Pupil Premium

Pupil Premium Strategy Statement 2023–24

This statement details our school’s use of pupil premium funding (and recovery premium for the 2023–2024 academic year) to help improve the attainment of our disadvantaged students.

It outlines our pupil premium strategy, how we intend to spend the funding in this academic year and the effect that last year’s spending of pupil premium had within our school.

Pupil Premium Strategy Plan

Statement of Intent

Key objectives

Our intention is that all students, irrespective of their educational background or the challenges they face, make good progress and achieve high attainment across the curriculum.

High-quality first teaching is at the heart of our approach, with a focus on areas in which disadvantaged students 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 students in our school. Implicit in the intended outcomes detailed below is the intention that non-disadvantaged students’ attainment will be sustained and improved alongside progress for their disadvantaged peers.

Our support and interventions this year and within our three-year strategy, are planned around three key areas: Teaching, Targeted Academic Support and Wider Strategies in line with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance. As a school we are research driven in the support we put in place both through our own research and experience and that of the EEF which helps guide us in our decisions around where to fund support and interventions.

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

• Ensure disadvantaged students are challenged in the work they are set;
• Act early to intervene at the point need is identified; 
• Adopt a whole school approach in which all staff take responsibility for disadvantaged students’ outcomes and raise expectations of what they can achieve.

Core principles and strategies

1. Improve the progress of disadvantaged students through high-quality teaching and learning. Ensure targets set for disadvantaged students are aspirational and based in the upper limits of FFT data.
2. Effectively use data tracking points based on high-quality assessment and feedback to identify PP students who are not making the required progress and target these students for rigorous academic interventions.
3. Increase interventions that consider the well-being of the PP cohort and improve engagement with PP parents in the community.
4. Ensure all PP students have a wide range of co-curricular activities available to support their self-esteem and resilience, enrich their education and raise aspirations.

Activity in This Academic Year

Below are the details of how we intend to spend our pupil premium (and recovery premium funding) 2022–2023 to address the challenges listed above:

• Teaching (budgeted cost: £29,829)
• Targeted academic support (budgeted cost: £20,625)
• Wider strategies, for example, related to attendance, behaviour, well-being (budgeted cost: £51,317)

Total budgeted cost: £29,829 + 20,625 + 51,317 = £101,771

Review of PP Strategy Outcomes for 2022–2023

The KS5 PP cohort outperformed the rest of the cohort in their A Level studies. At GCSE, the pupil premium outcomes remain slightly lower than the rest of the cohort and currently, while we are still closing the gap, we are making some good progress. The residual against 2019 is less negative -0.81 (2023) compared with -0.81 (2019) and the last public exams pre-COVID. Within our school, a number of departments saw the PP students outperform the whole cohort, this included Food Technology, Statistics, Music, Religion and Philosophy, PE and Drama.

There was also an increase in certain subjects which directly correlated to the tutoring provision. The areas showing greatest progress were Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Spanish, French and Maths.

Our internal review demonstrated that the impacts of COVID and school closure on well-being and mental health have continued to prove challenging for our students, including those who receive the pupil premium. In addition to the academic tutoring and support, more students were able to access MACK and counselling services this year to address some of the pastoral, emotional and well-being issues associated with the pandemic. Pupil premium students were also given the opportunity to have priority access to the careers service, which served to focus them on decisions on their next steps.

The impact of our interventions and the continuation of a high-quality curriculum means that the impact on disadvantaged students was minimised and their achievement was not wholly dissimilar to that of other students. The specific targeted support put in place to help students recover knowledge gaps will continue to form an integral part of our strategy to help pupil premium students, and the wider student cohort to achieve their academic potential in future public examinations.

In the final year of this three-year strategy we will continue to focus on the two key areas of the strategy on 'quality first teaching' and 'student well-being'. This will see us bring in more teacher PP champions and more Sixth Form mentors.