Pupil Premium / Free School Meals

Pupil Premium

Publicly-funded schools in England get extra funding from the government to help them improve the attainment of their disadvantaged pupils.

Evidence shows that children from disadvantaged backgrounds:

  • generally face extra challenges in reaching their potential at school
  • often do not perform as well as their peers

The pupil premium grant is designed to allow schools to help disadvantaged pupils by improving their progress and the exam results they achieve.

If you feel your child may be eligible for this funding please complete the Free School Meals & Pupil Premium Application form so we can check your child’s eligibility on your behalf.

Early Years Pupil Premium

From April 2015, nurseries, schools, childminders and other childcare providers have been able to claim extra funding through the Early Years Pupil Premium to support children’s development, learning and care.

National data and research tells us that children eligible for free school meals tend to do less well, for example in 2014, 45% of children eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level at the end of the early years foundation stage compared with 64% of other children.  The Early Years Pupil Premium will provides Early Years settings with extra funding to close this gap.  

The Early Years Pupil Premium provides an extra 53 pence per hour for three and four year old children whose parents are in receipt of certain benefits or who were formerly in local authority care but who left care because they were adopted or were subject to a special guardianship or child arrangements order.  This means an extra £302 a year for each child taking up the full 570 hours funded entitlement to early education.  

Early Years settings can use the extra funding to improve the quality of the early years education that they provide. This could include, for example, additional training for our staff on early language, investing in partnership working with our colleagues in the area to further our expertise or supporting our staff in working on specialised areas such as speech and language.  

An Early Years Pupil Premium Application Form should be completed and returned to the school so that we are able to check your eligibility to this funding on your behalf.