Guidance

Service pupil premium: what you need to know

Updated 16 April 2026

Applies to England

• Publication for Scotland
• Publication for Wales

Service personnel with children in state schools in England (reception age to year 11) should notify schools of their children’s service status so they are recorded before the autumn census (which takes place on the first Thursday in October) to qualify for service pupil premium (SPP).

What is service pupil premium?

The Department for Education (DfE) introduced SPP in April 2011 in recognition of the specific challenges children from service families face, and as part of the commitment to delivering the Armed Forces Covenant.

State schools, academies and free schools in England with children of service families (reception age to year 11) are eligible for SPP funding. SPP helps the school give additional support that the service child may need. It is currently worth £360 per service child for the 2026 to 2027 financial year.

Eligibility criteria

Pupils are eligible for SPP if they meet any of the following criteria:

• one of their parents is serving in the regular armed forces (including pupils with a parent who is on full commitment as part of the full-time reserve service) or is in the armed forces of another nation and is stationed in England and they have been registered as a ‘service child’ in the most recent autumn DfE school census
• they do not currently have ‘service child’ status but they have been registered as a ‘service child’ on any DfE school census in the past 6 years
• one of their parents died while serving in the armed forces and the pupil receives a pension under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme or the War Pensions Scheme

DfE’s Ever 6 service child measure

The premium was extended so that any pupil in reception to year 11 who has been flagged as a service child in the past 6 years will continue to receive the premium.

Ex-service personnel should tell the school if they left the armed forces within the last 6 years. Under the DfE’s ‘Ever’ measure, schools will continue to receive SPP for up to 6 years for children whose parent left the armed forces, provided the children were recorded as service children in a school census prior to their parent leaving the forces. The Ever measure also applies when service parents divorce or separate or when a service parent dies in service.

Refer to the pre-16 schools funding guidance for more information.

Purpose of the SPP

Eligible schools receive SPP mainly so they can:

• offer pastoral support during challenging times
• help mitigate the negative effects on service children of:
  • family mobility
  • separation
  • parental deployment

Family mobility is when a service person is posted from one location to another, including overseas and within the UK, resulting in separation from their family or moving of the family home.

Separation occurs when a service person is assigned to an unaccompanied location, or the family choose to remain at home when the service person is deployed, resulting in weekly or monthly commutes home, extended periods away, or both.

Parental deployment is when a service person is serving away from home for a period of time, such as a 6- to 9-month tour of duty, or a training course or exercise lasting for a few weeks.

How SPP differs from pupil premium (PP)

SPP helps schools provide mainly pastoral support for service children. The pupil premium (PP) was introduced to raise attainment and accelerate progress within disadvantaged groups.

Schools should not combine SPP with PP funding. The spending of each premium should be accounted for separately, but a school can be allocated both SPP and PP for the same child, if they are eligible for both.

What SPP is used for

For examples of what schools are doing with SPP, refer to Service pupil premium: examples of best practice.

Schools have flexibility over how they use SPP, as they are best placed to understand and respond to the specific needs of their pupils.

The funding could be spent on:

• support, including counselling
• clubs – for example, offering video calls to help improve the means of communication between the child and their deployed parent
• helping children to develop scrapbooks and diaries highlighting their achievements and daily school life
• nurture groups
• after-school activities that support the specific needs of armed forces children – for example, resilience-building out-of-hours childcare for service children that is supported by the wraparound childcare scheme

SPP should not be used to subsidise routine school activity – for example, trips and music lessons. However, schools may choose to fund trips just for service children to help them:

• build a sense of wider community
• understand the role their service parent plays (for example, with military-specific trips)
• cope with the potential strains of armed forces family life

Schools are held to account for the spending of this funding through Ofsted inspections, which focus on the progress and attainment of their wider PP-eligible pupil cohort.

Additional school roles may be required to support the needs of service children when they join a new school, including:

• mobility co-ordinators – for schools with high levels of service pupil mobility
• forces liaison officers
• parent support advisers