Pupil Premium Grant

You may be entitled to claim free school meals if you are claiming benefits such as Income Support, Job-seekers Allowance, Child Tax Credit or support from the National Asylum Support Service.

Schools receive £1,455 a year for every child who is entitled to claim free school meals. This money is spent directly on the child, providing one to one teaching, group support, help with funding for trips, access to out of school clubs etc. Even if your child chooses not to take the actual meals, the fact that they are registered means that they are still entitled to the funding.

If you think you may qualify, you can apply in confidence by collecting a form from the school office or online here. Proof of benefit does not need to be supplied as the Council can check entitlement via a Government database.

Pupil Premium Report

The pupil premium grant is funding to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in state-funded schools in England.

The grant also provides support for children and young people with parents in the regular armed forces, referred to as service pupil premium (SPP). This has been combined into pupil premium payments to make it easier for schools to manage their spending. Pupils that the SPP intends to support are not necessarily from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.

We want to support all schools to use the wealth of evidence of ‘what works’, evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to use this funding effectively.

Funding criteria

Pupil premium funding is allocated to eligible schools based on the number of:

Pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals, or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years (referred to as Ever 6 FSM)
Children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care, including children adopted from state care or equivalent from outside England and Wales

Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils, and schools do not have to spend pupil premium so that it solely benefits pupils who meet the funding criteria. It can be used:

To support other pupils with identified needs, such as those who have or have had a social worker, or who act as a carer
For whole class interventions which will also benefit non-disadvantaged pupils

Pupil premium funding is allocated to local authorities based on the number of:

Looked-after children, supported by the local authority
Pupils who meet any of the eligibility criteria and who attend an independent setting, where the local authority pays full tuition fees

For pupils who are looked-after children, funding should be managed by the local authority’s virtual school head (VSH) in consultation with the child’s school.

Details of the funding criteria for SPP is outlined in the Service pupil premium section.

Pupil Premium Coordinator	Sam Proctor
Pupil Premium Link Governor	Jen Buckley

For further information on eligibility criteria: CLICK HERE