Pupil Premium at Wantage CE Primary School

What is Pupil Premium?

The Pupil Premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and to close the gap between them and their peers. Pupil Premium funding is available to:

• local authority maintained schools, including special school and pupil referral units
• voluntary-sector alternative provision with local authority agreement
• special schools not maintained by the local authority
• academies and free schools, including special and AP (Alternative Provision) academies.

Pupil Premium, using additional resources from outside the School’s Budget, is intended to address the current inequalities by ensuring funding reaches the pupils who need it most.

Pupil Premium at Wantage CE Primary School

At Wantage CE Primary School we have always strived to ensure that all children make good progress. Our pastoral care and vigorous monitoring and tracking of all pupils help us to identify any pupils who are at risk of not making sufficient progress and have helped us to plan and implement good intervention strategies.

Nature of Support

Support at Wantage CE Primary School takes many different forms and has been used to enhance provision specifically for individual children and thereby promote learning and deepen engagement and to provide, as needed, pastoral support through, for example, access to emotional literacy support. Funding has also been used to ensure that children are not disadvantaged in taking part in wider curriculum opportunities (e.g. residential trips). As the school places a high priority on the support of all children, additional funding from the school budget is used to supplement the funding provided by government.

Other places where funding goes:

• Quality First Teaching with additional teaching staff to provide targeted teaching
• HSLW (Home School Link Worker) salary to improve attendance and provide parenting support
• Teaching Assistants in all classrooms
• Continued Professional Development for teaching staff and teaching assistants
• The development of the library and additional resources to engage reluctant and more able readers
• Setting up of a dedicated nurture room together with nurture groups to include staffing/resources
• Introduction of Read Write Inc. This is a method of learning round letter sounds and phonics to aid children in their reading and writing
• Residential and other trips
• Various interventions to provide additional support to reading, writing, maths and social development

Our most recent Pupil Premium Review took place in July 2019.

Pupil Premium Strategy Review 2019-2020

As a result of COVID 19 and the lockdown that took place during the spring and summer terms, we are unable to evaluate the impact of PP spending for the 2019/2020 academic year in the same way that we would usually do. This is especially when looking at academic attainment and progress.

It is to be noted that 70% of the PP budget (£66,560) became allocated to pastoral support as a result of the pandemic.

This has been used effectively for supporting PP children and their families, especially over the lockdown period. For example:

• Making sure families were contacted on a wekkly basis
• Support with academic work
• Dropping work off to families who were unable to access it online
• Lending laptops to as many families as possible
• Linking families to outside agencies, charities and services etc.
• Encouraging families to access 'key worker school' during term times and holidays.

We have found that this pastoral support, which has improved pupil wellbeing and built strong relationships between home and school, has had a significant impact on pupils' attendance, attitude to school, learning and ultimately outcomes.