Pupil Premium

Read our Pupil Premium Strategy Plan

Schools receive a payment for children who are considered particularly vulnerable in society. This funding is used to support their education and as a school we work towards narrowing the gap between these children’s achievement and that of their peers.

2022-23

We received £62,266 in Pupil Premium funding.

Our Rationale

In deciding how best to use this funding we have identified the barriers to learning for disadvantaged pupils in our school. In general we found the barriers to be:

• Difficult home routines especially in the mornings
• Lack of home support particularly for homework and daily reading
• Lack of parental engagement
• Limited life experiences, such as visiting the seaside, participating in adventurous activities or watching theatrical performances; these offer children inspiration for their own writing and help them to understand and appreciate what they read
• Limited vocabulary, not just tier 3 context specific (technical) vocabulary, but also tier 2 high frequency/multiple meaning vocabulary; this limits pupils’ understanding and their ability to communicate ideas and concepts effectively
• Lack of pupil engagement in learning and challenging behaviour in pupils with attachment difficulties and developmental trauma
• Disrupted schooling particularly when pupils have moved into temporary accommodation or have high levels of absence

To overcome these barriers to learning and based on research carried out by organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation we have used our Pupil Premium Grant to:

• Give eligible children a calm start to the morning with a subsidised Breakfast Club
• Provide additional adult support to listen to children read on a daily basis
• Run parent workshops and fund an additional family support worker to increase parental engagement with the school
• Support children and their parents
• Subsidise school trips for eligible pupils so that visits which offer valuable experiences and learning opportunities are financially viable
• Provide workshops and theatrical performances to enhance learning and offer new experiences
• Subsidise the provision of instrumental music tuition in Years 3 and 4
• Train all staff to understand the impact of developmental trauma on behaviour and readiness to learn, equipping them with strategies to engage these pupils in their learning
• Provide professional counselling and mentoring for children who might need it
• Employ an additional qualified teacher to not only provide English and Maths booster classes and 1:1 tuition for eligible children, but also to provide consistency for our most vulnerable children who may lack the resilience to cope with change
• Employ Teaching Assistants who have been trained to provide focused, high quality support for disadvantaged pupils across the ability range that supplements high quality classroom teaching.  These staff are linked to specific classes so that they are better placed to support children in making links to other learning in class.
• Employ an additional Early Years Teaching Assistant to support early learning in Reception to ensure disadvantaged pupils make a good start to school
• Training an Early Years/KS1 practitioner to support speech and language difficulties, including vocabulary development

Pupil Premium Plus funding is used to specifically benefit our looked after children in consultation with the Virtual School and, where appropriate, Children’s Services.

Impact

The emotional and social benefits to children and their families that this funding brings are not easily quantified, but the impact on children’s learning is nonetheless there.  Children who have a stress-free start to the day in breakfast club or who get a helping hand in homework club, benefit in the classroom too. The extended opportunities which are open to them give them experiences that they might not otherwise enjoy.

Ultimately the aim of the funding is to reduce academic differences for children who are or have previously been in receipt of free school meals. It is for this reason that we invest in well trained teachers and teaching assistants, who can make a real difference to the academic achievement of vulnerable children by running high quality intervention activities, supporting learning and pre-teaching topics linked to whole class teaching.

In 2018 the achievement for disadvantaged pupils in KS2 in reading and writing was greater than all pupils nationally and non-disadvantaged pupils in Hertfordshire and in 2019 the attainment for disadvantaged pupils was in line with or better than that of other pupils.

Additional support had focused on achievement in writing as this was the area with the widest gap in attainment previously and the results show that this had a positive impact on the pupils’ outcomes. In 2017, whilst disadvantaged pupils continued to make accelerated progress in writing (greater than their non-disadvantaged peers and national ‘other’ pupils) and they made similar progress in maths as their non-disadvantaged peers, their attainment and progress in reading was less than their non-disadvantaged peers. Our analysis indicates that these pupils lacked the required reading stamina and wide vocabulary required to fully access the reading test. As a result we redesigned our guided reading lessons and increased our focus on developing vocabulary with the acquisition of more quality reading texts and support materials throughout the school. This resulted in a significant improvement in reading standards for all pupils in 2018.

We also invested in the new HfL Essentials for Maths, with all the class teachers receiving training and new classroom resources purchased to ensure every pupil is able to use manipulatives and visual representations in mathematics to support the understanding of mathematical concepts.

Due to school closures, there were no statutory assessments in 2020 or 2021. At Windermere, when these assessments were taken, 30% of disadvantaged pupils also had special educational needs (SEND), compared with just 7% of non-disadvantaged pupils. This can affect the potential for the cohort to achieve the expected standard.

2019 – Percentage of pupils achieving expected standard or higher at the end of KS2:

2019 – Progress of pupils at the end of KS2:

0 represents expected progress

2019 – Percentage of pupils achieving expected standard or higher at the end of KS1:

2019 – Percentage of pupils making expected progress or better EYFS to end of KS1:

Expected progress is pupils at ‘emerging’ level on EYFSP achieving WTS or better; pupils at ‘expected’ level achieving EXS or GDS; pupils at ‘exceeding’ level achieving GDS