September is a natural time for school leaders to review priorities and think carefully about how Pupil Premium funding can make a meaningful difference to disadvantaged pupils.
The Pupil Premium is one of the most powerful tools we have for supporting education equity. An effective Pupil Premium strategy allows schools to intervene early, prevent attainment gaps from widening and support all pupils to reach their full potential.
Our updated guide is a practical, step-by-step resource for developing and implementing an effective Pupil Premium strategy that is built on a diagnosis of pupils’ needs and linked to wider school development plans.
Making time to monitor and reflect
While the 31 December publication deadline can bring the Pupil Premium strategy into sharp focus, to be fully effective it needs to remain visible and prioritised throughout the year – not just at key reporting points. To do this well, we recommend planning opportunities to pause, reflect, and use what you’re learning to inform next steps.
School leaders might ask:
- Are we implementing our strategy as intended?
- What might we need to adapt?
- What differences are our approaches making, and how do we know?
Our new monitoring and reflection resource supports Pupil Premium leads to consider points in the year when they could collect and review information about the progress of their Pupil Premium strategy to inform decisions about next steps.
One resource, different ways to use it
Regular monitoring and reflection can help schools move beyond compliance, supporting leaders to understand how their strategy is working in practice.
The three-part monitoring and reflection resource is designed to be used flexibly. That means schools can adapt it to their own context and build purposeful reflection into existing planning, review, and decision-making processes.
It includes:
- Prompts designed to support schools to monitor and reflect at different points in the year, helping to build reflection points into existing processes.
- Reflection questions to be used in meetings and collaborative planning, ensuring that the Pupil Premium strategy is a collective endeavour.
- A blank template to enable schools to reflect on their context and plan and monitor key activity throughout the year.
The Pupil Premium guide also includes videos interviews with school leaders and case studies on key issues such as attendance and literacy which can be used as prompts in leadership discussions, staff meetings, or governors’ meetings.
Used together, the updated Guide and monitoring and reflection resource can help schools keep their Pupil Premium strategy firmly in focus all year round.
Explore the updated Guide here: The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium | EEF