What is the Pupil Premium?
The Pupil Premium is allocated to children from low-income families who are currently known to be eligible for FSM in both mainstream and non-mainstream settings and children who have been looked after continuously for more than six months. Eligibility for the Pupil Premium in 2012-13 was extended to pupils who have been eligible for free school meals (FSM) at any point in the last 6 years.
What is Service Premium?
There is also a Service Premium which is additional government funding for children whose parents are currently serving in the armed forces and is designed to help schools address the specific emotional and social needs of these children.
What is the Sport Premium?
The Sport Premium is government funding used to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of PE and sport in school by developing or adding to the physical education and sport activities the school already offers; making improvements now that will benefit pupils joining the school in future years.
How are the Pupil Premium, Service Premium and Sport Premiums spent?
Over the past year we have used this additional funding in a variety of ways to ensure that eligible children (all in the case of Sport Premium) receive every opportunity to be successful and make the most of their opportunities here at Swanton Morley. This includes such things as greater levels of pastoral and welfare support, additional one to one tuition (that targets those children from identified groups), enhanced in-class support and further interventions to support learning. In the case of the Sport Premium, the funding has been used for buying in professional sport-specific coaching, subscribing to the School Sports Partnership and to make improvements to the grounds, equipment and sports infrastructure at school. In September 2022 we also used some of this funding to buy in ‘realPE’ in order to revitalise our PE curriculum as well as replace our old overhead projector with a new state of the art long-throw projector in the school hall.
The school endeavours to get the best value for money from any funding it receives. To assist with this, the school leadership and the Governors have taken in to account the findings of the ‘Toolkit for Strategies to Improve Learning’ produced by The Sutton Trust for Durham University.