The Department for Education has announced that as of September 2013, Ofsted will place a greater emphasis on schools’ performance on disadvantaged pupils. The Pupil Premium will mean an extra £900 per eligible pupil from September, to be used by schools to raise attainment for all disadvantaged pupils and close what the government has called “the unacceptable attainment gap” between them and their peers.The new measures, announced by Schools Minister David Laws, include:
- increasing schools’ accountability on disadvantaged pupils’ attainment
- schools judged as ‘requiring improvement’ will undergo a Pupil Premium review, supported by a headteacher with a strong track record in this area
- the appointment of John Dunford as the National Pupil Premium Champion
Sharper focus on closing the attainment gap
From September 2013, Ofsted will introduce a sharper focus on the performance and progress of Pupil Premium students in their inspections. The government has said: “It is unlikely that a school will be judged ‘outstanding’ if its disadvantaged pupils are not making good progress.”Schools will be inspected on:
- the attainment of their disadvantaged pupils
- the progress made by their disadvantaged pupils
- the in-school attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers
How schools use the Pupil Premium
The Department for Education has also published an independent
evaluation of the Pupil Premium, carried out by social researchers TNS-BMRB and the universities of Manchester and Newcastle. In a survey of 1,240 schools, they found that:
- 80% of secondary schools have introduced new support and/or enhanced their existing support for disadvantaged pupils as a direct result of the Pupil Premium
- Two-thirds of schools thought they would not be able to do as much for their disadvantaged pupils without the Pupil Premium
- 70% of schools use evidence from other schools and 45% use academic research to help them make decisions on how to spend their Pupil Premium funding
Schools have been warned that they must use the Pupil Premium funding specifically for disadvantaged learners and that it can’t be used for things like improving classrooms or to offset budget cuts elsewhere.
More to be done
Schools Minister David Laws said:
“It is vital we support disadvantaged pupils to fulfil their potential. We introduced the Pupil Premium to give headteachers a funding boost to achieve that aim and the evaluation showed promising signs of its impact.“However, there is much more to be done. Disadvantaged pupils’ attainment is unacceptably low compared with their peers. Schools must shoulder the responsibility to reverse that, and the government must help them do that as well as hold them to account.“I am pleased that Ofsted will add considerable weight to its scrutiny of the progress of disadvantaged pupils during its school inspections. And the Pupil Premium review process will help struggling schools to form a plan of action to ensure they are using this significant extra money effectively.”Three ways vision2learn can help with your Pupil Premium strategy
Vision
2learn for
schools is an ideal way to invest the Pupil Premium and can be justified to Ofsted under accountability requirements:
- Proven to raise attainment: We recently commissioned independent research which found that schools in areas of high deprivation using vision2learn online learning courses and resources outperform their expected attainment levels, and the longer they’ve used vision2learn the better their results are. See the research now.
- Chosen as a Pupil Premium investment by more and more schools: Schools choose vision2learn as a Pupil Premium investment to raise attainment amongst their disadvantaged learners because it offers a tangible and measurable investment, as required by Ofsted. See how these schools use vision2learn.
- Backed up by government-endorsed research on what works: The Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, compiled by Durham University academics, highlights the most effective strategies for using the Pupil Premium, and many of these strategies are clearly supported by vision2learn. See how vision2learn stacks up against the research.
If you’re looking for effective ways to invest your Pupil Premium to raise attainment amongst FSM pupils, just get in touch to find out more.