What is the Pupil Premium Grant?

The Pupil Premium Grant provides additional funding to schools for the specific purpose of improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged children, with the aim of raising their attainment and progress and closing the gap between them and their peers. The school receives the Pupil Premium Grant from the Local Authority.

The grant also provides support for children and young people of service families, referred to as Service Pupil Premium. This has been combined into Pupil Premium payments to make it easier for schools to manage their spending. N.B. pupils who receive service pupil premium funding are not necessarily from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.

 Why was it introduced?

The Government introduced Pupil Premium as an additional source of funding to main school budgets. The Government believe that it is the best way to address the current underlying inequalities between children eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) and those not in receipt of free school meals (non-FSM), by ensuring that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most. Whilst schools are free to spend the Pupil Premium as they see fit, schools are required to publish online information about how they have used the additional funding.

The Government want to support all schools to use the wealth of evidence of ‘what works’, evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to use this funding effectively to drive high and rising standards for disadvantaged pupils.

Funding criteria

Pupil premium funding is allocated to schools based on the number of:

• Children who are recorded as eligible for Free School Meals (FSM), or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years (referred to as Ever 6 FSM)
• Looked-after children, supported by the local authority
• Children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care in England, including children adopted from state care or. 
• Children who have been cared for by equivalent authorities outside England

For pupils who are looked-after children, funding should be managed by the local authority’s virtual school head in consultation with the child’s school.

Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils, and schools do not have to spend pupil premium so that it solely benefits pupils who meet the funding criteria.

Please read the information below which gives details of our Pupil Premium Grant and how we allocate the funding.

At Wolsey House Primary School, we strategically use the Pupil Premium money to ensure that children are given every opportunity to succeed.

A link to the DfE website can be found here: Pupil premium - GOV.UK