The Pupil Premium Grant

The pupil premium is additional funding received by schools to help ensure that pupils who are entitled to free school meals achieve their full potential. It is important to know that parents/carers must still apply for this benefit even with the introduction of free school meals for KS1 children. Failure to apply results in less funding for school. 

It also includes: 

• pupils who have been eligible for free school meals at any point in the last 6 years (this is known as Ever6 FSM)
• children who have been looked after continuously for more than 6 months

 First introduced in April 2011, this money is for schools to decide how to use but should be spent in order to improve educational attainment of children who are in the above categories. The introduction of the pupil premium was based on findings that show that, nationally as a group, children who have been eligible for free school meals at any point in time have consistently lower educational attainment than those who have never been eligible.

 How we spend the Pupil Premium Grant at St Thomas’ C of E Primary School

The pupil premium has the potential to have a great impact on the attainment, and future life chances, of pupils.

PPg is used in a variety of different ways, as listed below. For further information please see the Strategy Reports.

• Employment of Mrs Rachel Thompson, Inclusion Manager to support target families and work with outside agencies such as counselling services and Children’s Social Care (CSC) and deliver targeted intervention to identified children.
• Additional TAs to deliver personalised intervention programmes and support quality first teaching
• Specialist teacher input and training for staff
• Nessy literacy intervention package
• 1:1 support staff
• Provision of nurture groups through the employment of a Nurture Teaching Assistant
• Lego club
• Enabling pupils to participate in school residential and educational visits through the provision of  educational staff or financial support
• Lunchtime support staff for identified pupils
• Provision of daily toast/milk
• Use of CPOMS
• Kidsafe Training and delivery to classes.

Impact of Pupil Premium Funding

• SATS scores for May 2019 (last available SATs scores due to COVID-19) showed that, on average, Pupil Premium children showed more progress than their peers in Reading (+1.0 vs -1.6) and Maths (2.3 vs 0.3) and similar progress to their peers in Writing (+0.8 vs +0.9)

  School have also identified that effective use of PPG has led to:

• Improved self-esteem and class participation of Pupil Premium children
• Improved communication and relationships with parents
• Improved communication with outside agencies such as Children’s Social Care, ensuring children’s basic needs are met.

 Main barriers to educational achievement faced by eligible pupils

The table below shows the barriers to educational achievement and how the school is addressing those barriers.

St Thomas’ believe that by focusing work based around self-esteem, improving resilience and providing support which may not be available at home, we are enabling our children to improve their chances of academic success. All of the programmes named above have baseline assessments and the impact they have will be shown through both qualitative and quantitative data.

The date for the school’s next review of our Pupil Premium Strategy is December 2022.