Making the difference for disadvantaged pupils.

At Central Region Schools Trust our vision is to develop confident and creative young people who thrive in a changing world. We ensure this is the case by providing a broad and ambitious curriculum for all, with an emphasis on targeted support, where needed, to stop a pupil’s circumstances affecting their academic progress and therefore life chances. Our priority is to implement our vision through highly effective classroom teaching supplemented by interventions to support vulnerable learners. In planning our Pupil Premium Strategy, we have drawn on a range of experience, evidence-based research and best practice from across the Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit which found that the most important factor in improving narrowing the disadvantage gap is effective teaching day after day. High quality Teaching and Learning is therefore the most effective strategy in narrowing this gap but our schools’ plans also detail a range of out of lesson interventions to support pupils further. The causes and consequences of disadvantage affect all pupils differently and as such our interventions are bespoke and targeted depending on school, phase and context. All leaders in each academy, including the Governors, are committed to ensuring the Pupil Premium funding is targeted to provide the best possible outcomes to pupils that may be at a disadvantage. 

The Trust uses the EEF tiered approach. EEF’s pupil premium guide . 

1. High Quality Teaching
2. Targeted Academic Support
3. Wider Strategies relating to significant non-academic barriers including attendance, behaviour and Social and Emotional Learning/support.

The tiered approach is managed by schools but with mandatory aspects (For e.g 5 agreed approaches to classroom organisation.  These include each teacher knowing all their Pupil Premium pupils and ensuring thoughtful seating arrangements are in place to support those pupils).  All schools use Thrive or Pass to support profiling so schools can disrupt emerging patterns which cause concern.  All data is always broken down to include sub-groups of Pupil Premium (including when monitoring online remote learning and device access during the global pandemic).  All Trust schools are driven by a moral imperative to improve outcomes and experiences for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds and all schools understand the tiered approach and agreed focus areas within each tier (see Appendix 1).  As a Trust we are committed to improving our expertise as leaders and teachers working with the disadvantaged and most vulnerable learners and are working closely with the EEF, the guidance documents and the Big Picture teaching and Learning Toolkit EEF Big Picture

Implementation:

The implementation of the strategy will include the core expert strategy group chaired by the Trust School Improvement Leader and including the Chair for The Trust Reading Strategy and additionally the pupil premium leaders from all Trust schools. 

All schools use the EEF Guide on Supporting school  planning using the tiered approach as an overarching document to identify main areas of focus against the tiers  

All schools as part of the pupil premium allocations and conditions of grant for 2021 to 2022, demonstrate,  how their spending decisions are informed by research evidence and use the strategy statement templates to publish their pupil premium strategy

All schools have a detailed Pupil Premium Implementation Plan which sits  beneath these two headline documents.  These implementation plans are supported by the EEF implementation documentation template to aid discussion and all plans link into School Improvement Plans.

EEF Guide to Supporting School Planning – Tiered Model: