What is Pupil Premium?

Pupil Premium is a government scheme that was introduced in 2011 to improve education of underprivileged children. It was launched after several research papers suggested that there was significant gap between the educational performance of disadvantaged children and their classmates. In contrast to many of their peers, many children who are eligible for Pupil Premium have to face extra challenges daily. Our strategy for 2021-24 lists some of the challenges we know to be true for some of the children of St John the Baptist School.

The scheme aims to grant schools with extra funding so that they're able to provide additional support for children who faced with these types of challenges. Its objective is to help schools unlock the learning potential of their pupils and provide them with a better education. It also aspires to narrow the gap of educational development between children of underprivileged backgrounds and their peers.

Who qualifies for Pupil Premium?

Children can be eligible for pupil premium for a variety of reasons. These include their family circumstances, such as their income or occupations, and whether or not they’re in care. If a child is eligible, a school will receive the necessary amount of funding for each child per school year.

St John the Baptist Statement of Intent

Our mission is to provide an outstanding education for our children, enabling every child of SJB to be the very best they can be. We strive to develop children’s aspirations, their self-esteem and their academic achievement in a safe and stimulating learning environment. It is vital that all learning opportunities are of a consistently high quality and therefore we work tirelessly to ensure that children attend school, ready to learn.

It is important to acknowledge that, at SJB, the grant is used to create equality of

opportunity and to negate the complexity of challenge that socioeconomic disadvantage might create. 37% of SJB community is eligible for the Pupil Premium Grant and the IDACI indicators of 2022 demonstrate that 44% of our 196 children are in the top 10% most deprived in the country. It is our intention that every single child in our community can meet their ‘God’ given potential – we allocate the pupil premium grant strategically to teaching, targeted teaching and wider structures and systems that create equality of opportunity to our safe, supportive and academically rich learning environment.

In our strategy document, we outline the actions we will take to mitigate many known effects of state-defined disadvantage. By using Pupil Premium Funding to form an

effective Welfare structure at SJB, we can ensure that children’s primary needs are best met in order that they can access our academic offer, making rapid progress from their starting points, especially in Early Reading. Our ambition here is to teach

excellently, securing annually increasing attainment indicators so as to demonstrate that the children of SJB are learning, meeting their potential due to an ambitious and rigorous curriculum.