Start with the pupil, not the funding label. Find out what’s actually getting in the way of their learning, choose a strategy that fits that barrier, and decide in advance what success will look like so you can tell whether the money worked. Good pupil premium training should leave you with that habit, whether it comes as a course, a workshop or a day of CPD.
The rest of this post takes each step in turn, along with the mistakes schools make most often.
What is the pupil premium, and who is eligible?
The pupil premium arrived in 2011. It’s extra money for schools in England to support disadvantaged pupils: those who are or have been eligible for free school meals, children who are looked after or were previously looked after, and service children.
People often search for the “threshold” for pupil premium. In practice, eligibility follows free school meals. The free school meals rules (including the income limits for families on Universal Credit) are set by the Department for Education and change from time to time, and so do the funding rates. Check the current DfE guidance rather than a figure you read last year, and ask your school business manager what your school actually receives.
Why doesn’t eligibility tell you who needs help?
Because it’s a blunt measure. Free school meals eligibility is a rough stand-in for educational disadvantage, and it misses a lot. Plenty of eligible pupils are doing fine. Some who aren’t eligible are struggling badly. Some pupils have simply had fewer chances at home for the conversations, trips and experiences that school quietly assumes, and that gap shows up in lessons.
Pupil premium children aren’t one group either. An average for “the PP cohort” hides big differences between the pupils in it, and in most schools the numbers are too small to draw firm conclusions from a single year’s data.
None of this means the funding is wasted. It means the plan has to be built child by child, because there’s no such thing as a typical pupil premium pupil.
Step one: identify each pupil’s barriers to learning
Before you choose any intervention, ask a plain question about each pupil: what’s stopping them doing as well as their peers? It sounds obvious, and it’s the step schools skip most. Usually that’s because they assume every eligible pupil is disadvantaged in the same way.
Talk to the staff who know the child. Look at their attendance, their reading, their work in class, what they say about school. Some barriers will be academic (a weak grasp of number, a narrow vocabulary). Others will be pastoral or practical. And some eligible pupils won’t have a barrier worth spending on at all. That’s fine to record.
Step two: choose pupil premium teaching strategies that fit
Once you know the barrier, you can choose the response. The course makes the case that the commonest barrier is cultural capital: the knowledge of the world, and the language to talk about it, that some children pick up at home from books, trips, the news and conversation. New learning sticks to what a child already knows. A pupil who arrives with less of that finds the curriculum harder to get into, and the gap tends to widen as they move through school.
Vocabulary is the most practical place to start. Here’s what schools do with the funding:
- teamwork tasks that mix pupils with wide vocabularies and narrow ones, so everyone hears richer language from people their own age
- small sessions outside lessons (so nobody misses class) that teach the reading habits skilled readers use without thinking
- money for reading for pleasure, in every subject and not only English
- work with families and the local community, such as help for parents with their own literacy, or library and museum visits for children who wouldn’t otherwise go
Whatever you pick, a few principles hold. Teaching in the classroom comes first, and bolt-on activities come second. Put your strongest staff with the pupils who need most. Train the teachers and teaching assistants who already know them rather than buying in people who don’t. Start early, not in the run-up to exams. And keep expectations high: the point is to remove a barrier, not to treat disadvantaged pupils as less able.
What makes an intervention work?
If you do fund interventions, the ones that work share four traits.
They’re short. Plan them for a set time, ideally less than a term, and extend only if the evidence says so. Booking a pupil into something for a whole year is usually a mistake.
They’re intensive: three or more sessions a week, each of 20 to 50 minutes, rather than one long session.
They’re focused and tailored. “Improve literacy” is too broad. “Know the plot of the novel we’re studying” or “use embedded quotations in an essay” is something you can teach and check.
And they’re monitored while they run. Feedback from the pupil and the teacher counts. Wait until the end to find out whether it worked and the time and money have already gone.
Step three: set success criteria you can check
Before you start, write down what you expect to see. You’re trying to narrow the gap between your disadvantaged pupils and other pupils nationally, and the gaps within your own school, so each aim should point that way.
One rule is worth the time on its own. If an aim is pastoral, such as better attendance or fewer exclusions, tie it to an academic outcome too. Better attendance matters, but the pupil premium exists to raise attainment, and unless you link the two you won’t know whether the spending made a difference.
It also makes your published pupil premium strategy statement easier to write and easier to defend: each line of spending has a barrier behind it and a measure in front of it.
What should pupil premium training cover?
If you’re the pupil premium lead, or you’ve just been handed the job, look for CPD that does three things. It should help you identify barriers pupil by pupil rather than by group. It should give you a way of choosing strategies that match those barriers, with enough on vocabulary and cultural capital to act on. And it should help you set success criteria that tell you, during the year and not just at the end, whether the money is working.
Our course Succeed with the pupil premium with this 3-point plan follows that sequence. You can find more for senior and middle leaders on our leadership topic page.
Succeed with the pupil premium is a short online course for pupil premium leads, senior leaders and governors who want the funding to make a measurable difference. It covers why eligibility is a poor guide on its own, how to identify each pupil’s barriers, how to build cultural capital and close the vocabulary gap, what effective interventions have in common and how to set success criteria you can check. There’s a downloadable list of common barriers to use in your own school. See the course.