Research School Network: Statement of Intent: why a clear vision matters – part 2 Phil Stock’s Pupil Premium blog series continues, considering the importance of a clear and collaborative Statement of Intent.

The importance of intent

The word intent comes from the Latin intendere – ​‘to stretch toward’. It carries the sense of a mind fixed on a purpose, directed and deliberate.

That’s exactly what a strong Pupil Premium strategy demands: clarity about what we are aiming for, and a collective effort to ​‘stretch toward’ reaching it.

The aim is not simply to capture the intent of the person who wrote it, but to reflect the collective will of the school that must enact it.

Unfortunately, many statements of intent end up woolly, generic, or disconnected from the daily work of teaching. If the intent is vague, the actions that follow will drift.

A clear intent, by contrast, sets direction for everyone in the school and becomes the anchor for decision-making designed to make a difference. It is a vision that can be returned to time and again, reinforcing the moral imperative to act.

Effective implementation, after all, is ​‘a collaborative and social process driven by how people think, behave, and interact.’ People in schools – teachers, leaders, and support staff – behave and interact in line with how they think. What they think is shaped by the wider culture.

The statement of intent is therefore a powerful opportunity to set the tone for that culture and to signal our shared responsibility for raising the outcomes of those who need our help the most.

It is also difficult to envisage a school community getting behind a strategy that has not been written by its own leaders. Referring to exemplars (such as the DfE model) to get a sense of tone and structure is understandable, but wholesale lifting of sentences and paragraphs from elsewhere will never capture the unique identity of a school or compel its staff to act.

Every school has its own context and challenges. Our disadvantaged pupils need us to articulate this clearly and decisively to all stakeholders. The statement of intent is the chance to do it.

Avoid:

• Woolly or generic language.
• Borrowed paragraphs that don’t reflect your context.
• Values statements that repeat the prospectus.

Aim for:

• Clarity of purpose around disadvantage.
• A school-specific vision staff can believe in.
• A touchstone that guides decision-making.

Focusing on disadvantage

Many statements fail to make clear that the strategy is designed to raise the outcomes of pupils in receipt of the pupil premium, a proxy for the damaging effects of social and economic circumstances on achievement.

What benefits vulnerable pupils will often benefit all pupils, but we must never lose sight of the primary purpose of this funding. Rehearsing the whole-school ethos too heavily risks blurring that purpose and making the strategy sound more like a prospectus than a targeted plan for vulnerable pupils.

Central to laying out a vision for addressing disadvantage is clarity about how disadvantage is understood within the school community. 

For staff to act with intent, they must recognise that the focus is on mitigating the impact of low family income on academic attainment and personal development. 

The statement of intent is the place to provide this definition and to challenge reductive thinking. Pupil premium itself is not a need.

When defining the challenge of disadvantage, the emphasis should be on the barriers that lie within the school’s ability to address, not the wider ills of society that it cannot control.

Similarly, any deficit should be framed in relation to the school’s current provision, not located within the pupils or their families. As Marc Rowland points out, disadvantaged pupils are not a problem to be fixed. 

The statement of intent should name the challenge clearly, frame it within the school’s capacity to respond, and galvanise collective action. Anything less sells our pupils short.

Avoid:

• Treating pupil premium itself as a need.
• Overplaying whole-school ethos at the expense of clarity where it matters.
• Framing disadvantage as a deficit within pupils or families.

Aim for:

• Clear definition of disadvantage in your context.
• Emphasis on barriers schools can influence.
• A call to collective action that staff can unite around.

The big picture

Last but not least, remember the statement of intent is just that: a statement of the broad intentions that sit behind the strategy.

It should capture the big picture: the rationale that explains decisions. This is not the place for detail or repetition from later sections. No one will be motivated by a long list of interventions or paragraphs of waffle about evidence.

Equally, an overly short corporate-style mission statement fails to reflect the urgency of this work and wastes the chance to unite staff around a shared school vision.

Do:

• Keep it big picture.
• Make it purposeful and school-specific.
• Use it to unite staff around a shared vision.
  

Don’t:

• List interventions or overload with references to evidence.
• Recycle corporate-style slogans.
• Lose sight of the urgency of the work.

In the next blog, I will turn to the challenge of diagnosis – how schools can get under the hood and properly understand the barriers that their disadvantaged pupils face.

Because if intent sets the direction for the school, then clarity about the challenges for some of its pupils ensures that everyone will be stretching toward the right goal.