Pupil Premium Spending Rationale

 

What is the Pupil Premium Grant?

The Pupil Premium Grant is allocated to children from low-income families who are, or have been, eligible for free school meals (FSM), within the last six years. The grant is also made available to support children of service personnel and those who are looked after by the local authority (LAC).

 

What are our aims for the Pupil Premium Grant?

The aim of the Pupil Premium is to identify and implement strategies that help to increase social mobility and reduce the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged pupils nationally. We have placed a strong emphasis on securing foundations in literacy and numeracy as we believe that our disadvantaged pupils require most support in these key areas. Furthermore, we believe that strong literacy and numeracy are crucial for preparing children for life beyond school.

 

Who benefits from the Pupil Premium Grant?

At St John  Fisher School, we ensure that the Pupil Premium Grant has the most benefit for those with the greatest disadvantage. Our intention is to build capacity and maximise our impact. Being a small school with a large proportion of disadvantaged children means that some of the interventions put in place are shared by children who are not in receipt of Pupil Premium funding. We do this in order to promote good progress for all children.

 

What barriers do pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium Grant face?

The barriers and challenges disadvantaged pupils face are complex and varied- there is no single difficulty faced by all. However, we have identified several barriers that we believe are particularly relevant to our disadvantaged children in our context.

These are the key barriers we have identified:

  • Homework completion
  • Literacy
  • Numeracy

We allocate our Pupil Premium Grant to resources that aim to close the gaps in these areas.

 

How do we decide how to spend the Pupil Premium Grant?

In deciding how to use our Pupil Premium Grant, we draw upon the following sources:

  • Sutton Trust report: “The Pupil Premium: Next Steps” available here.
  • Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit, available here.
  • Research on disadvantaged pupils and the vocabulary gap, available here.
  • Our combined professional experience of what works best

 

From these sources we have identified the following priority areas for spending:

  • Evidence based literacy interventions: phonics, comprehension strategies, reading programmes.
  • Evidence based numeracy interventions: mastery maths
  • Additional teaching staff
  • High quality homework programmes
  • Small group and/or individual intervention groups
  • Robust vocabulary interventions

 

Further Information & Reports

 

Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP)

From April 2015, children who are currently claiming the Free Entitlement for 3 and 4 year olds could be eligible for additional funding called the Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP). The Early Years Pupil Premium is extra funding paid to early years providers to improve outcomes for eligible children.