Using pupil premium: guidance for school leaders

Question 1

What this guidance is for

Accepted Answer

This document is non-statutory guidance for school leaders and those involved in managing the use of pupil premium in schools, such as academy trust leaders, trustees and governors. It is to help you make best use of pupil premium funding and ensure you adhere to the conditions of grant including:

using pupil premium in line with the menu of approaches
publishing a strategy statement on your school website by 31 December using DfE’s strategy statement template

If you have a multi-year strategy, you must still publish an updated version each year.

It may also be useful for parents and local authorities who want to know how schools can use their pupil premium effectively and understand the related reporting requirements.

There is a separate guidance document that gives a brief overview of the pupil premium for school staff, parents and anyone with an interest.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guide to the pupil premium complements this document. We encourage all schools to use it in developing their pupil premium strategies.

Question 2

Purpose of pupil premium

Accepted Answer

Opportunity for children and young people is too often defined by their background. This government is determined to do more to improve the life chances of our most disadvantaged children and break the link between background and future success. The pupil premium grant plays a critical role in supporting the work of government’s opportunity mission to drive high and rising standards and ensure every child, no matter their background, can achieve and thrive.

Pupil premium is additional funding for state-funded schools in England to help raise the educational outcomes of disadvantaged 5- to 16-year-olds. We know that disadvantaged pupils, on average, achieve worse educational outcomes due to the additional challenges they face.

Pupil premium supports the aim of narrowing the gap between the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and their peers. This will help to break the link between children’s outcomes and those of their parents. Prioritising early education is critical to this. Roughly 40% of the overall gap between disadvantaged 16-year-olds and their peers has already emerged by age 5, and these differences continue to widen as children move through the education system.

Schools should use their pupil premium to address the specific challenges their disadvantaged pupils face, through:

high-quality teaching
targeted academic support
wider strategies to help pupils to attend, belong and succeed

Evidence such as that from EEF shows that approaches that support high-quality teaching can be particularly effective at accelerating the progress of disadvantaged pupils.

The EEF provides evidence-based guidance to support schools to spend pupil premium effectively, including through its:

Where schools need additional support to improve outcomes for disadvantaged pupils, we will offer government-funded expert reviews of their pupil premium strategies.

Question 3

Using pupil premium

Accepted Answer

You as the school leader must spend your funding in line with the pupil premium conditions of grant.

You should ensure the grant is used to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and that selected approaches are informed by evidence.

Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils. It is for you to decide how to allocate the funding, after assessing the needs of your disadvantaged cohort and evidence about which approaches are likely to be effective in your school’s context.

You can use pupil premium to support pupils who do not meet the eligibility criteria but have other identified needs, such as:

those who have or have had a social worker
those who act as a carer
to support pupils that you believe to be economically disadvantaged but have not been identified as pupil premium eligible
whole-class approaches that benefit all pupils – for example, high-quality teaching

Schools, including local-authority virtual schools, must spend their pupil premium grant on evidence-informed activities in line with DfE’s menu of approaches. This is to ensure pupil premium is focused on effective approaches that improve the educational outcomes of pupils,

You must also publish an updated strategy statement by 31 December each year, using the DfE template. Use the section on reporting on pupil premium for more information.

Question 4

The menu of approaches

Accepted Answer

The menu has been developed in line with EEF’s tiered approach, as set out in its guide to the pupil premium.

You should select approaches from the menu as you follow steps 1 to 3 of the 5-step approach in developing and delivery an effective strategy.

The EEF’s evidence brief for the menu of approaches signposts to evidence-informed resources related to each strand of the menu.

When selecting approaches from the menu, you should also consider how you are using the funding to support:

effective identification of pupil needs – for example, through diagnostic assessment
successful implementation of approaches
effective monitoring and evaluation of approaches

In exceptional circumstances, and where this is necessary to overcome specific barriers to pupil attainment, you may use this funding on items not included in the menu. This could be for example, to meet acute needs around pupil equipment to ensure readiness to learn.

As stated in the conditions of grant, any activity that you fund using pupil premium must fall under an approach listed in the menu of approaches.

Select approaches from the menu, informed by your diagnosis of pupil need and what the evidence says is effective for improving their attainment. You should then follow steps 1 to 3 of developing and delivering an effective strategy.

High-quality teaching

Consider the following approaches:

high-quality teaching, assessment and a broad and balanced, knowledge-based curriculum that responds to the needs of pupils
professional development including training provided by a DfE-validated, systematic synthetic phonics programme and mastery-based approaches to teaching or feedback
mentoring and coaching for teachers
supporting the recruitment and retention of teaching staff, for example, providing cover time for professional development such as National Professional Qualifications (NPQs)
technology to support high-quality teaching – for example, software to support diagnostic assessment

Targeted academic support

Consider the following approaches:

one-to-one and small group tuition
peer tutoring
targeted interventions to support language development, literacy and numeracy
targeted interventions and resources to meet the specific needs of disadvantaged pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
teaching assistant deployment and interventions – for example, by supporting high-quality provision within the classroom or delivering structured interventions
extended school time, including summer schools

Wider strategies

Consider the following approaches:

supporting pupils’ social, emotional and behavioural needs
supporting attendance
enrichment such as extracurricular and co-curricular activities, including sport and physical activities, outdoor and nature activities, arts participation and developing wider life skills
breakfast clubs and meal provision
communicating with and supporting parents

Question 5

Further information on approaches

Accepted Answer

The specific issues impacting disadvantaged pupils’ educational outcomes vary, but 2 of the most common challenges are attendance and English and maths attainment.

This section provides links to resources to help you address these challenges, and resources on tutoring and early intervention, given these are effective approaches.

Disadvantaged pupils are at disproportionately higher risk of exposure to violence that can impact on their education, so this section also includes information on strategies that can help reduce children’s involvement in violence.

Attendance strategies

Reduced attendance following the pandemic continues to be a major challenge. Absence rates for all children increased post-pandemic, but more so for disadvantaged pupils.

There are significant costs associated with poor attendance rates, including:

lower attainment
reduced earning potential
poorer mental health and wellbeing

You should consider using your pupil premium to support improving attendance, where appropriate, including tackling underlying causes of absence.

Approaches to support attendance are outlined in:

The Supporting school attendance resource from EEF is structured around 6 evidence-informed themes to support you and attendance teams.

High-quality teaching of English and maths

English and maths are key to pupils accessing the whole curriculum and it is crucial that all pupils have the right foundations to achieve and thrive in their education and later life.

DfE has advice on teaching pupils who may need more support to learn to read or write proficiently:

The reading framework provides guidance for schools aimed at improving the teaching of reading from reception to key stage 3
The writing framework provides guidance on how to teach writing to pupils in reception, key stage 1 and key stage 2

English hubs can offer help for primary schools in how to best prioritise and support the lowest attainers in reading. English hubs can also offer guidance on choosing a systematic synthetic phonics programme that is best for your school.

In secondary schools, English hubs can provide in-school support for key stage 3 struggling readers, including resource funding and tailored advice to embed a whole-school reading strategy. Use Find your English hub to contact the hub responsible for your area.

Teaching maths guidance is available for:

Maths hubs help schools and colleges in England to improve maths education, including through continuous professional development projects.

A wide range of support is available for both primary and secondary, including the Mastering Number programme for:

reception and key stage 1
key stage 2
Securing Foundations at Year 7 programme at key stage 3

You can find your local maths hub lead school on the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) website.

EEF’s Promising Programmes lists a number of programmes that have shown promising results for raising attainment, including a range of maths, reading, and speech, language and communication interventions.

Tutoring

Tutoring is an effective and well-evidenced targeted approach to increase the attainment of disadvantaged pupils.

DfE’s tutoring in education settings guidance provides guidance on how to plan and deliver tutoring. It also includes further resources on tutoring.

EEF publish resources to support school leaders implement tutoring, including their Making a Difference with Effective Tutoring booklet.

Supporting reception year pupils

Prioritising early learning within a school is critical to preventing attainment gaps from establishing and widening in later years.

DfE’s Development Matters guidance provides an overview of effective curriculum and expectations in the early years, including reception.

Kindred Squared’s Starting Reception can be used by you to support parents ahead of their child starting reception, freeing up time for teaching when children start school.

DfE’s reception improvement offer has more information on a range of online and in-person school support and professional development for improving teaching and leadership of reception.

Reducing serious violence through well-evidenced strategies

Disadvantaged pupils are disproportionately at higher risk of exposure to violence, and this risk is further heightened for those with disrupted education, including suspension or permanent exclusion. Keeping children safe in education has information on risk indicators.

The Youth Endowment Fund’s (YEF) Education Practice Guidance sets out overarching evidence-based strategies for schools that can help reduce children’s involvement in violence. Alongside maintaining high standards of behaviour across the school, schools may consider the following.

Universal opportunities plus targeted support for those who need it can help children regulate emotions, think before acting, manage aggression, understand others’ perspectives and build healthy relationships. Developing these skills, as evidenced by EEF, also improves attainment.

Mentoring by trained adults

High-quality mentoring for vulnerable children can help them form trusted relationships, build social skills, develop positive behaviours, and, as evidenced by EEF, improve attainment.

Anti-bullying programmes

Preventing bullying can increase safety and reduce pathways into serious violence. There are several evidence-based programmes signposted by YEF that schools can adopt. Behaviour interventions, including anti-bullying strategies, can improve attainment as evidenced by EEF.

Question 6

Developing and delivering an effective strategy

Accepted Answer

This section explains how you can make the best use of your pupil premium through a 5-step approach:

Identifying the challenges faced by your school’s disadvantaged pupils
Using evidence
Developing an effective strategy
Delivering and monitoring your strategy
Evaluating and sustaining your strategy

Effective implementation is important for making best use of pupil premium. You should treat implementation as a process to be executed over a series of stages, not as an event.

EEF’s guide to implementation supports schools to embed an evidence-informed approach to implementation.

Step 1: Identifying the challenges faced by your school’s disadvantaged pupils

Diagnostic assessment, using data from internal and external assessments, is important for identifying the specific areas where intervention and support will improve each pupil’s academic progress.

You should also draw on data to develop an understanding of any non-academic challenges that pupils are facing that negatively affect their readiness to engage with education – for example:

attendance and levels of persistent and severe absence
behaviour incidences and exclusions data, alongside risks relating to serious violence (both indicators for those at risk and incidences of violence)
wellbeing, mental health and safeguarding concerns

When identifying the main challenges pupils are facing, it is important to consider the underlying academic and non-academic causes of them. For example, low attainment may be an outcome of poor early language development. This is set out in EEF’s guide to implementation which offers advice on how to identify pupil needs and their root causes.

When identifying challenges, you should draw on a range of sources, including:

internal assessments
performance data from compare the performance of schools and colleges in England
discussions with teachers and support staff
engagement with pupils and families

When diagnosing the needs of your disadvantaged pupils, you should bear in mind that you do not have to spend your pupil premium so that it solely benefits eligible pupils. You can use it to support other pupils with identified needs – for example:

those who have or have had a social worker
those who are a carer
high-quality teaching, which will benefit all pupils

You should diagnose the challenges facing higher-attaining disadvantaged pupils to help you identify how to help them make further progress. Evidence has shown that high-achieving disadvantaged pupils at key stage 2 are more likely than their peers to fall behind by key stage 4. Social Mobility: The Next Generation – Lost potential at age 16 from the Sutton Trust has useful information.

Step 2: Using evidence

Using evidence is vital to inform your decision-making and wider pupil premium strategy planning.

To support schools to make best use of their pupil premium, we have introduced a menu of approaches based on evidence of how best to improve attainment.

The conditions of grant requires schools to spend their pupil premium in line with the menu. Doing this will help you to develop an effective pupil premium strategy.

It is for you to decide how to use your pupil premium within the framework set out in the menu. You do not have to allocate pupil premium to every menu item, you should focus on approaches that best address the challenges identified in step 1.

When using the pupil premium to buy external programmes, use those that are well-supported by evidence, including from EEF’s list of Promising Programmes and assess their suitability for your context.

You should consider a range of external research evidence, including from EEF and other ‘what works’ centres such as the YEF, alongside your own knowledge of your pupils.

External evidence can help you to better understand:

which specific activities have been found to be the most effective in addressing the types of challenge your pupils face
how to successfully implement your chosen activities
the relative impact of different approaches

For further guidance about using evidence, use the EEF’s:

Step 3: Developing an effective strategy

Develop a strategy for effective use of your pupil premium, that:

addresses the challenges within your control that are having the most significant impact on disadvantaged pupils’ outcomes
combines evidence about ‘what works’ with your knowledge of your setting
sets ambitious but realistic target outcomes

DfE requires that all schools with more than 5 pupil premium pupils publish their strategy on their website, using the pupil premium strategy statement template. The format of the template should help you to develop your strategy.

DfE recommends that your strategy covers 3 academic years. If it does so, you must still review your strategy and renew your school’s published statement each year.

The template and the evidence-informed menu of approaches should align with EEF’s tiered approach to strategy planning, as set out in EEF’s guide to the pupil premium.

This helps schools allocate spending across the following areas:

developing high-quality teaching
providing targeted academic support
tackling non-academic barriers to academic success

EEF recommends that approaches that support high-quality teaching should be a top priority for pupil premium spending, but the exact balance of spending between categories will vary depending on the specific needs of your pupils, and factors such as the size of your pupil premium cohort.

You should consider how your strategy aligns with other strategic school improvement documents, such as your school improvement plan, to ensure that addressing disadvantage is a whole-school approach.

Evidence suggests that engaging stakeholders in strategy development is a key driver of effective implementation. Page 9 of EEF’s implementation guide has more information.

Building an implementation team around your strategy will give it the best chance of success. When developing your strategy you should consult:

governors, trustees and academy trust leaders (as appropriate to your setting)
relevant staff members including the:
- designated safeguarding lead
- designated teacher for previously looked-after children
- special educational needs co-ordinator
relevant external partners, such as the virtual school head

For academy trusts, if common challenges are identified across multiple academies, trusts may wish to pool pupil premium to fund activities that support them.

Trusts must ensure that any such approach reflects the needs of each school’s disadvantaged pupil cohort. Each academy within the trust must still publish a separate pupil premium strategy statement each year.

Step 4: Delivering and monitoring your strategy

Planning delivery

You should consider:

coherence with the curriculum – how to integrate any planned activity with the curriculum and ensure that pupils receiving targeted support do not miss out on core curriculum content
collective responsibility – how to ensure that all staff promote the principles and ethos of your strategy and ensure that professional development requirements are taken into account
targeting and monitoring – which pupils will benefit from which activity, when and in what group size, and what data and resources will be required to monitor the impact of each activity
external providers (if using them) – what internal resources and capacity are required to make the most of any external provision

EEF’s implementation guide has information on how to develop and embed evidence-informed approaches, and practical advice about how to unite values, understanding and skills around your strategy.

Supporting delivery

Once your strategy is in place, you should ensure it is being delivered effectively by doing the following.

Monitoring improvements

Monitoring can improve implementation and pupil outcomes by using, sharing and understanding data and insights on progress.

Create sufficient time and opportunities for staff to reflect on implementation data and feedback, and for implementation leaders to identify and tackle problems.

Leaders and staff should reflect jointly on how well the strategy is being delivered, and opportunities for improvements.

Supporting staff during initial attempts and implementation

Leaders should support staff wellbeing, manage expectations, and encourage buy-in during the delivery of your pupil premium strategy.

There is evidence that staff wellbeing can be supported throughout implementation by:

engaging people in decisions
giving teachers time to collaborate and plan
focusing on realistic goals
providing extra time and support
discussing wellbeing with staff

Reinforcing the strategy

This could include:

ongoing professional development of staff delivering elements of your pupil premium strategy
reminders and communications to your staff about the importance of the strategy and how everyone can contribute to its aims

Step 5: Evaluating and sustaining your strategy

Specify monitoring and evaluation measures when planning your strategy, rather than after it has launched. This helps ensure your strategy begins with clear outcomes in mind and reduces bias when evaluating impact.

To evaluate the impact of your approaches, you should:

measure success based on outcomes for disadvantaged pupils such as attainment and attendance of disadvantaged pupils
implement a robust and transparent evaluation framework and report outcomes against this
consider the short, medium and long-term outcomes needed to achieve your strategy objectives
ensure that evaluation is an ongoing process – strategies that have been effective in one year may not continue to be effective the next

Do not:

use data that does not focus on pupil outcomes
base evaluation solely on the perceptions of those delivering the activity
use vague intended outcomes, which make an accurate assessment of improvements more difficult

The outcomes of your evaluation should inform your decision on whether to sustain or stop each activity. Pages 45 to 46 of EEF’s implementation guidance has more information.

If evaluation data suggests a strategy is successful, you should still continue to monitor implementation. Use additional professional development and resources for new and existing staff to maintain successful outcomes.

Question 7

Pupil premium plus

Accepted Answer

Pupil premium plus refers to the portion of the pupil premium grant for children who are:

looked-after by the local authority
previously looked-after by a local authority or other state care

This includes children adopted from state care or its equivalent from outside England and Wales.

Looked-after and previously looked-after children achieve significantly poorer outcomes than non-looked-after children.

In many cases the impact of pre-care and care experience can be a significant barrier to their educational achievement. To help close the attainment gap between looked-after children and their peers, a number of measures were introduced, including the pupil premium plus for looked-after and previously looked-after children.

Schools should use their pupil premium plus alongside their main pupil premium budget to support the needs of their disadvantaged pupils.

Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual children and schools must use their funding on approaches intended to improve pupils’ educational outcomes, including previously looked-after pupils, in line with the menu of approaches.

Looked-after children

Pupil premium allocations based on the eligibility of looked-after children are managed by the local authority’s virtual school head.

Virtual school heads’ responsibilities include ensuring pupil premium is used to support the educational outcomes of children looked after by the local authority.

The school’s designated teacher for looked-after children should work with virtual school heads to ensure that pupil premium benefits looked-after children in your school. The funding should be used on evidence-informed interventions that are clearly linked to robust personal education plans and in line with the menu of approaches.

The virtual school head should ensure there are arrangements in place to discuss how the child will benefit from the pupil premium grant for looked-after children. Discussions should be with the designated teacher or another member of staff in the child’s education setting who best understands their needs.

Processes for allocating funds to a child’s education setting should be as simple as possible to avoid delay.

Local authorities are expected to release these payments as soon as possible to schools. They may choose to retain a portion of the grant to fund activities that will benefit a group, or all, of the authority’s looked-after children.

Previously looked-after children

Pupil premium funding based on the eligibility of previously looked-after children is part of your school’s pupil premium allocation.

The designated teacher has a key role in ensuring the specific needs of previously looked-after children are reflected in the school’s pupil premium strategy.

Your designated teacher should:

encourage parents of eligible previously looked-after children to tell the school if their child is eligible to attract pupil premium plus funding
consult the virtual school head on how to support the needs of previously looked-after children, where appropriate
encourage parents and guardians’ insight on the educational support their child would benefit from – school leaders can use this to help decide how the funding is used in developing a pupil premium strategy that addresses the needs of the previously looked-after cohort
be the main contact for queries about how pupil premium is being used to support previously looked-after children

Service pupil premium

Service pupil premium (SPP) provides support for children and young people of service families.

It is combined into pupil premium payments to make it easier for schools to manage their spending. Pupils that the SPP intends to support are not necessarily from financially disadvantaged backgrounds. Details on eligibility are available in the pupil premium overview.

The principal purposes of the SPP are to:

enable schools to offer mainly pastoral support to eligible pupils during challenging times
help mitigate the negative impact on service children of family mobility or parental deployment
help improve the academic progress of eligible pupils, if the school deems this to be a priority

The strategy statement template includes a section to report on how you are using the SPP and its impact on eligible pupils.

Guidance is available on:

Question 8

Reporting on pupil premium

Accepted Answer

In line with the conditions of grant, schools whose allocation for pupil premium is based on more than 5 eligible pupils must publish a strategy statement annually on their school website using the DfE strategy statement template.

Schools whose allocation is based on 5 or fewer than 5 eligible pupils are not required to publish a strategy statement. The DfE template is designed to help you develop your strategy effectively and efficiently, in line with the steps outlined in this document.

The template gives examples of how to complete it. You must develop your own strategy and reflect this accurately in your statement.

The strategy statement is a tool for you to demonstrate how your school is using pupil premium to raise disadvantaged pupils’ attainment. It is for the benefit of parents, governors and trustees. You should write it with them in mind.

DfE will review a sample of schools’ published statements each year to ensure that plans for use of the funding comply with the conditions of grant, including that activities are in line with the ‘menu of approaches’.

Ofsted’s school inspection toolkit, operating guides and information sets out the way in which a school’s pupil premium strategy is considered as part of an inspection.

Format of the template

The strategy statement template has been designed to reflect the 5-step process for developing an effective strategy for the use of pupil premium, which is set out in this guidance.

Part A

In part A, you should outline your strategy and the approaches that your pupil premium is funding in the current academic year.

The format is designed to reflect the steps needed to develop an effective strategy to help you with that process.

Part B

In part B, you should explain what outcomes were achieved for disadvantaged pupils in the previous academic year, including reference to performance measures data.

It can be challenging to evaluate the impact of any activity that is not directly linked to academic outcomes, such as activity supporting social and emotional wellbeing. You should still write about this in your online statement and refer to any evidence that shows you are making progress.

There is an optional further information section to provide any additional information you wish to publish.

Publishing your strategy

You have until 31 December each year to publish your statement. This will enable you to take the needs of your new intake into account.

If you have developed a multi-year strategy for pupil premium, you must review your strategy and publish an updated statement every year.

Although multi-academy trusts (MATs) can pool resources for use of pupil premium funding across multiple academies, each academy within the MAT must publish a separate pupil premium strategy statement each year.

Question 9

Checking your allocation and payments

Accepted Answer

Pupil premium is a financial year grant from 1 April to 31 March of the following calendar year.

Information about the pupil premium funding your school will receive is available in the allocations document. The pupil premium conditions of grant and technical note show the payment timetable and explains how each school’s allocation has been calculated.

Get information about pupils

If you need to check which pupils your school’s allocation is based on you can consult Get information about pupils (GIAP) from April each year.

GIAP should not form the sole basis on which schools plan their pupil premium strategy, as it is a retrospective list of eligible pupils based on the October census.

For pupils in alternative provision settings, GIAP is based on the January census.

Pupils who move schools

As pupil premium is not an entitlement for individual pupils, you will not get an adjustment if a pupil leaves your school or joins another school.

The only exceptions are those adjustments made by the local authority for permanently excluded pupils and where a pupil in respect of whom pupil premium is payable leaves a school for reasons other than permanent exclusion and is receiving education funded by a local authority other than at a school which is maintained by that authority.

The school that the pupil leaves will have their pupil premium reduced by the value of one pupil, pro-rated to the point in the financial year when the pupil leaves. A school that receives an excluded pupil will be credited by the value of one pupil, pro-rated to the point in the financial year when the pupil joins the receiving school.

Further information about these adjustments can be found in the The School and Early Years Finance (England) Regulations 2025 and the schools operational guide for the relevant financial year. Local authorities: pre-16 schools funding has more information.

Errors in payments

Contact DfE if you have mistakenly recorded a pupil as eligible for the pupil premium.

We can change the national pupil database for you to correct individual pupil errors, but we cannot amend your census return.

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Applies to England

What this guidance is for

Purpose of pupil premium