Pupil Premium

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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 skills for independency as we believe that our disadvantaged pupils require most support in these key areas. Furthermore, we believe that strong literacy skills are crucial for preparing children for life beyond school.

Who benefits from the Pupil Premium Grant?

Just under 60% of our students qualify for the PPG and as a result, we are clear that these students must benefit from this additional school funding. We are in the fortunate position whereby this fund allows us to run a 'Nurture provision' for our least able students, alongside allowing smaller teaching sets for our most able students.

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

This is a tricky question. All families are different and have found themselves in receipt of the PPG for differing reasons. There is no single reason for why pupils receive the PPG. However, we have identified several barriers that we believe are particularly relevant to our disadvantaged children in our setting:

Literacy - a proportion of our students have reading ages below their chronological age

Completion of independent study tasks - a proportion of our students do not yet have the skills required to complete tasks away from school

Aspirational futures - a proportion of our students are not yet aspirational enough for their futures

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 order to decided how we spend the funds granted to us via the PPG, we have called upon extensive research which has taken place nationally. This includes the study conducted by the Education Endowment Fund in to how schools can best allocate PPG funds. The guidance can be seen here.

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

• Evidence based literacy interventions: phonics, comprehension strategies, reading programmes.
• Additional teaching staff
• High quality Independent study programmes
• Small group and/or individual intervention groups in the form of our Nurture provision and Reading groups