PUPIL PREMIUM

What is Pupil Premium?

Schools in England get extra funding from the government to help them improve the attainment of their disadvantaged pupils.

Evidence shows that children from disadvantaged backgrounds:

• generally face extra challenges in reaching their potential at school;
• often do not perform as well as their peers.

Pupil Premium is designed to allow schools to help disadvantaged pupils by improving their progress. 

The Government provides additional funding for certain groups of pupils:

• those who are eligible for Free School Meals;
• children who are looked-after or previously looked-after;
• pupils whose parent(s) are either serving in HM Forces or have retired on a pension from the Ministry of Defence

Pupil premium is not based on ability.  Research shows that the most academically able pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are most at risk of under-performing.  Schools should focus on these pupils just as much as pupils with low results.

Service Pupil Premium

The Department for Education introduced the Service Pupil Premium in April 2011 in recognition of the specific challenges children from service families face and as part of the commitment to delivering the armed forces covenant.  Service Pupil Premium is used mainly to provide pastoral support during challenging times and to help mitigate the negative impact on service children of family mobility or parental deployment.  

How is Pupil Premium Used

It is up to school leaders to decide how to spend the pupil premium.  This is because school leaders are best-placed to assess their pupils’ needs and use funding to improve attainment.

We aim for every single one of our pupil premium funded children to reach at least national expectations in all areas.  As a minimum, we want this group to achieve above the level at which all non-disadvantaged pupils nationally achieve.  We also want the attendance of our pupil premium funded children to exceed the attendance of all non-disadvantaged pupils nationally.

KEY PRINCIPLES FOR USING THE PUPIL PREMIUM GRANT AT WALFORD NURSERY & PRIMARY SCHOOL:

1. Walford Nursery & Primary School has a commitment to raise achievements for pupils who are eligible for Pupil Premium and knows these pupils must make faster progress than non-eligible pupils and is determined to achieve this.  
2. Walford Nursery & Primary School never confuses eligible pupils with low ability and strives to ‘bring out the best’ in this group of pupils and support them to achieve the highest levels.  
3. Walford Nursery & Primary School creates an overall package of support aimed to tackle a range of barriers including; attendance, behaviour, external factors, professional development focusing on improving outcomes for eligible pupils, improving the quality of teaching and learning, language acquisition, parental engagement, opportunities for first-hand experiences and development of English and Mathematics skills.  
4. Walford Nursery & Primary School uses rigorous assessment systems to track and enable thorough analysis of data (Reading, Writing and Maths) to identify pupils who are under achieving and why.  
5. Walford Nursery & Primary School directs resources and interventions to accelerate progress of eligible pupils and close the attainment gap compared to their peers.  The school uses data to carefully track the impact of targeted spending (interventions, projects or pedagogy) on attainment and progress of eligible pupils.

Please read the information below which gives details of our Pupil Premium Grant and how we allocate the funding.