: Assessing and Addressing Needs, the Importance of Understanding Before Action. How school leaders can diagnose pupils’ needs to inform effective planning for socio-economically disadvantaged students

Claire Williams, Director of Alexandra Park Research School and Deputy Headteacher at Alexandra Park Primary School in Stockport, explores how school leaders can diagnose pupils’ needs to inform effective planning for socio-economically disadvantaged students. Providing an example from their Pupil Premium Strategy, focusing on a key priority: oral language development, this blog considers the first two steps of the five-point plan. Steps three to five will be explored in a second blog in late November.

The updated EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium details how to plan, implement, monitor and sustain an effective Pupil Premium strategy. Following a five-point plan, school leaders are guided to assess and address the needs of socio-economically disadvantaged pupils through targeted diagnosis and strategic planning.

Step one: Diagnose your pupil’s needs

We take great care to avoid making assumptions about any of our pupils, especially those who are socio-economically disadvantaged. A key part of our approach involves using robust and rigorous diagnostic assessments to gather the information we need to accurately identify challenges and devise effective solutions. One example of this is our use of Language Screen to assess all Reception pupils upon entry. This provides us with detailed insights into each child’s language abilities, and importantly, allows us to compare their current ability with a larger cohort. When combined with other data and contextual information about each pupil, this approach gives us confidence in understanding each pupil’s needs and helps mitigate against making assumptions.

When deciding which pupils to target for additional Oral Language Interventions, we aim to ensure that the identified need and resulting impact of an intervention will exceed what would happen under ​‘business as usual.’ This is especially crucial for our youngest pupils, who benefit greatly from peer interaction, play, and exploration. We are cautious not to compromise these vital experiences by placing pupils in intervention groups unless it is absolutely necessary. By ensuring there is a synergy in our targeted and our whole-class approaches to Oral Language development, we provide additional targeted support for those who require it and high quality teaching for everyone.

Step Two: Use Strong Evidence to Support Your Strategy

Once we’ve diagnosed the issue, our next step is to identify the approaches with the greatest potential to benefit our pupils. Time is especially precious when you’re only four or five years old! We focus our school’s capacity and funding on narrowing the disadvantage gap in outcomes by age five, as we know this becomes harder to address as pupils get older. We are also keenly aware of the strong link between oral language competency by age five and future wellbeing and life outcomes, with language proficiency being a key indicator of child wellbeing.

In this step, we prioritise using the best available evidence to guide our choices, ensuring that any intervention we select is grounded in research and capable of making a meaningful impact. These decisions require careful thought, as adding something extra that has a positive effect on pupils can be challenging to implement effectively and with fidelity. However, by relying on robust evidence, we feel confident that we are making informed decisions — our ​“best bets” — to support our pupils.

Using a high-quality diagnostic screening tool as part of our assessment of need ensures we avoid assumptions and can accurately target those pupils who will benefit most from timely, well-planned support and intervention. Employing the best available evidence to address these identified needs helps time-pressed school leaders make sound decisions.

By assessing and identifying ways to address need, we can move onto the next challenge of developing, delivering, monitoring, evaluating, and sustaining the chosen strategy to give it the best possible chance of success. We will consider this challenge in the next part of this blog series, out in late November.

Further reading:

EEF blog: Unlocking potential: the power of the Pupil Premium

Introducing new Pupil Premium resources

The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium

Addressing educational disadvantage: from strategy to the classroom

Law, J., Charlton, J. and Asmussen, K., 2017. Language as a child wellbeing indicator. London: Early Intervention Foundation.

Major, L.E. and Briant, E., 2023. Equity in education: Levelling the playing field of learning‑a practical guide for teachers. Hachette UK.