Pupil Premium & Sports Premium

• The Government believes that the Pupil Premium, which is additional to main school funding, is the best way to address the current underlying inequalities between children eligible for free school meals (FSM) and their wealthier peers by ensuring that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most. 

As a group, children who have been eligible for FSM at any point in time have consistently lower educational attainment than those who have never been eligible for FSM.

The Pupil Premium is allocated to children from low-income families who have been eligible for free school meals (FSM) now or at any point over the last 6 years and children who have been continuously looked after for more than six months.

• In most cases the Pupil Premium is allocated to schools and is clearly identifiable. It is for schools to decide how the Pupil Premium, allocated to schools per FSM pupil, is spent, since they are best placed to assess what additional provision should be made for the individual pupils within their responsibility.

• For pupils from low-income families in non-mainstream settings, it is for the local authority to decide how to allocate the Pupil Premium. For instance it could be allocated to the setting where they are being educated, or held by the local authority to spend specifically on additional educational support to raise the standard of attainment for these pupils. The authority must consult non-mainstream settings about how the Premium for these pupils should be used.

• Schools are free to spend the Pupil Premium as they see fit. However they will be held accountable for how they have used the additional funding to support pupils from low-income families. New measures will be included in the performance tables that will capture the achievement of those deprived pupils covered by the Pupil Premium. From September 2012, we will also require schools to publish online information about how they have used the Premium. This will ensure that parents and others are made fully aware of the attainment of pupils covered by the Premium.

• We will also provide schools with information about strategies and interventions which can improve the progress and attainment of pupils from poorer backgrounds.

Our Link Governor for PPG is Mrs L. Van Biljon

What is the Sports Premium?

The Government has been providing funding to provide quality primary PE and school sport. Each school will receive £16,000 per pupil. See the documents below for a spending breakdown and the impact it has had.

How should the funding be used?

The PE and sport premium must be spent by schools on ‘making additional and sustainable improvements to the provision of PE and sport’ for the benefit of all pupils to encourage the development of healthy, active lifestyles.

This means that the funding should be used to develop or add to the PE and sport activities that schools already offer and/or make improvements now that will benefit pupils joining the school in future years. With this in mind, schools can choose how they use the funding.

For example, funding can be used to:

• hire qualified sports coaches to work alongside teachers
• provide existing staff with training or resources to help them teach PE and sport more confidently and effectively
• introduce new sports or activities and encourage more pupils to take part
• support and involve the least active children by running or extending school sports clubs, holiday clubs and Change4Life clubs
• run sport competitions
• increase pupils’ participation in the school games
• run sports activities in partnership with other schools

Funding cannot be used:

• to employ coaches or specialist teachers to cover planning, preparation and assessment time (PPA)
• for teaching the minimum requirements of the national curriculum PE programmes of study, including those specified for swimming.

Swimming 

Here at The Deans we realise just how important it is for children to be able to swim efficiently and be able to rescue themselves from water. We teach all children to swim in Year Four for an hour per week for half a year. Those children who still struggle to swim 25m are able to complete a further set of lessons in Year 5.  We recognised that over the last two years due to the pandemic our current Year 6 children missed out on their swimming lessons, so for this year only we have provided them with additional lessons to enable them to develop this important life skill.

Swimming is not only a vital life skill, it is also a compulsory part of the National Curriculum. All children by the end of Key Stage 2 (Year 6) should be able to: 

• swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]
• perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations