Pupil Premium

Pupil Premium Strategy Statement 2024–25

This statement details our school’s use of pupil premium funding to help improve the attainment of our disadvantaged students.

It outlines our pupil premium strategy for 2024–2027 and 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

Our philosophy

We believe that all students, irrespective of their 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. 

Our support and interventions this year and within our three-year strategy are planned around three key areas: teaching, targeted academic and well-being 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. We keep abreast of national reports on disadvantage to inform our strategy (Annual Report 2024: Disadvantage - Education Policy Institute).

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. We will:

• ensure disadvantaged students are challenged in the work that 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.

In summary, our mission is to create an aspirational, high achievement culture for all, to:

• provide tailored curriculum interventions to enable strong progress
• allow everyone to experience success and a pathway to a great future 
• increase attendance and engagement for students
• raise aspiration and ambition
• raise self-confidence and provide opportunities to develop higher level independent learning skills, attitudes and habits
• enable students to catch up quickly to reach target levels for their age and support academic progress
• provide access to additional resources to enable fair equitable access to wider opportunities and enrichment
• support mental health and resilience support for students who have complex needs.

Core principles and strategies

1. Improve the progress of disadvantaged students through high-quality first teaching and learning. Ensure targets set for disadvantaged students remain aspirational and in line with the whole-school cohort set by the FFT’s top 5%.
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.

The tiered approach

1. Quality first teaching
2. Targeted academic and well-being support
3. Wider strategies

Activity in This Academic Year

Below are the details of how we intend to spend our pupil premium (and recovery premium funding) this academic year to address the challenges listed above:

Review of Outcomes for 2023–2024

Pupil premium strategy outcomes

This details the impact that our pupil premium activity had on students in the 2023–2024 academic year.

Disadvantaged students at TWGSB make above average progress against national standards, however the outcomes at both KS5 and KS4 remain slightly lower than the rest of the whole school cohort, with both A8 and P8 measures lower at KS4 and the average point score at KS5 lower. The average attainment 8 score nationally was 45.9, compared with 54.6 for our disadvantaged students.

Of the GCSE cohort of disadvantaged students, half of them achieved an average grade in line with, or above, the average grade for the cohort. This indicates that while the curriculum and interventions were successful in supporting the attainment of the cohort of disadvantaged students, there is still work to be done in further specific, targeted interventions to close learning gaps and reinforce of emotional well-being for this to increase. Of this cohort, all students were supported with careers advice and supporting next steps and they are all now accessing education or training post-16. 

At KS5, disadvantaged students achieved an average grade of a B- compared with a B grade for the whole school cohort. Fifty per cent of the disadvantaged students achieved an average grade above, or in line with, the rest of the cohort, again demonstrating the need for more targeted academic and pastoral support for some students. However, post-18, the destinations of our disadvantaged students shows that the careers and aspiration support meant they all accessed high-quality education, whether places at top universities or higher-level apprenticeships.