPG. Instead, we identify the barrier to be addressed and the interventions required, whether in small groups, large groups, the whole school or as individuals, and allocate a budget accordingly.

Our Priorities

 Setting priorities is key to maximising the use of the PPG. Our priorities are as follows:

  • Ensuring an ‘outstanding’ teacher is in every class
  • Closing any attainment or progress gaps between disadvantaged pupils and their peers
  • Providing targeted academic support for pupils who are not making the expected progress
  • Addressing non-academic barriers to attainment such as attendance, behaviour and access to extra-curricular activities
  • Ensuring that the PPG reaches the pupils who need it most

Our Implementation Process

We believe in selecting a small number of priorities, based on need and the small budget we receive, in order to give them the best chance of success. We also believe in evidence-based interventions and learning from our experiences, which is why we utilise annual light-touch reviews to ensure our approach is effective and we can cease or amend interventions that are not having the intended impact.

We will:

Explore

  • Identify a key priority that we can address
  • Systematically explore appropriate programmes and practices
  • Examine the fit and feasibility with the school

Prepare

  • Develop a clear, logical and well-specified plan
  • Assess the readiness of the school to deliver the plan
  • Make practical preparations

Deliver

  • Support staff and solve any problems using a flexible leadership approach
  • Reinforce initial training with follow-on support
  • Drive faithful adoption and intelligent adaption

Sustain

  • Plan for sustaining and scaling the intervention from the outset
  • Continually acknowledge, support and reward good implementation practices
  • Treat scale-up as a new implementation process

Our Tiered Approach

To prioritise spending, we have adopted a tiered approach to define our priorities and ensure balance. Our tiered approach comprises three categories:

  • Quality First Teaching
  • Targeted Academic Support
  • Wider strategies

Within each category, we have chosen a limited number of strategies and interventions. This focussed approach ensures the best chance of success for each intervention.

Quality First Teaching

  • Reading is at the centre of the curriculum: staff training and enhanced resources to engage all children and diminish the progress differential between PP and all children.
  • Pupil Progress monitoring ensures children make good progress as learning is tailored to need, therefore reducing barriers.
  • Staff training provides education effectively delivered using a metacognitive approach enabling children to develop strategies of effective learners thus reducing barriers to learning.

Targeted academic support

  • Structured intervening in learning – SENDCO: Introducing vocabulary interventions for pupils with poor oral language and communication skills
  • Small group tuition: Pre-teaching children who require additional input to effectively access Quality First Teaching; Homework Club
  • One-to-one support: Creating additional teaching and learning opportunities using Teaching Assistants

Wider strategies

  • Equality of opportunity: financial support enabling children to have fair access extra-curricular activities
  • Readiness to learn: Support with uniform & wraparound care
  • Attendance: Attendance strategy resources and SENDCO time to foster links with parents