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

Our intention is that all pupils, irrespective of their background or the challenges they face, make good progress and achieve high attainment across all subject areas and that they will not only learn but be inspired, flourish and enjoy their time at Wantage CE Primary School.

The focus of our pupil premium strategy is to support disadvantaged pupils to achieve that goal, including progress for those who are already high attainers, and be successful.

We will consider the challenges faced by vulnerable pupils, such as those who have a social worker or are under the TAF (Team around the family) process; there may be complex family needs that prevent children from flourishing. The challenges are varied and there is no “one size fits all”.

Excellent quality-first teaching is at the heart of our approach, with a focus on areas in which disadvantaged pupils require the most support. This is proven to have the greatest impact on closing the disadvantage attainment gap and at the same time will benefit the non disadvantaged pupils in our school. Implicit in the intended outcomes, is the intention that non-disadvantaged pupils’ attainment will be sustained and improved alongside progress for their disadvantaged peers.

Our strategy is also integral to wider school plans for education recovery, notably in its targeted support through the National Tutoring Programme for pupils whose education has been worst affected, including non-disadvantaged pupils.

Our approach will be responsive to common challenges and individual needs, rooted in robust diagnostic assessment, not assumptions about the impact of disadvantage. The approaches we have adopted complement each other to help pupils excel. To ensure they are effective we will:

• ensure disadvantaged pupils are challenged in the work that they’re set

• act early to intervene at the point need is identified

• adopt a whole school approach in which all staff take responsibility for disadvantaged pupils’ outcomes and raise expectations of what they can achieve.