Pupil Premium
Overview
The Pupil Premium grant is funding provided by the Government to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged 5-16-year-olds in state-funded schools in England.
Allocations of Pupil Premium (PP) grant are calculated by the Government for each financial year and apply to all eligible schools.
The following groups are eligible for pupil premium:
- Pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals, or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years, including eligible children of families who have no recourse to public funds (NRPF).
The government has permanently extended free school meals (FSM) eligibility to include children in all households with NRPF.
Funding for free school meal is paid to the school.
- Children looked after by local authorities, referred to as looked-after children, and children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care, referred to as previously looked-after children.
Since 1 April 2023, pupil premium eligibility for pupils who have been adopted from care or have left care has included children adopted from state care or equivalent from outside England and Wales.
Funding for looked-after children (LAC) is paid to the local authority and should be managed by the Virtual School Head in consultation with the child’s school. The Virtual School Head and the Local Authority, Cheshire West and Chester use the term Child in Care (CiC) for our LAC students.
Funding for previously looked after children is paid to the school.
- Service Pupil Premium is additional funding for schools with pupils who have parents serving in the Armed Forces. It has been combined into pupil premium payments to make it easier for schools to manage their spending.
This funding is primarily provided to enable schools to offer pastoral support and help mitigate the negative impact of family mobility or parental deployment. It can also be used to help improve the academic progress of eligible pupils if the school deems this to be a priority.
Where Pupil Premium funding is paid directly to the school, schools must use the funding in line with the ‘menu of approaches’ set by the Department for Education, to ensure that pupil premium is focused on effective approaches to raising the educational attainment of disadvantaged pupils.
The menu has been developed in line with the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF’s) 3-tiered approach to help school allocate spending across the following 3 areas:
- supporting the high-quality teaching, such as staff professional development
- providing targeted academic support, such as tutoring, including through the National Tutoring Programme
- tackling non-academic barriers to academic success, such as difficulties in attendance, behaviour and social and emotional wellbeing
When it comes to spending funding, high attaining eligible pupils should receive just as much focus as lower attaining eligible pupils. Evidence shows that eligible pupils who are among the highest performers at key stage 2 are more likely than their non-eligible peers to fall behind by key stage 4.
Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils, and school does not have to spend pupil premium so that it solely benefits eligible pupils.
Pupil premium can be used to support other pupils with identified needs, such as pupils who have or have had a social worker, or pupils who act as a carer. It can also be used for whole class interventions, for example high-quality teaching, which will also benefit non-disadvantaged pupils.
Our Pupil Premium Strategy identifies how we spent our Pupil Premium funding in the last financial year. It details the impact on the performance of disadvantaged students and includes the next steps we are taking to ensure that disadvantaged students continue to experience the learning, support and guidance that will enable them to achieve highly and move successfully to the next stage of their education, and closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers.
For copies of our Pupil Premium Strategy Statements, please refer to our Policies & Documents page