Pupil Premium

How we spend it

The pupil premium is additional funding given to publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and close the gap between them and their peers.

Pupil premium funding is available to both mainstream and non-mainstream schools, such as special schools and pupil referral units. It is paid to schools according to the number of pupils who have been:

• registered as eligible for free school meals at any point in the last 6 years

• been in care for 6 months or longer.

The main barriers to educational achievement faced by eligible pupils at our school are:

1) Assessments, observations, and discussions with pupils indicate underdeveloped oral language skills and vocabulary gaps among many disadvantaged pupils. These are evident from Reception through to KS2 and in general, are more prevalent among our disadvantaged pupils than their peers.

2) Assessments, observations, and discussions with pupils suggest disadvantaged pupils generally have greater difficulties with phonics than their peers. This negatively impacts their development as readers.

3) Internal and external (where available) assessments indicate that maths attainment among disadvantaged pupils is below that of non-disadvantaged pupils.

4) Our observations and discussions with pupils and families have identified social and emotional issues for many pupils.These challenges particularly affect disadvantaged pupils, including their attainment.

5) Discussions with children sometimes demonstrate lower aspirations with families that are disadvantaged.

6) Absence, both persistent and non-persistent, is an issue for all pupil groups and disadvantaged rates are significantly above National.

Our belief is that if all our children receive Quality First Teaching (QFT) from the teacher and the issues above are fully addressed, then they will make the progress.

For information on how school uses the pupil premium, please see the attached file.