Key Principles of Pupil Premium Funding

Respect

We provide a culture where:

•  Staff believe in all children.
•  There are no excuses made for underperformance.
•  Staff adopt an outcome focused approach to overcoming barriers to learning or to further challenge children.
•  Staff support children to develop their basic skills and aspirations towards being the best they can be.

Developing the Whole Child

We believe in developing the whole child by offering a spread of strategies which include paying  towards the cost of some educational visits for children and other enrichment activities for each pupil premium child and offering a curriculum which embraces the whole child and focuses on children reaching their full potential.  We also invest in emotional and mental health.

We also believe in offering a rich and inspiring curriculum which allows children to apply their English and Mathematics skills through all the subjects in the curriculum. To ensure our children are given every opportunity to achieve we employ a specialist PE teacher who teaches Dance sessions that follow the same topics as the curriculum (e.g. Ancient Egypt). Parents are always invited to an end of Spring Term Dance show thus raising the self-esteem of children and involving the families in their child’s achievements.

Academic achievement and Progress

• All staff are involved in the analysis of data through moderation (internal and external) and tracking so that they are fully aware of the progress and attainment of their pupils but also the strengths and weaknesses across year groups.
•  Interventions are monitored on a six weekly basis and adjusted for best effect.
•  We use research such as the Education Endowment Foundation and DfE website to support us in determining the strategies that will be most effective for our pupils.

Personalised Learning

We ensure that we provide personalised learning and additional support which is effective by:

•  Looking at the individual needs of each child and identifying their barriers to learning or how to challenge them further through our Pupil Progress meetings and Provision Maps six times a year.
•  Ensuring additional support staff and class teachers communicate regularly.
•  Providing CPD for staff to lead high quality teaching.
•  Matching the skills of staff to the interventions they provide.
•  Working with other professionals to bring in additional expertise: Multi Agency Support, Educational Psychologists, Mental Health Service (CAMHS), Paediatricians, Speech and Language Therapists etc.
•  Providing support for Parents/Carers through the role of the Pupil Premium support worker with pastoral support e.g. access to Early Help.
• Tailoring interventions to the needs of the children.
• Recognising and building on children’s strengths to further boost confidence.

Priorities

This year our aim is to close the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers; in particular we are focusing on closing the gap of our lower attainers in maths, reading and writing and our most able disadvantaged children.   To this end, we will continue to strategically track and target pupils while also investing in high quality CPD for staff.

To boost oracy in the EYFS we will be working on the well researched BLAST intervention in our nursery and focussed language intervention ‘Language Link’ in foundation.  We are also working on the development of children's vocabulary throughout the school. 

Reading is a high priority, and we are currently in transition to 'Little Wandle' phonics scheme.  Reading is being developed in KS2 with new approaches being trialled to ensure that every child is a fluent, competent reader by the time they move to secondary school. 

The Impact of Pupil Premium Funding

 Stowford School’s evaluation of its own performance is rigorous and tracking of progress over time for each pupil is thorough so we can quickly identify any gaps/trend and develop sensible strategies and interventions to promote improvement. The impact of Targeted Interventions is analysed half-termly as assessment data is gathered and input. Moderation of data between teachers in school also takes place at this time; external moderation takes place.  Follow-up support is then put in place if an intervention is not having the desired impact and different interventions decided upon

We will use a range of data to analyse the impact of our Pupil Premium Funding spending, this will include:

•  End of key stage data and year group data.
•  Phonics Screening Check Outcomes.
•  Early Years Foundation Stage data.
•  Current data based on Teacher Assessments.
•  Intervention analysis.
•  Outcomes of observations, work scrutinies, learning walks and pupil conferencing.
•  Stakeholder feedback.
• Attendance.
• Soft data such as pupils' confidence and evident well-being.