Pupil Premium
The government has focused on improving performance of groups that are falling behind their peers. One such group, is pupils on free school meals (FSM) and the government have directly funded these pupils by use of a grant called Pupil Premium. Other groups are also funded through this mechanism, ie children who are looked after (LAC) and children are in families where a parent is a member of the armed services.
How we use the funding
We target the spending for this funding to the pupils in these groups, first of all, to ensure they are enabled to achieve as highly as other pupils and secondly to support the progress for these pupils so that is compares with all other pupils (and where performance is lower for pupil premium children then the gap between them and other pupils will be narrowed).
One of the most effective ways to do this is to use intervention groups to target specific areas of weakness. This has shown significant positive progress over the last few years and the pupils benefit from the individual attention and support received.
All our teaching assistants are 'Pupil Premium Champions'. In our school this means that all Teaching Assistants know who the Pupil Premium children are and look to prioritise supporting these children effectively every lesson.
In order to ensure these pupils have access to the extra-curricular activities we support funding of these. We believe it is essential that these pupils have the same opportunities for extra curricular activities and sport in order to help them develop physically, socially and emotionally. Please contact the school office if you wish to discuss how we can support your child’s access to extra-curricular activities. We also support educational visits and residential stays by using pupil premium.
Some of the work we do does not cost any additional money. For example, peer to peer support is an excellent way to bring on all readers - we frequently use our oldest pupils to support younger pupils in reading.
Parents have an incredibly important role to play and therefore we encourage parents to come and help (please contact the office if you have some time that you could volunteer).