: Pupil Premium: Building a Culture of Collective Responsibility How schools can turn Pupil Premium priorities into shared action, embedding collective responsibility in everyday practice.

Ask a teacher in your school what the Pupil Premium strategy is trying to achieve. Could they tell you?

More importantly, could they tell you what their role is in achieving it?

Schools rightly appoint Pupil Premium leads to provide strategic oversight. But there is a risk: responsibility for disadvantaged pupils quietly becomes the responsibility of the Pupil Premium lead.

The EEF’s message is clear. An effective Pupil Premium strategy should be a collective endeavour, not a document owned by one person. Its guidance recommends involving a range of staff in the ongoing delivery and improvement of the strategy, rather than over-relying on one individual (EEF, 2026a).

That matters because most Pupil Premium activity does not happen in the Pupil Premium lead’s office. It happens in classrooms, curriculum decisions, interventions, attendance conversations and interactions with families.

From knowing the strategy to enacting it

Building collective responsibility requires more than ensuring staff are familiar with the strategy. It means developing a shared understanding of its priorities and ensuring that everyone recognises how their work contributes to achieving them.

EEF implementation guidance identifies three behaviours that support effective implementation: engage, unite and reflect (EEF, 2024). Applied to Pupil Premium, these provide a useful way to think about how genuinely collective our approach is.

Engage: Do staff help diagnose the problem?

Rather than leaders deciding that ​‘literacy’ or ​‘attendance’ is a barrier and announcing it to staff, bring colleagues into the diagnosis.

For example, give teachers a small set of attainment, attendance and pupil-voice evidence and ask: What patterns do you notice? What might be getting in the way? What are we seeing in classrooms?

The EEF recommends building a shared understanding of pupils’ strengths and needs, using a range of evidence rather than relying on assumptions about disadvantage (EEF, 2026b). This shifts the conversation from ​‘these are our Pupil Premium pupils’ to ​‘these are the barriers we are trying to address’.

Unite: Can everyone locate themselves in the strategy?

A strategy becomes meaningful when people can connect its priorities to their everyday work.

Imagine a school identifies reading comprehension as a priority. Senior leaders might protect time for evidence-informed professional development. Subject leaders might define what effective reading support looks like in their subject. Teachers might explicitly teach and model reading strategies. Support staff might ensure interventions connect with classroom teaching. Governors might ask whether agreed approaches are being implemented and what evidence suggests they are making a difference.

This is not about giving everyone an additional Pupil Premium job. It is about making existing roles pull in the same direction.

The EEF emphasises the importance of helping people understand how their individual contribution connects to the wider collective endeavour (EEF, 2026c).

Reflect: Make Pupil Premium part of the school improvement cycle

Too often, evaluation becomes an annual exercise completed when the strategy statement needs updating.

Instead, build it into structures that already exist. A pupil progress meeting might routinely examine outcomes for disadvantaged pupils. A subject leader’s monitoring might consider whether an agreed approach is visible in practice. An SLT meeting might revisit one intended outcome each term.

At each point, the question becomes: What did we expect to see by now, and what does our evidence tell us?

This reflects the EEF’s emphasis on ongoing monitoring, reflection and adaptation, rather than treating implementation as a one-off event (EEF, 2024; EEF, 2026a).

A question worth asking

Perhaps the test of a Pupil Premium strategy is not simply:

​‘Do we have a good plan?’

But:

​‘Could people across our school explain how their work contributes to it?’

Because collective responsibility is what moves Pupil Premium from a strategy on a website to something enacted across a school.

References

Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (2024) A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: EEF.

Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (2026a) The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium: Evaluate and sustain your strategy. London: EEF.

Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (2026b) The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium: Diagnose your pupils’ needs. London: EEF.

Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (2026c) The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium: Deliver and monitor your strategy. London: EEF.