Pupil Premium
What is Pupil Premium?
Pupil Premium is additional funding given to state funded schools to help raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and to close the gap between them and their peers. National attainment figures show that students who have been eligible for Free School Meals at any point in their time at school tend to achieve lower grades than their peers. By careful use of Pupil Premium funding schools are able to raise the attainment of those eligible for Pupil Premium to the same level as their non-eligible peers.
How much Pupil Premium do we expect this year?
The rate of Pupil Premium funding for 2015 - 2016 is £935 per eligible student. Children of parents in the armed services are entitled to £300 Pupil Premium. The Swanage School received £64,172 for the 2015-16 academic year, with 30% of students eligible for Pupil Premium.
How are we spending our Pupil Premium?
At The Swanage School we believe that raising self-esteem is as important as direct assistance with numeracy and literacy. A happy, confident student, wearing their uniform with pride and able to participate fully in the life of the school, stands a greater chance of high academic attainment.
To support this approach we spent our 2015-16 allocation on:
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- Running a Homework Club every day after school, where students are able to use the school’s facilities and are supported by a teaching assistant. The Education Endowment Foundation’s toolkit supports our view that homework has a consistently positive impact for secondary school students.
- Providing additional support through small group learning in literacy and maths to assist those students in need of additional support.
- Using and sharing teaching strategies for meta-cognition and self-regulation, effective feedback and peer tutoring. Examples of these approaches include our Inspiration Station, our three pronged approach of teacher assessment, peer assessment and self-assessment, our Big Brother and Big Sister mentor network, and the inter-year and inter-school peer coaching activities undertaken by our students. These approaches are highly effective.
- Banning the use of mobile phones in school time which has been shown by a research project [“Ill Communication: The Impact of Mobile Phones on Student Performance”] carried out by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics to have a positive and significant impact on the learning of students, and especially disadvantaged students.
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£59,900 |
- Subsidising uniform (70% discount), enabling all students to dress smartly for school
- Subsidising small-group instrument lessons (70% discount) enabling all students to learn to play a musical instrument
- Subsidising educational trips, visits and activities for students currently registered for Free School Meals, enabling all students to participate in all activities. Our programme of Project Based Learning, Challenge Days and school trips and visits provide opportunities for our students to participate in outdoor adventure learning, and arts participation and often involve collaborative learning. The Education Endowment Foundation has found that these types of activities have a positive impact on students’ attitude to learning and self-confidence as well as on academic attainment.
- Subsidising transport to school
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£8,100 |
- Providing extraordinary items for individual students which make school or home learning easier.
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How will we measure the impact of Pupil Premium on our students?
At The Swanage School we monitor the progress of each student and compile a report for our Governing Body every half term. We use this data to identify groups of students and to compare each group with the national, local and school averages. We expect to see the same high levels of progress in all students, regardless of whether they are eligible for Pupil Premium.