The pupil premium grant is funding to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in state-funded schools in England.

The grant also provides support for children and young people with parents in the regular armed forces, referred to as service pupil premium (SPP). This has been combined into pupil premium payments to make it easier for schools to manage their spending. Pupils that the SPP intends to support are not necessarily from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.

The DfE want to support all schools to use the wealth of evidence of ‘what works’, evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to use this funding effectively.

Pupil premium funding is allocated to eligible schools based on the number of:

• pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals, or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years
• children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care, including children adopted from state care or equivalent from outside England and Wales

Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils, and schools do not have to spend pupil premium so that it solely benefits pupils who meet the funding criteria. It can be used:

• to support other pupils with identified needs, such as those who have or have had a social worker, or who act as a carer
• for whole class interventions which will also benefit non-disadvantaged pupil

At The Purbeck School, we want to support all students so that they are successful and achieve their potential. 

Healthy school food has obvious health benefits and can help pupils establish healthy habits for life. Healthy school food can also help to improve pupils’ readiness to learn.

Your child may be able to get free school meals if you get any of the following:

• Income Support 
• income-based Jobseeker's Allowance
• income-related Employment and Support Allowance
• support under part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999
• the guaranteed element of Pension Credit
• Child Tax Credit. Provided you’re not also entitled to Working Tax Credit and have an annual gross income of no more than £16,190
• Working Tax Credit run on. Paid for 4 weeks after you stop qualifying for Working Tax Credit
• Universal Credit. If you apply on or after 1 April 2018 your household income must be less than £7,400 a year. This should be after tax and not including any benefits you get

To check if your child is eligible, we need information about you and your child. Please complete this online form.

Registering for free meals will raise additional money available from central government for The Purbeck School to fund valuable support like extra classes, additional staff and specific interventions. If your child is eligible for free school meals, then your child will receive additional benefits outlined in our school Pupil Premium Guarantee.

Students in receipt of free school meals are never identified by us in any way, as all students pay in the same way by using cashless catering, so nobody can tell who is receiving free school meals.

If you have any queries, then please contact the main office office@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk

The Purbeck School receives approximately £260,000 in total. It is up to school leaders to decide how to spend the pupil premium. This is because school leaders are best-placed to assess their students’ needs and use funding to improve attainment. However, The Purbeck School has created the Pupil Premium Guarantee to enhance and extend our current provision to make sure that students, whose parents or carers are on lower incomes, are not disadvantaged in any way.

At The Purbeck School, for all Pupil Premium students, our Pupil Premium Guarantee includes:

• £100 per child per academic year to go towards the cost of uniform, equipment, trips and activities. This will be held by the Business Manager but can be claimed at any time by parents/carers by contacting Mrs Katie Ayres-Turner (finance@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk). All such requests will be treated with the strictest confidence, please click the link to complete the PP Funding Request Application Form. Please note, when requesting reimbursement for uniform the school will require receipts as proof of purchase. 
• Guaranteed access to a personal laptop to aid with home and remote learning. To apply, please complete the form at Laptop Application Form
• Guaranteed access to a GCSE Study Pack (for all Y10/11 students), complete with quality revision guides and workbooks for each subject, or Knowledge Organisers (for all Y7-9 students), which can supplement both class and home learning.
• Guaranteed access to diagnostic assessments to identify gaps in learning, such as Lucid screening and exam concessions assessments.
• Guaranteed access to Study Plus, our after-school academic support sessions, to help catch up on learning, self-quiz, complete home learning and self-directed study.
• Guaranteed access to careers advice and guidance at key points in their education. Please email Michelle Scott (mscott@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk) for more information.
• Guaranteed access to a Learning Mentor to receive bespoke individual pastoral support and mentoring, where required, such as attendance, behaviour, emotional, mental health and wellbeing. Please email Rachel Stevens (rstevens@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk) for more information.
• Guaranteed access to more able events and activities, motivational and careers-based opportunities, such as visits to university and local businesses, where appropriate. Please email Jenny Bartlett (jbartlett@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk) for more information.

At The Purbeck School, for all looked-after and previously looked-after children, our Pupil Premium Guarantee also includes:

• Guaranteed access to our Mentoring Programme led by Marta Coronilla, Designated Teacher (mcoronilla@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk), to improve performance by supporting organisation, relationships, home learning and attendance

At The Purbeck School, for all Service Premium students, our Pupil Premium Guarantee also includes:

• Guaranteed access to a Service Childs Support Worker (csmith@purbeck.dorset.sch.uk) to offer pastoral support during challenging times and to help mitigate the negative impact of family mobility or parental deployment.

Our Pupil Premium spend is divided into the following four priority areas:

1.       Teaching for Mastery and the Power of Assessment and Feedback

Teaching for Mastery is a commitment that virtually all students can learn all important academic knowledge to a level of excellence if allowed the right amount of time to learn and provided with the appropriate conditions to learn.

We understand the importance of ensuring that all teaching meets the needs of each learner, rather than relying on interventions to compensate. We are developing and implementing a Mastery curriculum model, where schemes of learning are content-specific, coherent, cumulative and challenging. All lessons should include a strong start, a do now task, explicit teacher instruction, guided practice, deliberate practice and an exit routine. Teaching is responsive to the needs of students through continuous checking for understanding. High quality corrective instruction is provided to remedy gaps, errors and misconceptions in knowledge and skills. Senior leaders, middle leaders and teachers across the school are continuously developing their curriculum and their classroom practice, by linking findings from cognitive science and other research.

2.       Highly tailored interventions and more time

Diagnostic assessments identify where basic skills gaps exist among students when they arrive in Y7, through reading tests and dyslexia screening. Quality first classroom teaching helps address and close these gaps. Adaptive teaching is implemented to support the needs of all students. Sparx Reader gives all students access to a rich range of books, pitched to support them increase their reading ages, with quizzes throughout to support engaged reading. Students who have a KS2 standardised score in Maths less than 90 are assigned to our Nurture Maths classes and receive an additional two lessons per cycle.

3.       Minimising barriers to achievement

We have thought carefully about what barriers to learning our students are experiencing, and how to remove or, at least, minimise them. As part of the Pupil Premium Guarantee, students will have access to a range of mentors to enable them to make progress with their learning. We have employed an Inclusion Lead, two Attendance Officers, a Service Child Liaison Officer, a LAC Coordinator and two Mental Health Well-being Leads to provide well-targeted support to improve behaviour and attendance, and to support student’s mental wellbeing. Our Learning Mentors will strengthen links with families where these are barriers to a student’s learning.

4.       Raising aspirations and broadening experiences

Our priority is to support every child fulfil their potential, encourage all students to raise aspirations, and to progress onto higher education or into a career of their choice. We support our disadvantaged students financially by subsidising costs for trips and extracurricular opportunities. The Careers Information, Advice & Guidance Education programme at The Purbeck School aims to encourage all students to develop skills that will enable them to make the transition into further or higher education, apprenticeships and accredited training in employment.  It aims to offer objective and impartial advice from a range of talks, activities and individual interviews. All students are offered a careers appointment to discuss their next steps, whether this is thinking about GCSE options, Post16 education or beyond

• 2022-23 GCSE Exam results
• 2023-24 GCSE Exam results (Data taken from SISRA Analytics in September 2024 prior to tables checking exercise)
• Attainment 8 score of disadvantaged pupils has increased from 36.5 to 43.6
• Progress 8 score of disadvantaged pupils has increased from -0.35 to 0.38 (unvalidated)
• Percentage of students achieving grades 9-4 in English & Maths has increased from 33% to 61%
• Percentage of students achieving grades 9-4 in English & Maths has increased from 23% to 30%