Pupil Premium and Year 7 Catch-Up Funding

Pupil Premium

The pupil premium is additional government funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and close the gap between them and their peers.

Pupil premium statement – December 2021

SUMMARY OF PUPIL PREMIUMS ALLOCATION AND CATCH UP FUNDING

Financial Year (1st April – 31st March)	Apr 18 – Mar 19	Apr 19 – Mar 20	Apr 20 – Mar 21
Status	Complete	Complete	Estimated
Allocation	£464,695	£466,565	£469,860
Students	504	508	507
Catch up Funding	£19,115	£19,232	£21,175

Pupil Premium Spend – Academic Year (1st September – 31st August)	2018-19	2019-20	2020-21
	2018-19	2019-20	Estimated
Income by academic year	£466,263	£467,946	£537,245
Expenditure
Teaching post for intervention	£98,570	£98,926	£113,576
SLT support to focus and achievement	£57,717	£57,926	£66,504
Ed support staff	£14,889	£14,943	£17,156
Raising attainment posts	£26,254	£26,349	£30,251
Behavioural Support	£34,336	£34,459	£39,563
e-Learning posts	£48,521	£48,696	£55,908
Classroom res and extra-curricular activities	£179,418	£180,065	£206,732
Well-being intervention	£6,558	£6,582	£7,556
Total	£466,623	£467,946	£537,245

KEY PRINCIPLES

Pupil premium funding is used to support a raft of interventions specifically targeted at those students who are eligible for this funding at the academy. As approximately half of the students at the academy are covered by this, there are some large scale interventions and principles outlined below.

The key principles of the use of our pupil premium funding are: addressing individual need and equality of opportunity where there are difficult circumstances; and providing strong additional academic support for our pupil premium students with the allocated funding.

Pupil premium is an identified and monitored attribute for students at a whole school and departmental level. All teaching staff are aware of these students within their classes and are asked to be mindful of when and where support needs to be drawn from the funding to provide equality of opportunity.

KEY BARRIERS

Key barriers to students’ attainment are:

Significant numbers of safeguarding issues which disproportionally affect these students.
Poverty reducing students’ participation in extra-curricular activities and trips.
Low home aspirations or areas where no English is spoken in the home.
Higher ability students’ confidence and motivation to achieve the top grades.

Specific interventions include:

Raising the standards of higher ability pupil premium students.
Increasing students’ cultural capital and inquisitiveness
Providing strong role models
A series of raising aspiration interventions such as our Theatre School.

ADDRESSING INDIVIDUAL NEEDS

Educational support staff are important in closing the gap for pupil premium students. Mentoring, safeguarding and behaviour specialists are all employed to deal with issues within students’ lives, with additional support provided by the academy’s attendance team, Local Authority and part-time agencies.

The academy has created a supportive learning suite to aid students who are falling behind on their studies. Here, in a safe and secure environment, students are assessed and given one-to-one provision with a structured plan to secure a more confident return into mainstream lessons within the Academy. We believe that until students are safely cared for there will be restrictions to their academic progress.

From a safeguarding perspective, to help solve students’ complex needs, the academy has added an additional post to the safeguarding team in order to create capacity for a focus on pupil premium students.

In 2019-20 our non-teaching staff working with pupil premium students engaged with the following agencies:

Breaking silence
BEAM counselling and emotional support
Sandwell Early Intervention team (for psychosis)
Sandwell Eating Disorders Team
Birmingham Forward Thinking
Edward’s Trust Bereavement Counselling
Kaleidoscope
Exam stress groups with education psychologist
School Health Nurse drop in
Black Country Women’s Aid
Kooth online counselling
Sandwell young carers
Birmingham young carers
DECCA
CAMHS
Targeted Youth Support
Barnardos Family Support
The CSE team (based in Sandwell Children’s Services)
Brook
Barnardos SPACE (Birmingham CSE team)
ART in Dudley for victims of CSE
Family support Team (part of Birmingham Children’s Services)
Krunch (mentoring and girls group)
Brushstrokes
Smethwick Food Bank
ASIRT (advice and support for asylum seeker families)
St Chad’s Sanctuary (for refugees and asylum seekers)
RESTORE (befriending service for asylum seeker families)
Smethwick Asian Families Support Service
PREVENT team
Children In Need Emergency Essentials Fund
Jubilee Food Network
The African French Community
Smart Works Birmingham
Birmingham and Solihull Women’s Aid
RSVP
Smethwick COG
Welfare Rights
Cape Hill Children’s Centre
Shout Text Support
CEOP
Strong Minds, Brave Hearts (based at Murray Hall)
Sandwell Advocacy Voice and Empowerment (SAVE) Project

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

A large portion of the funding goes to supporting students’ equality of opportunity. This includes, but is not exclusive to, free resources such as: revision guides; stationery; uniform support; peripatetic music tuition; trips and after school activities with no charge; Saturday School; and transition Summer Schools. This direct support accounts for roughly 40% of all pupil premium spend.

We have a hard-to-reach families project that ensures that when there are missed engagements e.g. parents’ evenings or information evenings, additional effort is put in to reach those families to ensure that they are involved in students’ education.

RAISING ATTAINMENT

Raising attainment involves using specific staff to work with pupil premium students to improve their grades. Examples include:

One-to-one personalised intervention with ‘Tute’ video-conferenced lessons specifically targeted at their weaknesses.
There are a number of whole-school opportunities in which the delivery has been changed to maximise the use by pupil premium students. For example, all students have access to GCSEPod and Century Tech.
Catch-up classes in Years 7 and 8 to stop the gap forming early in the students’ experience.

MEASURING IMPACT

Impact is measured through a cohort analysis of each subject and year group for pupil premium at each assessment point. A senior member of staff is detailed to examine this data and present to the senior team and Standards and Performance Committee on recommendations for further pupil premium intervention. Approximately 10% of pupil premium spend is on senior staff to co-ordinate intervention and measure impact.

REVIEW OF STRATEGY

The current date of the Pupil Premium Strategy Review is April 2021.

IMPACT OF PUPIL PREMIUM 2018-19 SPEND FOR PUPIL PREMIUM STUDENTS

In 2018-19, pupil premium students at the academy achieved a progress 8 score of +0.31; this is ahead of the local authority average of -0.08 and the national average of +0.13 for non-disadvantaged students. Furthermore, the progress 8 score of +0.31 for disadvantaged students is on par with the progress 8 score of all students at the academy as a whole in 2018-19 (+0.30).

Year 7 catch-up funding

Our Year 7 catch-up funding is used to help fund the role of a member of staff who supports students with one-to-one and small group catch-up in literacy and reading.

In 2020-21, we have also used this funding to provide access to CAT testing for Year 7 students in order for us to identify gaps in their knowledge and skills. As a result, we have been able to accurately devise appropriate support strategies following the disruption to students’ Year 6 studies due to the Covid-19 pandemic.