Pupil premium is a fund introduced by the Department for Education in 2011 with the aim to improve the education of all pupils. How it gets used is up to the school – they’re each given the scope to choose how best to use this fund to help their pupils.
But what’s the best way to spend it? Here’s a run-down of how it works and how you can use pupil premium to help your pupils achieve their best in exams and beyond. You can also take a look at this article for other creative ways to spend your pupil premium.
Secondary schools are allocated an annual £935 per pupil on free school meals. This is to help narrow the gap between children of different socio-economic backgrounds, with the view to helping everyone do better as a result of the school being supported.
Although the way schools spend their pupil premium budget is monitored by the government, schools are left to decide how they use their fund themselves. While it’s great that you can choose what’s best for your pupils, we know the pressure to get positive results, along with all the other challenges our schools face today, means deciding how to spend your pupil premium budget is no mean feat.
When deciding how to use your school’s pupil premium budget in the coming year, the first step is to make a solid plan. Here are some top tips:
There are lots of creative ways that schools have used pupil premium funding to help their disadvantaged pupils. Along with spending strategies, having an ethos of ambitious achievements and high attainment across the school, enforced by all teachers is key to making the most of the resources at hand.
But what can schools spend pupil premium on that actually improves pupils’ learning? Here are six top ways to achieve this with your pupil premium funding:
Since we were founded in 2013, we’ve provided one-to-one online tuition in over 350 schools. The schools tend to pay for this using part of their pupil premium funds to give every pupil a better chance to boost their grades. We work directly with teachers to make sure tutorials reinforce classroom learning. The one-to-one time a pupil gets with a tutor supplements the time their teacher spends with everyone in class. Anything pupils were too shy to ask in class, or a topic they couldn’t grasp at the pace of teaching can be looked over and resolved in the personal setting of our online classroom.
We have thousands of excellent tutors across the UK who love helping school pupils do their best. They’re all at top UK universities, so as well as being super-friendly and high academic achievers, they also act as personal mentors for each of the pupils who they help. Especially for kids who don’t know anyone else who’s been to university, one-to-one tutorials work to boost aspirations and confidence while helping with tricky topics and exam revision.
In just a term’s worth of lessons, we see an average of a whole grade’s improvement (often more) per pupil. The teachers we’ve worked with have been really happy with the results they’ve seen too. Laura Toovey, the Assistant Head of Tring School in Hertfordshire, told us,
“The reason we started to use MyTutor is because I believe you need to try something different. It was recommended to us by someone who’d already used it, and we thought let’s give it a go and see what happens. We started with a group of 20, and very quickly we grew to a group of 40 and it’s been fantastic.”
At MyTutor, we want to keep helping as many students as possible achieve their full potential. If you’d like to find out more about using MyTutor in your school, email richard@mytutor.co.uk or call us on 0203 773 6020.
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