At Strathmore Infant and Nursery school, our intention is that all pupils, irrespective of their background or the challenges they face, make good progress and achieve high attainment across all subject areas. Pupils will feel proud of their achievements and set high expectations of themselves.

The focus of our pupil premium strategy is to support disadvantaged pupils to achieve this goal whilst continuing to develop their sense of positive well-being. Promoting high self-esteem and teaching children how to understand emotional intelligence is at the heart of our vision. Pupils need to feel safe and happy in order to make progress. 

Our next priority is to ensure high-quality teaching is paramount across the whole school. Teachers feel confident to support disadvantaged pupils with specific areas of development and plan engaging lessons that build on prior knowledge and focus on retrieval methods. Staff create an environment that scaffolds rich conversations and modelling of key vocabulary in order to remove barriers to prior and new learning. This will in turn provide children accessibility and a better understanding of knowledge and skills within the curriculum.

We pride ourselves on offering a range of cultural and diverse experiences that reflect our school community. Our aim is to provide non-disadvantaged pupils with the same offer that their peers may receive. Our aim is that disadvantaged pupils will make the same or greater progress than their non-disadvantaged peers in all areas of the curriculum.

Our strategy is integral to wider school plans for education recovery, notably in its targeted support for pupils whose education has been worst affected, including non-disadvantaged pupils. This has been identified through daily assessment for learning and regular discussions with the senior leadership team.

The approaches we have adopted complement each other to help pupils excel. To ensure they are effective we will:

• stretch and challenge our disadvantaged pupils in all areas of learning
• act early to intervene at the point need is identified
• adopt a whole school approach in which all staff take responsibility for disadvantaged pupils’ outcomes and raise expectations of what they can achieve 

Purpose of Pupil Premium Funding

The government believes that the pupil premium, which is additional to main school funding, is the best way to address the current underlying inequalities between children eligible for free school meals (FSM) and their peers by ensuring that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most.

The pupil premium funding is allocated to schools to work with pupils who have been registered for free school meals. It is not ring-fenced to those children and can be spent in any way that the school sees fit, so long as the school is able to demonstrate that the specific needs of FSM pupils have been addressed and how this additional funding is being used. 

School leaders and governing boards need to ensure that their school is tracking the progress of pupils in receipt of FSM to demonstrate how the school is using pupil premium grant funding.