Government Funding

Context

Belmont School is a special school for children aged 4-16 years with Moderate Learning Difficulties. All pupils have an EHCP. Levels of attainment upon entry to the school are significantly below average. The catchment area is wide with pupils drawn from both urban and rural communities.

Pupil Premium was introduced in April 2011. The funding is provided in addition to the main Special School funding from the LA and is intended to help disadvantaged pupils to ‘close the gap’ and to raise attainment and improve progress. A high percentage of our pupils receive Pupil Premium funding – we are in the highest quintile on the Ofsted School Data Dashboard.

Children who are eligible include:

• pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals, or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years (referred to as Ever 6 FSM)
• children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care, including children adopted from state care or equivalent from outside England and Wales
• children and young people with parents in the regular armed forces

The funds are used effectively, supplemented by the school’s budget to provide additional support so that “The school provides a wide range of therapies and support programmes that are closely related to pupils’ needs.” (Ofsted 2014).

Impact

“Disadvantaged pupils generally make slightly better progress than other pupils in English and Mathematics. This is because of the highly individualised support they receive.” (Ofsted 2014)

Attainment upon leaving at Key Stage 4 exceeds expectations with pupils in receipt of Pupil Premium consistently achieving between 1 and 4 GCSE passes and up to 9 Entry Level qualifications including English, Maths, Science, ICT and a range of Foundation and vocational subjects.

Belmont’s innovative, wide-ranging and creative approach, using technology and drawing upon talented and skilled staff, has enabled Pupil Premium funding to support the progress of our most disadvantaged pupils.

Context

The government provides additional funding to improve provision of physical education (PE) and sport in primary schools. At Belmont School this funding is used to:

• increase the engagement of all primary pupils in regular physical activity, working towards more healthy lifestyles
• raise the profile of sporting activity in our primary school
• improve the skills of all staff who teach primary PE and sport
• enable primary pupils to experience a wider range of sports activities
• increase the participation of competitive sports.

Context

The Year 7 literacy and numeracy Catch-Up funding allows school to provide additional interventions, resources and staffing for children in Year 7 who are highlighted as needing more support). Therefore this additional funding relates to all of our Year 7.

The funding is used to support the development of English and Maths’ skills through additional interventions using resources such as Dancing Bears (reading resource), Apples and Pears (spelling resource), Spellodrome, Reading Eggs, Mathletics and Numicon.

The funding has been used to support specialist intervention roles and staffing ratios in our Year 7 nurture groups to enable them to work towards a bespoke curriculum to meet their needs.

The funding also contributes to some holistic based interventions such as THRIVE, working memory, and Lego Therapy to reduce the barriers to Year 7 children’s learning, enabling them to access the academic curriculum more effectively.

We are always looking at new ways and approaches that would better support pupil progress, including new interventions, iPad apps and Year 7 events to support teaching and learning with a focus on literacy and numeracy.