We receive Government funding known as Pupil Premium. The DFE describes this as additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities and to close the gaps between them and their peers.
The DFE states that it is for schools to decide how the Pupil Premium is spent. Each school is held accountable for how they use this additional funding. Measures are included in the performance tables that capture the achievement of these children.
At Brandesburton Primary School our ethos is wholly inclusive and based upon equal opportunity for all; we recognise that the route children take through school will be unique to them, and dependent upon an enormous range of factors both in school and beyond. We therefore ensure that teaching and learning opportunities meet the needs of all our pupils and in doing so have a variety of initiatives which are deployed to support children to ‘bridge the gap’ in performance and/or provide enrichment to extend learning further.
Barriers to Educational Achievement
With a relatively small number of children eligible for the pupil premium, it is unhelpful for us to generalise about the barriers faced to educational achievement. We view each child as an individual and address their needs accordingly. We utilise a wide range of initiatives to help children overcome their own barriers and to ‘close the gap’ to other pupils of their age, should the need arise. For some pupils, the barrier may not be directly related to their learning in class; in these cases, we endeavour to support the family in whatever way we can.
Overcoming the Barriers
We believe the best way of ensuring success is to focus on excellent classroom teaching for all pupils across the school.
At Brandesburton Primary School we have a range of initiatives which are deployed to support children to achieve their potential and to secure good or better rates of progress, across the curriculum.
The Pupil Premium funding is used to pay for, as appropriate:
• 1 to 1 tuition
• Small Group Work
• Specific intervention programmes
• Social Language and Friendship Groups
• Funding of extra-curricular activities
• Funding of visits/residential
• Funding of Parent Support Advisor
Funding is also used to release members of staff to support pupils, for example
- Preparation/liaison with outside agencies, such as EHC meetings
- To conduct assessments/observations and prepare case studies
- To track individual pupils and research ‘what works well’
- To meet regularly with parents/carers
This is a representative, but not exhaustive, list of the strategies that may be used.
Strategic budget planning seeks to maximise value for money and exploit our human resources in the most efficient way possible. However, we are not limited in our approach purely by the level of allocated funding.
Impact of Pupil Premium
We carefully monitor and evaluate outcomes for all pupils and for those pupils eligible for the premium, reviews take place regularly and at least once a term. The involvement of the senior leaders, and present, previous and future teachers provides a broad overview of each child. Our close links with parents/carers ensures that communication is timely and effective.
Where possible we try to judge overall success by considering the broad outcomes for a child over time rather than simply comparing a narrow set of test scores and against those of other children. We look for trends which may suggest additional barriers.
Pupil Premium Review
The next review of Pupil Premium achievement will be December 2022
Reporting
Governors are involved with senior leaders in decisions about how the funding is spent and the effectiveness of this.
The Governors of the school ensure that there is an annual statement to parents on how the funding has been used and the impact. This task is carried out annually within the requirements published by the Department for Education.
The Governing Body is very careful to publish only limited data relating to the very small cohorts. In some cases, the data for a particular year can be drawn from one single pupil and thus feel it is neither helpful nor fair for this data to be identifiable on our website.