What is Pupil Premium?

Pupil Premium is a government scheme that was introduced in 2011 to improve education of underprivileged children. It was launched after several research papers suggested that there was significant gap between the educational performance of disadvantaged children and their classmates. In contrast to many of their peers, many children who are eligible for Pupil Premium have to face extra challenges daily. Our strategy for 2021-24 lists some of the challenges we know to be true for some of the children of Whitehawk.

The scheme aims to grant schools with extra funding so that they're able to provide additional support for children who faced with these types of challenges. Its objective is to help schools unlock the learning potential of their pupils and provide them with a better education. It also aspires to narrow the gap of educational development between children of underprivileged backgrounds and their peers.

Who qualifies for Pupil Premium?

Children can be eligible for pupil premium for a variety of reasons. These include their family circumstances, such as their income or occupations, and whether or not they’re in care. If a child is eligible, a school will receive the necessary amount of funding for each child per school year.

City Academy Whitehawk Statement of Intent

Our mission is to provide an outstanding education for our children, enabling every child of Whitehawk to be the very best they can be. We strive to develop children’s aspirations, their self-esteem and their academic achievement in a safe and stimulating learning environment. It is vital that all learning opportunities are of a consistently high quality and therefore we work tirelessly to ensure that children attend school, ready to learn.

It is important to acknowledge that, in Whitehawk, the grant is used to create equality of opportunity and to negate the complexity of challenge that socioeconomic disadvantage might create. 67% of the City Academy Whitehawk community is eligible for the Pupil Premium Grant and the IDACI indicators of 2022 demonstrate that 85% of our 400 children are in the top 10% most deprived in the country. If more than 8 out of every 10 children of our school community lives in state-defined disadvantage, the principle behind our funding allocation is that structures and systems at CAW will enable every child to succeed. It is our intention that every single child in our community can meet their potential – we allocate the pupil premium grant strategically to teaching, targeted teaching and wider structures and systems that create equality of opportunity to our safe, supportive and academically rich learning environment.

In our strategy document, we outline the actions we will take to mitigate many known effects of state-defined disadvantage. By using Pupil Premium Funding to form an effective welfare structure at City Academy Whitehawk, we can ensure that children’s primary needs are best met in order that they can access our academic offer, making rapid progress from their starting points, especially in Early Reading. GAG funding is then allocated to ensure that our Quality of Education Team can accelerate pupil progress and secure academic achievement – our ambition here is to teach excellently, securing annually increasing attainment indicators so as to demonstrate that the children of Whitehawk are learning, meeting their potential due to an ambitious and rigorous curriculum that is worthy of emulation.

Please see below for our latest Pupil Premium Review & Strategy documents.