Pupil Premium Strategy
What is Pupil Premium?
At Coniston Primary School, we firmly believe that all children deserve the very best education regardless of background or need. In April 2011, the government introduced the Pupil Premium. This gave schools additional funding to diminish any gaps in attainment for disadvantaged pupils and children in care, as well as to assist with the pastoral needs of those children. How the Pupil Premium is spent is closely monitored and schools are accountable for the impact of the money spent.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to get good GCSE results. Attainment statistics published in January 2014 show that in 2013 37.9% of pupils who qualified for free school meals got 5 GCSEs, including English and mathematics at A* to C, compared with 64.6% of pupils who do not qualify. The government believes it is unacceptable for children’s success to be determined by their social circumstances, and intends to raise levels of achievement for all disadvantaged pupils and to close the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.
Schools can decide how the money is spent, since they are best placed to assess what additional provision should be made for the individual pupils within their responsibility.
How is Pupil Premium spent at Coniston Primary School? Our rationale
At Coniston we continuously monitor the progress of all our pupils to ensure that they are achieving their full potential. When deciding how to best use the Pupil Premium, we have used the Educational Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit which provides evidence on how schools can spend money more effectively to improve the teaching and learning of children from low-income families.
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How we implement our Pupil Premium Plan
The EEF guidance also recommends that Pupil Premium budgets are divided as follows:
As a result of those recommendations, the majority of our budget is spent on training, additional staff and resources to ensure that all pupils have the best possible education which we can provide.