The pupil premium grant is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England. It’s a school-level grant that gives schools extra resources to help them meet challenges, including those arising from deprivation.
It’s allocated for schools to:
Barnett Wood receives funding for each disadvantaged pupil and uses the funding flexibly, in the best interests of each eligible pupil. We draw upon an evidence based approach to apply a ‘tiered’ approach to delivering their pupil premium strategy.
Tier 1: Improving Teaching
Tier 2: Academic support
Tier 3: Wider approaches
This may include non-academic use of the pupil premium such as:
Schools may find using the pupil premium in this way helps to:
Please read the information below which gives details of our Pupil Premium Grant and how we allocate the funding.
At Barnett Wood, we consider the following four-step approach when developing and sustaining our Pupil Premium Strategy:
1. Diagnosing our pupils' needs
2. Using strong evidence to support our strategy
3. Implement our strategy
4. Monitor and evaluate our strategy
Pupil Premium is carefully targeted once the needs of individuals have been diagnosed or assessed. When diagnosing needs, we take into account a wide range of internal data and information, including:
We use strong evidence to support our strategy and utilise a broad array of external evidence to inform our decision making, alongside the expert knowledge we have of the pupils in our care. For instance, after identifying pupils in need of targeted reading interventions through standardised assessments, we seek relevant and robust evidence on which approaches are most likely to provide appropriate and effective solutions, such as particular phonics or reading comprehension programmes. Our experienced LSAs have additional hours in order to focus on appropriate support interventions which mainly focus on extra support for English and Mathematics skills and also pupils' mental health and well being. Our aim is to make sure these children attain as well as their peers and this is monitored closely through internal tracking and regular professional dialogue between practitioners, teachers and the headteacher. This funding has also been used to support extracurricular activities and resources. Some children have benefited from extra swimming lessons, joining our after school football, dance, reading and cooking clubs and the provision of support during holidays to join clubs.
Successful implementation of a pupil premium strategy is a carefully staged process that takes time, rather than being a one-off event. The strategy is aligned with other school development plans and existing practices to ensure a sustained impact. We will scrutinise the evidence that has informed our strategy with a focus on effective implementation.
In 2023-24, our plan is to continue the excellent support and interventions that are proving successful for our Pupil Premium children. We also plan to provide Emotional Literacy Support Assistants (ELSA) to meet the social, emotional and health needs of our pupil premium pupils. This includes children who are eligible for free school meals, children who are in Local authority care and children who are adopted or have a special guardianship order.
We have recruited additional Learning Support Assistants which enhances the support we are able to provide. Children receive individual support through targeted literacy, numeracy, speech and language and ELSA sessions. The impact of these sessions are regularly discussed with teachers and the headteacher and successes are shared with parents and children.