Pupil premium is funding to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in schools in England. Evidence shows that disadvantaged children generally face additional challenges in reaching their potential at school and often do not perform as well as other pupils.

Our aim is to use our pupil premium funding to help us to raise attainment for all our students, so that outcomes are comparable with national outcomes, with no difference between students who are in receipt of pupil premium funding, and those who are not so that any gaps are narrowing or closed.

During the next three years, 2024-27, we will focus both our efforts and our resources on the key challenges which we believe are preventing our students, and particularly our disadvantaged students, from attaining well: reading, vocabulary, social skills and relationship building, experience of the wider world and being able to take independent control of their own learning (metacognitive strategies).

Our approach will be responsive to individual need and based on the ‘best bets’ that the evidence-base recommends to us. It will be rooted in robust diagnostic assessment, not assumptions about the impact of disadvantage. We know that all our children can be disadvantaged in some ways and at some points in their time at school. It is our belief that the best use of funding is to provide the skills, knowledge, expertise and environment for teachers and students to thrive together in the classroom, which is where we have the greatest influence over student attainment.

Our key expectation at Castle Manor Academy is that all our students, irrespective of where they sit on the spectrum of disadvantage, will learn to be great readers so that they can learn, broaden their horizons and be interested and interesting citizens. It is our ambition that all our students can have the opportunity to experience and be experienced intellectually and culturally in what the wider world has to offer.

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

• Commit to developing in every classroom the highest standards of teaching and learning so that all students are making good progress
• Ensure all our students, including those who are disadvantaged, are challenged through the work they are set, and the approach taken in every classroom
• Act early to intervene at the point a need is identified
• Adopt a whole school approach in which all staff take responsibility for disadvantaged students’ outcomes and raise expectations of what they can achieve: in all areas of our work, we have a collective responsibility for the progress and attainment of disadvantaged children

Please click on the link to the right to review our full Pupil Premium Strategy.