St. Mary’s CE (VA) Primary School Pupil Premium Statement

At St. Mary’s we have high aspirations for all children and believe that all children are entitled to grow in wisdom and knowledge so that they can fully contribute to their community.

For us to live out our vision it is essential that we aim to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers. To achieve this, it is crucial that we recognise key barriers to learning and provide effective support and strategies so that over time they are surmounted so that equity of opportunity is achieved.

Central to closing the attainment gap is our strategy for effectively using our pupil premium funding. This funding is in addition to main school funding and is targeted to address inequalities between eligible children and their peers.
St. Mary’s Pupil Premium Strategy is directed at overcoming the following persistent and ongoing barriers to learning:
• High percentage of children with English as additional language
• High percentage of disadvantaged children who have other multiple potential barriers to learning – EAL/New to English, Vulnerable, SEND, Mobility, Attendance, Behaviour Parental Support.
• High levels of mobility – Children entering school, mid Key Stage, with multiple potential barriers to learning and potential gaps in learning.
• Challenges EAL children face moving from social language acquisition to academic language acquisition, particularly as they move through KS2.
• Children enter Lower Foundation significantly below age related expectations of 30-50 months, primarily within the area of Communication and Language.
• Limited opportunities for concrete experiences that are essential for the acquisition of a broad and rich vocabulary.
• Limited early language development is hindered as a result of low-level language role models outside of school.
• Acquisition of phonics is impacted by home language.

We target our funding in three main areas:
• The continual improvement of quality first teaching
• High quality targeted academic support
• Wider emotional and wellbeing support along with targeted family support
Quality First Teaching essential to improving outcomes for disadvantaged children. Using the Pupil premium to improve teaching quality benefits all children and has a particularly positive effect on children eligible for the Pupil premium.

In addition to good teaching, targeted interventions are used to address and overcome specific academic barriers individuals and groups may have.

St Mary’s therefore deploys pupil premium to provide additional staffing to ensure targeted interventions regularly take place. We promote effective intervention and additional support in order to eradicate barriers to learning, and to accelerate pupil progress, effectively narrowing the achievement gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers

Whilst all spending relates in some way to raising attainment, several interventions which may appear to have a less direct impact have proved to be highly effective in overcoming barriers to learning encountered by pupil premium children. Measuring the impact of such interventions is not straightforward. Previous outcomes clearly evidence that, the better these pupils are provided for in terms of basic needs, emotional and social welfare, then the more likely they are to make similar progress to other pupils.

Our Learning Mentor, Parent Support Worker and Community Liaison Worker offer extensive social and emotional support strategies to individual children, groups of children and families. Their work focuses on attendance through first day response, working with parents and home visits. They provide social and emotional support through check-ins, talk times, intervention groups and working with individual children and families. Supporting children who fall into multiple groups (PP, regularly late, under child protection etc) and implementing imaginative strategies to support these children is a key aspect of the team’s work.

Long-term and in year spending to support disadvantaged children
To ensure spending is effectively managed school allocate funding around ongoing longer-term spending and short-term / in year spending.
A significant portion of spending is allocated to increasing staffing levels and providing additional pastoral and family support than would not be otherwise funded through the basic school budget. By investing in staffing over the longer term we are able to attract and maintain high quality staff that are suitably trained to provide ongoing support.
In addition, short term / in year spending is used to fund targeted school improvement priorities to strengthen quality first teaching, targeted interventions and social and emotional support.

Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP)
Focusing on developing children’s communication and language development, through the additional hours of an experienced and talented classroom support assistant has supported extra high level interactions with children, in their own self-initiated play, where their learning is at its highest level. This has also incorporated individual and small group story times to develop a love of books, familiar stories and the development of the English language. The Early Years Unit is run with at least two additional practitioners over ratio to facilitate this high quality interaction approach.

Monitoring the impact of spending
Maximising the impact of Pupil Premium spending involves balancing the use of effective assessment and progress procedures and softer evidence bases like pupil voice. It is also recognised that some impact may only be evident over the long term where social justice is brought about.