Pupil Premium
The pupil premium grant is funding to improve educational outcomes for certain pupils in state-funded schools in England. It is important to note that if you think your child may be eligible for Pupil Premium based on your family income, please register them even if you do not wish to take up Free School Meals. The school will only receive Pupil Premium money for each registered pupil. This money will make a difference to your child's education. To register please click here
Purpose
Pupil Premium is extra funding from the government to help them improve the attainment of pupils who :
- generally face extra challenges in reaching their potential at school
- often do not perform as well as their peers
The pupil premium grant is designed to allow schools to help pupils to improve their progress and the results they achieve.
Eligibility and funding
Schools get pupil premium funding based on the number of pupils they have in January each year from the following groups.
Free school meals
Schools receive £1,455 for every primary age pupil or £1035 for every secondary age pupil who claims free school meals or who has claimed free school meals in the last six years.
Looked-after and previously looked-after children
Schools receive £2,300 for every pupil who has left local authority care through adoption, a special guardianship order or child arrangements order.
Local authorities receive the same amount for each child they are looking after; they must work with the school to decide how the money is used to support the child’s Personal Education Plan.
Service families
The service premium is not part of the pupil premium as the rules to attract the service premium are different.
Schools receive £335 for every pupil with a parent who:
- is serving in HM Forces
- has retired on a pension from the Ministry of Defence
This funding is to help with pastoral support.
Academically able pupils
The pupil premium is not based on ability.
Research shows that the most academically able pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are most at risk of under-performing. At Over Hall there is as much focus on these pupils just as much as pupils with low results.
Use of the pupil premium
It’s up to school leaders to decide how to spend the pupil premium. This is because school leaders are best-placed to assess their pupils’ needs and use funding to improve attainment.
Tiered approach
We believe in maximising the use of the pupil premium grant (PPG) by utilising a long-term strategy aligned to the School Improvement and Development Plan. This enables us to implement a blend of short, medium and long-term interventions, and align pupil premium use with wider school improvements and improving readiness to learn.
Overcoming barriers to learning is at the heart of our PPG use. We understand that needs and costs will differ depending on the barriers to learning being addressed. As such, we do not automatically allocate personal budgets per pupil in receipt of the PPG. Instead, we identify the barrier to be addressed and the interventions required, whether in small groups, large groups, the whole school or as individuals, and allocate a budget accordingly.
Evidence, collated by the Education Endownment Foundation, suggests that pupil premium spending is most effective when schools use a tiered approach, targeting spending across the following 3 areas below but focusing on teaching quality - investing in learning and development for teachers.
- Quality Teaching for All
Arrange training and professional development for all staff to improve the impact of teaching and learning for pupils.
- Targeted Academic support
Identify the main issues stopping pupils from succeeding at school and use the pupil premium to help.
- Wider approaches
This may include non-academic use of the pupil premium such as:
- school breakfast clubs
- music lessons
- help with the cost of educational trips or visits
- speech and language therapy
Schools may find using the pupil premium in this way helps to:
- increase pupils’ confidence and resilience
- encourage pupils to be more aspirational
- benefit non-eligible pupils
Non-eligible pupils
Schools can spend their pupil premium on pupils who do not meet the eligibility criteria but need extra support. For example, if they:
- are in contact with a social worker
- used to be in contact with a social worker
- are acting as a carer
Eligibility for Free School Meals and Pupil Premium
You may qualify if you are a parent, guardian or carer and receive one of the following:
- Income Support (IS) or you are a pupil receiving the benefit in your own right
- Income Based Jobseekers Allowance (IBJSA)
- Income-related Employment and Support Allowance
- Support under part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999; or
- Child Tax Credit (but not Working Tax Credit) and have an annual income (as assessed by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) that does not exceed £16,190
- The Guarantee element of State Pension Credit
- Working Tax Credit run-on - paid for four weeks after you stop qualifying for Working Tax Credit
- Universal Credit
- Children who get any of the above benefits in their own right (ie they get benefits payments directly, instead of through a parent or guardian) can also get free school meals.
Check if you are able to claim Free School Meals by filling in the online form.
You can also contact the Free School Meals department (Benefits Information) directly by:
Email: Benefits@cheshirewestandchester.gov.uk
Telephone: 0300 123 7021, Monday to Friday 8am to 7pm
Post: Revenues and Benefits Department, PO Box 187, Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, CH34 9DB
Use of Pupil Premium at Over Hall
We endeavour to utilise the additional funding stream to have maximum impact upon children’s experience, attainment and progress. We consider effective and validated national strategies; the skill set of our team; our knowledge and understanding of our local context; to create bespoke strategies to target the individual and unique needs of our children within our community who are entitled to Pupil Premium.
Broadly the strategies are:
- Effective deployment of staff, including increased staffing levels
- Personalised learning & effective feedback
- Meta-cognitive & self-regulation strategies
- Reading strategies
- Early years interventions & support
- Collaborative learning
- Peer tutoring
- Digital technology
- Wider approaches
- Breakfast & After School Club
- Extra music lessons
- Subsidised costs of educational trips or visits
- Speech and language therapy
EFFECTIVE DEPLOYMENT OF SUPPORT STAFF
As a result of increasing the ratio of support staff children’s achievement, perceptions and attitudes are more positively affected.
Firstly, we deploy support staff in each year group so that the curriculum can be delivered to children in smaller groups. This increases the range of learning approaches the teacher can use e.g. collaborative and cooperative techniques, talking partners, peer to peer support. This improves the level of personalisation and the amount of individual feedback a learner receives. As the size of a teaching group gets smaller, the range of approaches a teacher can employ increases.
Secondly, teaching assistants are used with the intention of improving the learning of pupils to bridge the gap in attainment. We recognise that there is greater impact when teaching assistants know the children alongside are given a particular pedagogical role or responsibility in specific curriculum interventions particularly with training and support. Interventions include a range of 'off the shelf' bought resources alongside bespoke individual programmes matching the needs of the learner.
There are also positive effects in terms of team morale and reduced stress of working with the support and team ethos.
PERSONALISED LEARNING & EFFCTIVE FEEDBACK
At Over Hall personalised learning is based on the idea that children have a clear understanding of what it is that they need to learn and evidence about their current level of performance, so they can close this gap. Verbal, written or digital technology feedback is information given to the learner about their performance in relation to the learning goals which then redirects or refocuses either the teacher’s or the learner’s actions to achieve the goal. It can be about the learning activity or task itself, about the process of the task or activity, about the child’s management of their own learning or their self-regulation or about them as individuals. We have developed a number of classroom strategies to support the approach and support staff play an integral part of our feedback approach to both individual children and to ability groups.
META-COGNITIVE STRATEGIES & SELF-REGULATION
Such approaches aim to help pupils think about their own learning more explicitly, often by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning. Interventions are usually designed to give pupils a repertoire of strategies to choose from and the skills to select the most suitable strategy for a given learning task.
Self-regulated learning can be broken into three essential components:
- cognition - the mental process involved in knowing, understanding, and learning;
- metacognition - often defined as ‘learning to learn’; and
- motivation - willingness to engage our metacognitive and cognitive skills.
These strategies are usually more effective when taught in collaborative groups so that learners can support each other and make their thinking explicit through discussion.
READING STRATEGIES
Pupils are taught a range of techniques which enable them to comprehend the meaning of what they read therefore building a greater understanding of the written text. These can include: inferring meaning from context; summarising or identifying key points; developing questioning strategies; and monitoring their own comprehension and identifying difficulties themselves (see also Metacognition and self-regulation). Successful reading comprehension approaches allow activities to be carefully tailored to pupils’ reading capabilities, and involve activities and texts that provide an effective, but not overwhelming, challenge.
Many of the approaches can be usefully combined with Collaborative learning techniques and Phonics to develop reading skills. The use of techniques such as drawing pupils’ attention to text features are likely to be particularly useful when reading information texts. There are some indications that computer-based approaches can be successful in improving reading comprehension, particularly when they focus on the development of strategies and self-questioning skills.
EARLY YEARS INTERVENTION
Early years interventions aim to ensure that young children have educational pre-school or nursery experiences which prepare them for school and academic success. Over recent years staff have worked hard to build stronger links with the private on-site nursery, providing shared activities, coaching, alongside free flow sessions providing pre school children with effective and positive experiences of school thus ensuring a smoother transition.
Once early years provision is in place, improving the quality of provision, for example by training staff to improve the interaction between staff and children, appears to be more promising than increasing the quantity of provision, or changing the physical environment of early years settings.
COLLABORATIVE / COOPERATIVE LEARNING
A collaborative/cooperative learning approach involves pupils working together on activities or learning tasks in a group small enough for everyone to participate on a collective task. Pupils in the group may work on separate tasks contributing to a common overall outcome or work together on a shared task. Some collaborative learning approaches put mixed ability teams or groups to work in competition with each other in order to drive more effective collaboration. There is a very wide range of approaches to collaborative and cooperative learning involving different kinds of organisation and tasks. Peer tutoring can also be considered as a type of collaborative learning. Effective collaborative learning requires much more than just sitting pupils together and asking them to work in a group; structured approaches with well-designed tasks lead to the greatest learning gains. Approaches which promote talk and interaction between learners tend to result in the best gains.
PEER TUTORING
Peer tutoring includes a range of approaches, across all age groups, in which pupils work in pairs or small groups to provide each other with teaching support. This may involve cross-age tutoring, in which an older pupil takes the tutoring role and is paired with a younger pupil; or reciprocal peer tutoring, in which learners alternate between the role of tutor and tutee. Pupils have engaged with class based reciprocal reading groups, transition buddies supporting younger children smoothly into school life, sports representatives leading upon physical activities and reading buddies across year groups alongside sharing learning across the wider curriculum.
Peer tutoring involves pupils taking on responsibility for aspects of teaching and for evaluating their success. Peer assessment involves the peer tutor providing feedback to the tutee relating to their performance and can take different forms, such as reinforcing learning or correcting misunderstandings. Studies have identified benefits for both tutors and tutees, and for a wide range of age groups. Though all types of pupils appear to benefit from peer tutoring, there is some evidence that pupils who are low-attaining and those with special educational needs make the biggest gains.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
The use of digital technologies plays a key part in supporting learning through technology built for pupils, where learners use programmes or applications designed for problem solving or open-ended learning; or technology for teachers, such as interactive whiteboards or learning platforms. The increased and more effective use of ICT at Over Hall could be associated with better learning and is used to supplement other teaching methods. It is used across all ages.
In line with evidence-based research, at Over Hall, technology approaches are used to supplement other teaching, rather than replace more traditional approaches. Some technology-based programmes provide effective feedback or use more helpful representations. Sometimes they are even known to motivate pupils to practise more.
SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Interventions which target social and emotional learning seek to improve pupils’ interaction with others and self-management of emotions, rather than focusing directly on the academic or cognitive elements of learning. Such interventions focus on the ways in which students work with, or alongside, their peers, teachers, family or community. At Over Hall you will see programmes which generally take place in the classroom; more specialised programmes which are targeted at students with particular social or emotional needs such as Basecamp led by an ELSA for half the weekly timetable; alongside school-level approaches to developing a positive school ethos, which also aim to support greater engagement in learning such as Equality & Diversity, No Outsiders, Pivotal Behaviour strategies along with strong school values that underpin both positive rewards and addressing of poor choices.
WIDER APROACHES:
'EARLY BIRDS' BREAKFAST & 'TREE TOPS' AFTER SCHOOL CLUB
Our before and after school programme, is a service offered during term time, at the beginning and end of the school day. Children are involved in planned activities which are supervised by adults. There are a variety of activities offered including, help with home learning and reading that are supported by staff. There is a small fee paid for by parents and carers subsidised by the school enabling the fees to be extremely low and affordable. The benefits are in terms of learning, behaviour and relationships with peers. Attendance at an after-school programme, where children spend time in academic and enrichment activities, have been reliably but modestly linked with improvements.
MUSIC PROVISION
All children in Year 5 are given the opportunity to learn to play a wind instrument – given the choice of clarinet, trombone or trumpet. This opportunity is extended into Year 6 thus providing each child with the ability to read music and play an instrument as they enter secondary education. To enhance this further they are given a wide range of opportunities to perform before a wide range of audiences from their fellow peers to their friends and family.
SUBSIDISED EDUCATIONAL TRIPS
Pupils across all age groups are given a wide range of opportunities to attend educational trips, some fully or partially subsidised ensuring a strong participation and experience. In turn these experiences enhance the education and provide opportunities to extend learning.
SPEECH & LANGUAGE PROVISION
Children identified with speech and language difficulties are effectively supported by a member of staff who has a 0.5 of the weekly timetable designated to this area alongside a fortnightly support from a Speech Therapist.
Please see below a copy of Over Hall's 3-year pupil premium plan - which outlines how the PPG has been allocated.
RECOVERY PREMIUM
Recovery premium is part of the government’s package of funding to support pupils whose education has been impacted by COVID-19.
It is a time-limited grant providing over £300 million of additional funding for state-funded schools in the 2021/22 academic year and £1 billion across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years.
It is focused on pupils who are eligible for pupil premium and pupils in specialist settings such as:
- special schools
- special units
- pupil referral units (PRUs)
This is because of the additional impact of the pandemic on these students.
Recovery premium allocations for academic year 2023/24 will be calculated on a per pupil basis, based on the following rates.
In mainstream education, the rates are:
- £145 per eligible pupil in primary schools
- £276 per eligible pupil in secondary schools
