At Elton, we are committed to ensuring all our children make the best possible progress. We track the achievements of every child on a regular basis, and do all we can to make sure each child achieves his/her potential across the curriculum. We acknowledge that we have a duty to ensure that no group of children is disadvantaged due to gender, ethnic origin, family income or background.

The Pupil Premium grant, combined with the Recovery Premium Grant, enables us to build and extend upon the best practice we already endeavour to provide.

The recovery premium grant is part of the government’s package of funding to support pupils whose education has been impacted by coronavirus (COVID-19).

It is a time-limited grant providing over £300m of additional funding for state-funded schools in the 2021 to 2022 academic year and £1bn across the 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2024 academic years.

It is focused on pupil premium eligible pupils and pupils in specialist settings such as special schools, special units and pupil referral units (PRUs).This is because of the additional impact of the pandemic on these students.  Every school receives an additional £145 per pupil in receipt of the PPG.

However, schools can use it to deliver evidence-based approaches for supporting any pupil based on an assessment of individual need. The recovery premium will be allocated using the same data as the pupil premium. This means the following pupils will attract recovery premium funding to schools:

• pupils who are eligible for free school meals (FSM), including eligible children of families who have no recourse to public funds (NRPF)
• pupils who have been eligible for FSM at any point in the last 6 years
• children looked after by local authorities, referred to as looked-after children (LAC), and children previously looked after by local authorities, referred to as previously looked-after children (PLAC)

We follow the principles of the EEF report when deciding how best to spend the pupil premium and recovery premium funding the school receives: "Spending on developing high quality teaching may include investment in professional development, training and support, along with recruitment and retention. Ensuring an effective teacher is in front of every class, and that every teacher is supported to keep improving, is the key ingredient of a successful school and should rightly be a top priority for pupil premium spending."

Our second tier of spending is on targeted interventions or systems of support.  For any child not making expected progress towards achieving end of year age related expectations in any subject, we analyse their barriers to learning and ensure that they receive targeted intervention to enable them to close the gap. 

Finally, we recognise that the pupil premium grant can be invaluable for extending the breadth of the curriculum for children, and that success in enrichment and extracurricular activities for example, can have an incredibly positive impact on a child's confidence and self-esteem, enabling them to achieve more across all curriculum areas. 

This is why, we value working in partnership with our families to identify together, the best way of spending some of the funding we receive. We ask them for their input, and see if we can use the funding to make life easier in any way for the family as a whole (eg transport costs, wrap-around child-care, uniform and specialist clothing, access to extracurricular activities etc).  We recognise that every child is unique, every family's situation is unique and therefore the way in which the money is spent should also be unique and personalised whenever possible.