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 Benfield, 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 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:
- Low levels of attendance across all year groups leading to cumulative dysfluency and lack of engagement in academic study.
- Lack of cultural capital due to lack of experiences outside of school.
- A legacy of a reduced curriculum offer which has led to a knowledge deficit in subject areas and knowledge and skills needed to thrive not just in modern Britain but wider society.
- A lack of ambition for high challenge and high expectations due to socio-economic issues within the community.
- Attainment within English and Mathematics remains below both national and regional averages which does not allow our pupils to compete on a level playing field.
- Pupils who are high ability do not perform as well as their peers nationally and do not attain the highest grades.
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: ‘School Funding and Pupil Premium 2019’ – available here.
- Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit – available here
- Research on disadvantaged pupils and the vocabulary gap
- Our combined professional experience of what works best
Pupil Premium
All state schools within England are required to provide a copy of the Pupil Premium Stratagy for their school. Please see below for our stratagy document.