Pupil Premium 2014-15

In 2014-15, the Pupil Premium allocation to Forest Gate Academy was £176,955 which equates to 136 pupils and was worth £1300 per pupil aggregated over the financial year.

Breakdown of Total Spend

pupilpremium2015

The above chart shows the breakdown of the funding spend.

The Pupil Premium is grant funding and is in addition to the School’s Delegated Budget. It is allocated to children from low-income families, children who are in local authority care, children adopted from local authority care and children with parent(s) in the Armed Forces. Pupil Premium Funding is used to raise attainment, promote social skills, independent learning and positive behaviour in order to increase pupil progress.

The Purpose of the Pupil Premium Grant

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 peers by ensuring that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most.

It is for the school to decide how the Pupil Premium is spent. However, schools 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 the pupils covered by the Pupil Premium.

At Forest Gate Academy we target additional support strategies to enable every student, however financially disadvantaged, to:

  • Improve their levels of progress and attainment
  • Close attainment gaps relative to school averages
  • Have full access to the curriculum
  • Access extra-curricular provision

Funding has been directed to support the following interventions:

  • Uniform & Kit
  • Equipment and Resources
  • Rewards/Incentives
  • Staffing & Intervention including booster classes
  • Assessment
  • Educational Trips, Visits and Visitors
  • Training for intervention

The impact of this funding has been to support and enhance our existing intervention strategies for students who would otherwise have been disadvantaged and has allowed them to experience the full range of opportunities offered.

Pupil Premium Expenditure and Impact 2014-15

Attendance and Behaviour

Monitoring strategies and the introduction of incentives to improve attendance has shown attendance across all year groups has increased. In 2014-15 Pupil Premium pupils had 94.4% attendance compared to Non-Pupil Premium pupils where attendance was 96.2%. Reward systems have impacted positively on children’s engagement within lessons and the wider life of the school, in particular the weekly celebration and awards assemblies. Families’ needs are better addressed through the employment of a SCIPS (Social Care in Primary Schools) worker whose role is mainly pastoral and has been instrumental in facilitating appropriate support from a multi-agency viewpoint and engaging parents in the process.  

Trips Visitors

The School has funded a number of social & cultural visits for identified pupils, often linked closely to their termly learning topics. Pupil and staff surveys reveal positive feedback on all these events.The costs associated with social/cultural visits, which provide vital cultural, social and enrichment experiences for pupils, are often a barrier to those pupils with free school meals or from low income families. Pupil Premium funding has enabled these costs to be subsidised for eligible pupils, thus allowing greater access to the same high quality and exciting opportunities offered by these experiences. Artis come into school once a week and work with the EYFS and Year 1 pupils to encourage confidence and expression through music, dance and drama.

‘It was really scary and must have been very frightening for the children who had to go down there in the war’

Year 5 – Stockport Air raid Shelters visit

Equipment & Resources

Topics are thoroughly resourced and guided reading books are now more appropriate for our children and reading engagement and standards have improved as a result. Software and books ensure that we have better resources directly aimed at children’s needs. Class act film studio has been purchased as an alternative resource to help improve literacy levels as well as assist in engaging those school pupils that are hard to reach.

‘I didn’t believe how much science you can do just using red cabbage and everyday items! We did loads of experiments including making a tester for acids and alkalis – we even made some gloop from polymers!’

Science with Cabbage Year 6

Uniform & Kit

Forest Gate Academy helped provide students with school sweatshirts, polo shirts, book bags, planners, PE kit and bags. All new Pupil Premium entrants are offered free uniform on enrolment.

I learnt how to build a den, it was fun!’

Reception – Delamere Forest

Achievement

(Staffing, Intervention, Training & Assessment)

A wider range of focused interventions are now in place and this continues to increase the performance of Pupil Premium children. Support needs are now fully addressed by closely monitored interventions and deployment of staff. Staff have completed specific numeracy and literacy training to ensure that all lessons are delivered to children’s specific needs.

Impact of Pupil Premium on Achievement

The impact of Pupil Premium is measured in two ways. Firstly we compare the performance of pupils eligible for Pupil Premium Funding against the performance of those who are not and against National Expectation. Our disadvantaged pupils continue to attain above the national disadvantaged group in Reading, Writing and Maths and the 2015 cohort outperformed disadvantaged pupils in all areas based upon Value Added measures and was 0.1% below national other.

The RaiseOnline report for Forest Gate, alongside the school’s own tracking systems, indicate that year-on-year progress is consistently improving for disadvantaged children:

  • Year 6 children making expected progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2 at Level 4 was above the national non-disadvantaged by 9% in Reading, 9% in Maths and 5% in Writing.
  • At Level 5, the disadvantaged gap has narrowed by 9% in Maths, 10% in Reading, 19% in Writing and 29% in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling from the 2013-14 figures.
  • In Key Stage 1, the gap between the school’s disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children has reduced by 3% in Writing and 2% in Maths compared to the previous year.
  • In all areas except Reading the gap between school and national has reduced, for example the overall Average Point Score has reduced by 0.7% in Maths, 0.9% in Writing and 1.8% in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling.
  • With writing as the focus, disadvantaged pupils in Year 6 have outperformed non-disadvantaged national pupils in attaining Level 5 in 2015 – the first time that the school has achieved this in the last 3 years, and the gap between the school’s own children has remained positive in favour of disadvantaged pupils for the last 3 years.

The Raise inspection dashboard (October 2015) included the following comments in the “Strengths in 2015” statement:

KS2 value added in all subjects was broadly average or above for disadvantaged pupils and those who have special educational needs.

Disadvantaged KS2 pupils had an average point score equal to or above the national score for other pupils in writing & mathematics.

The proportion of disadvantaged KS2 pupils that attained at least Level 4 was equal to or above the national figure for other pupils in writing & Mathematics.

The proportion of disadvantaged KS2 pupils that attained at least Level 5 was equal to or above the national figure for other pupils in writing & mathematics.

The second way in which we measure the impact of Pupil Premium is through the quality of the activities or intervention that we provide. Each activity concludes with a review by staff and pupils indicating success against the intended outcomes.

What projects will run in 2015-2016?

For 2015-2016 Forest Gate Academy intends to continue to fund similar interventions to those used in 2014-15 as this has had a positive impact on narrowing the gap of overall achievement and has helped to ensure all our students have full access to all the opportunities available at Forest Gate Academy.

Specific plans include:

  • Continuing to invest in the Artis provision to promote speaking, listening, drama and performance in the early years.
  • Further implementation of the Class Act Film Studio offering children a purposeful medium for writing and presentation via the foyer plasma TV.
  • Provision of musical instruments (recorders) to all disadvantaged children in Key Stage 2.
  • Continued investment in staff training for the delivery of intervention programmes in English and Maths.
  • Continued growth of the school reading book library to offer appealing texts and genres to disadvantaged children.
  • Continued investment in real-life experiences including egg hatching, adventure, team-building and problem solving activities, residentials and educational visits.
  • Continued investment in reward systems for progress, achievement, learning attitude and aspiration, and attendance.