The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium

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Step 4: Deliver and monitor your strategy

Supporting staff to put the approaches into practice will help them take ownership and successfully carry out the strategy. This will include providing effective professional development for staff where appropriate. Monitoring how the strategy is delivered, and regularly using information to reflect and adapt, allows you to stay flexible and make changes when needed.

Step 4 can support you in developing the ‘intended outcomes’ section of DfE’s Pupil Premium strategy template.

Put it into practice

Provide practical and social support to help implement your strategy well

Practical considerations include preparing people, the approach, and school systems and structures. Social support might mean creating opportunities for teachers to discuss problems, share insights, and provide peer support and assistance.

See ‘A School’s Guide to Implementation’ guidance report for more information.

When people work collaboratively during implementation, they can share knowledge and expertise, bounce ideas off each other, and solve problems together…Leaders should help people understand how their individual roles contribute to the collective endeavour.

Stacey Jordan

Director, Staffordshire Research School

Observe every new activity in action.

Monitoring helps you to understand what’s working, for whom, in which circumstances, and why. Reflecting on these aspects brings the strategy to life within the reality of your school context.

Reflect and adapt

Monitoring is most effective when it follows a simple, repeatable process:

  • Identifying what to look for;
  • Tracking what is happening in practice;
  • Deciding what, if anything, needs to change.

This may include drawing on a small number of signs of progress related to whether an approach is being delivered as intended. Consider progress towards your final outcomes so you can target support and make improvements throughout the year. Adaptations should focus on how an approach is delivered rather than changes to its core components.

This video explores the importance of monitoring approaches over time.

Video length: 02:22

This video exemplifies monitoring as a feedback cycle.

Video length: 01:49

Take action

Do ensure that professional development is an ongoing process.

Don’t treat professional development as a ‘one-off event’ such as one PD day in September.

Do unite staff, pupils and parents around why monitoring implementation is important and how data will be used. Communicate changes.

Don’t assume that the presence of a monitoring system guarantees its use.

Do actively engage staff in deciding what information will be useful, when, and why.

Don’t confuse monitoring with accountability.