EducationCity and the Pupil Premium

We have been pleased to see EducationCity.com being referenced in many schools’ Pupil Premium reports on their school websites. With the recent Ofsted report and the increase of the Premium from £600 to £900 per pupil EducationCity.com offers a number of features that make us a suitable resource:

Breadth of resource

EducationCity.com covers core subjects of Maths, English and Science and also offers opportunities to learn French, German, Spanish as well as English as an additional language.

Differentiated learning, tracking data and assessments

The EducationCity.com Success Tracker enables teachers to track progress by child or class. Assessments that automatically deliver personalised pathways and the use of the myCity feature enable differentiated individualised learning opportunities.

Pupil and parental engagement

As an online resource schools can choose to use EducationCity.com to set homework tasks helping to keep their pupils learning, particularly useful during holidays to prevent learning loss. It also helps to engage parents/carers by allowing them to experience what their children are learning in the classroom.

Making the most of the Pupil Premium

EducationCity.com can support learning for your targeted individual pupils that qualify for the Pupil Premium while at the same time the whole school will benefit as our award-winning resource is delivered as a modular annual site licence.

We are here to help.

If you feel that your school is not making the most of these features do not hesitate to contact us on 0844 225 3060 and we can arrange for online, telephone or face to face training.

 

Click here to read more about the Pupil Premium +

The Pupil Premium, introduced in April 2011, provides funding for disadvantaged pupils. It is allocated in addition to main school funding and was designed to address inequalities between children eligible for free schools meals (FSM) and their peers. Last year, for each pupil registered as eligible for FSM, schools received £600, which is increasing to an impressive £900 for 2013-2014.

Eligibility

The 2013 school census was conducted in January and the figures of pupils registered for FSM have been taken from here to calculate the funding each school will receive. For each pupil on the January consensus recorded as ‘Ever 6 FSM’, a school will receive £900. This term refers to pupils that have been eligible for FSM in any of the previous six years and includes pupils who were first known to be eligible in January 2013. Children with parents in the Armed Forces will also bring additional funding to their schools with a further £300 being given to the school for each service child.

Monitoring its use

The funding is mostly paid directly to schools with the intention that the schools’ head teachers and school leaders should decide how best to use it. This is because it is thought that people within the school are better placed to assess what their school most needs. While this offers a degree of flexibility with the funding, as expected, the use of it will be monitored from time to time.  The new Ofsted inspection framework for example, focuses on the attainment of pupil groups, particularly those which qualify for the Pupil Premium. Therefore, the reports of Ofsted inspectors will reflect how successful they deem a school’s use of the funding to have been. Furthermore, the government intends to hold schools accountable for their decisions through the performance tables comparing disadvantaged pupil performance with that of their peers as well as new reports for parents that schools now have to publish online.

The government is keen to make sure that schools which use the funding well and make a real difference to the attainment of disadvantaged pupils are recognised. The Pupil Premium Awards will take place in London and the best school in each English region with be given recognition and invited to attend. To enter, schools must demonstrate objectively how they used the funding to achieve measurable positive results among their disadvantaged pupils, in time for the closing date in April.

Ways to use the Pupil Premium

The grant has now been available for nearly two years so some schools are beginning to see positive results. Ofsted inspectors visited over 60 schools shortly after its introduction to follow it up and found that schools concentrating on core subjects such as literacy and numeracy saw the best results. Focussing on the key stages of a child’s development in their school career by tailoring extra activities around certain year groups has also proven to be a successful approach to spending the money.

Pupil Premium and EducationCity