What is Early Years Pupil Premium?
Early Years Pupil Premium was introduced in April 2015 meaning that nurseries, schools, childminders and other childcare providers who are delivering funding entitlement for 3 and 4 year olds are able to claim extra funding to support disadvantaged children who meet the eligibility criteria.
What is the aim of Early Years Pupil Premium?
The aim of Early Years Pupil Premium is to close the gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and other children by providing additional funding to settings such as ours, therefore ensuring that these children have the best possible start to their education.
What is the impact of Early Years Pupil Premium?
Evidence shows that children from less advantaged backgrounds can start school 19 months behind their peers, but that good quality childcare can reduce this gap and have a significant benefit in terms of a child's development and the Early Years Pupil premium provides us with extra funding to close this gap, diminishing the difference.
Who is eligible for Early Years Pupil Premium?
The Early Years Pupil premium provides an extra 53 pence per hour for three to four year old children whose parents are in receipt of certain benefits or who were formally 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 ÂŁ302 per year for each child taking up the full 570 hours funded entitlement to early education. This additional money makes a significant difference to us and in order to be able to claim this funding we require parents to sign the funding agreement which asks for details of parent's date of birth and national Insurance number.
How is this funding spent?
We can use the extra funding in whatever way we choose to improve the quality of the early years education that we provide for your child. This includes:
. further training for staff in relevant areas e.g. communication and language
. purchasing additional resources
. the creation and organisation of learning and challenge bags to support learning at home including the Nursery Library
. providing additional staff to work specifically with children
. buying in services to support with areas of learning/training or to provide experiences or opportunities
. purchasing additional sessions at our school
. paying for trips/visits
What difference does Early Years Pupil premium make and how do we know?
It is well documented that high quality early education can influence how well a child does at both primary and secondary school so we do want to make the most of this additional funding. Children who receive good-quality early years education go on to earn around ÂŁ27,000 more during their career compared to those who don't, and are also likely to do better at school - the equivalent of 7 GCSE grades at grade B compared to grade C.
We measure the impact of this funding by assessing the progress of our EYPP children against the interventions that they may have in place or by the impact of strategies that have been deployed. We also pride ourselves on the fact that we support all our children to meet their needs, regardless of their situation. We have many children who we know are 'on the cusp ' of being eligible for Early Years Pupil Premium and even though school financial resources are strained, this group get the same monitoring and support out of normally available resources but also benefit from staff training or purcahsed resources or services along with their disadvantaged peers.
Our Headteacher Lynsey is responsible for Early Years Pupil Premium and she also has the overview for the implementation of the interventions. Our focus always remains on the child's needs and the staff, leaders and governors work tirelessly to ensure that through rigorous monitoring and reviewing, interventions and strategies are purposeful and progress is rapid.
The impact of Early Years Pupil premium is measured through:
. external audits
. moderation with other settings and schools, particularly within the federation
. pupil progress meetings
. questionnaires
. parental discussions
. tracking and monitoring individuals and groups
. transition meetings and follow ups
. working with outside agencies - reviewing progress
Below you will find our expenditure report of how we plan to spend our Early Years Pupil Premium Funding.