Our Rationale for Pupil Premium Spending

At Churchill, our primary goal is to ensure that our children leave us as well-rounded citizens, fully prepared for the next stage in their education.

Looking at this in a little more detail we aim to ensure all our children:

• achieve as highly as they are able
• are academically prepared to thrive at secondary school
• find joy in success, be it academic, sporting, musical, artistic or another area
• are confident at building and maintaining positive relationships
• demonstrate kindness and respect to all people however different or similar they may be
• understand our school's values and why they are important
• have the beginnings of their own set of personal values
• have the self-esteem and self-confidence to make the most of their innate gifts and talents

To achieve these aims with our Pupil Premium children, we use the funding we receive in a variety of ways. With limited numbers of children in receipt of Pupil Premium, some of the interventions we put in place are shared by children who are not, in order to make these groups viable and promote good progress for all children as well as Pupil Premium children.

Many of our interventions are linked directly to the curriculum and, in particular, core subjects:

• We provide additional support through small group teaching, 1:1 teaching and in-class support to accelerate progress in all areas of English and maths, as it is widely recognised that attainment in these subjects underpins success across the curriculum at secondary school level.
• We provide technology and access to relevant computer programs which are proven to support learning in the above subjects and across the wider curriculum.
• We provide a range of strategies to support the development of a love of literature and reading.

Alongside this academic input, we provide a range of interventions to address some of the issues children can experience in their early lives, which if ignored impact on their learning and success in the school environment. To understand the reasoning for these, it is helpful to look at Maslow's hierarchy of need.

This shows, starting at the base and working up towards the peak, what any human being needs in order to thrive. Where elements of this hierarchy are missing, the individual concerned will find it more difficult to fulfil their potential in life. As a school, we work in close partnership with our families to ensure all our pupils have all the elements they need in order to achieve their potential. To this end, the school is sometimes able use funding, following careful consideration of individual circumstances, to benefit children in the following ways:

• Help with sourcing uniform
• Transport
• Support with attendance
• Funding for trips and visits
• Mentoring
• Counselling
• Secondary Transition work
• Effective Communication interventions
• Additional music or sports provision
• Extra clubs and activities
• Breakfast Club
• Social skills workshops and friendship circle work

There is no expectation that all pupil premium children will receive identical support; indeed the allocation of budget for each child feeds into the schools budget for pupil premium, rather being ring fenced for an individual child. Some children will need more than others and each child is individual with individual circumstances. The school considers how to allocate pupil premium money to different interventions and projects on an annual basis, following rigorous data analysis and careful consideration of the needs of the pupils within this group. We use information from the Education Endowment Fund Teaching and Learning Toolkit to research those interventions which provide the best results and value for money.