Research School Network: Making the Difference for Disadvantaged Pupils Resources to support the development of your Pupil Premium Strategy

We were delighted to welcome delegates to Day 2 of Making the Difference for Disadvantaged Students today, which focused on effective teaching and targeted academic support to improve outcomes.

During the course of the three days, we will have considered a range of resources and evidence to help support colleagues with the development of their Pupil Premium Strategy document. We thought we would share a brief summary of some of these in a blog today.

1. The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium

In June 2019, the EEF published this clear guide aimed at supporting schools to spend their pupil premium funding most effectively to maximise benefits for their pupils. It provides a tiered approach to this, with the priority being teaching.

It includes five key principles for pupil premium funding and some case studies of inspiring schools who have used their funding to transform outcomes.

This guide can be found here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/pupil-premium-guide/#search

2. Pupil Premium Audit

Completing an audit of current practice is one task that our delegates completed and discussed. The goal of the document is to capture initial reflections on how effective your current pupil premium strategy is and can be a useful starting point in considering areas to change.

The audit document can be found here.

3. Families of Schools Database

The EEF has designed the Families of Schools database to support schools with meaningful benchmarking. This tool enables you to:

- provides key data on the attainment of your school’s disadvantaged pupils
- shows your school’s position within a ​‘family’ of 50 schools which have pupils with similar characteristics
- highlights schools to collaborate with and key EEF resources to support your school’s improvement journey.

The Families of Schools database can be found here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/families-of-schools-database/#closeSignup

4. EEF Guidance Reports

The EEF has published a range of guidance reports that can accessed on their website. They provide clear, actionable recommendations based on the best available evidence. Reports have been written on a range of areas from subject specific guidance reports such as science and maths to reports focused on learning behaviours, such as metacognition. 

The full range of reports can be found here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/

5. Promising Projects

The EEF funds numerous projects and a summary of the most promising can be found on their website. Projects range from numeracy interventions to philosophy for children to using text messages to improve parental engagement. Each promising project has the strength of evidence and impact summarised clearly, as well as more details about what exactly the strategy entails and the conclusions of the evaluation.

More details about Promising Projects can be found here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/promising/

6. Implementation Guidance Report

The EEF clearly states that one of the characteristics that distinguishes effective from less-effective schools is not just what they implement but how they go about putting new approaches into practice. As such, the importance of effective implementation is a theme running through this three day training course. Underpinning our approach is the EEF’s Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation, which provides a clear summary of the steps needed to manage change well.

The guidance report, summary of recommendations and a range of additional tools can be found here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/a‑schools-guide-to-implementation/

7. Your own school data

Knowing your own school context is essential to ​‘defining the problem’, identifying strategies and implementing them successfully. 

As Dylan Wiliam says: