Research School Network: Addressing disadvantage in our coastal community: St Clare’s Catholic Primary School A headteacher and Pupil Premium lead outline how they are leading and implementing an impactful strategy to address disadvantage

Jamie Whiteside, Headteacher, and Pupil Premium lead Hannah Smith from St Clare’s Catholic Primary School, Clacton share reflections on their work leading a successful strategy for addressing disadvantage and improving outcomes for all pupils.

Context

St Clare’s Catholic Primary School is part of the Rosary Trust and is situated in Clacton, Essex. The school has 314 pupils on roll aged 4 – 11 and has a nursery on site with 65 on roll.

Clacton ranks among the top 1% of deprived neighbourhoods and we currently have 44% of pupils eligible for Pupil Premium funding. The percentage of pupils with special educational needs is 17%.

Ambitions

Our school ethos is to create equity for all pupils regardless of circumstance, and we use pupil premium funding to support this goal. At St Clare’s we promote high expectations, teachers are well trained and use evidence-based strategies in our pursuit of successful outcomes. We strive to:

• create the ethos of opportunity and success for all
• vow to address the primary need of all our pupils in school
• develop positive relationships between parents, staff and children.
• develop staff’s understanding about the importance of quality first teaching and adaptive teaching strategies.
• change the mind set of how we look at our disadvantaged pupils and our disengaged parents.
  

Diagnosing the needs of our pupil premium cohort

We take a granular approach to identifying disadvantaged pupils’ barriers early on in their school life. These barriers range from attendance to social and emotional or academic needs, and we strive to identify and try to remove these barriers to enable them to flourish.

This is achieved through a holistic approach that includes a rigorous cycle of planning, teaching and assessment from an educational and social emotional perspective. We have systems and processes in place to recognise pupils’ needs quickly and identify what steps are needed to enable all pupils to fully access the curriculum. This approach informs our pupil premium strategy planning.

A consistent approach to supporting disadvantaged pupils

Our leadership draws focus through three lenses – teaching, behaviour and pastoral/​personal development. Implementation of our revised Pupil Premium strategy seeks to ensure that this income is put to work to secure high quality, high impact teaching and support.

Understanding the needs of our pupils is paramount. Once pupils’ needs are identified, children and families have access to a number of specialist staff who help support pupils depending on their individual barriers. This includes:

• speech and language support for 3 – 5 year old pupils through our Elklan trained Speech and Language specialist teacher
• access to play therapist
• a family liaison worker
• emotional literacy support assistant (ELSA)
• Forest School lead teacher
  

Working with families is an essential part of the strategy and considering how we best communicate and build strong relationships with them has been an important journey. The Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) parental engagement research has helped guide our approach.

Part of our key principles in whatever we do, including our Pupil Premium strategy, is to be consistent in the approach, monitor accurately and be reflective on the effectiveness. Whatever the problem, we will find a solution.

We take a whole school approach to learning from early years to year six. All the strategies we use are evidence-informed and support sustained progression over time. They include prioritising high-quality teaching through our synthetic phonics scheme, the mastery maths approach and Trauma Perceptive practice. Staff are trained thoroughly, and strategies are embedded to ensure that children are given a consistent, quality offer by all. If, on reflection, initiatives are not well embedded or effective, we will revisit them.

Senior leaders work collaboratively with the pupils, staff, parents/​carers and governors to get accurate feedback on our approach, and we welcome external providers or experts into the school to help support new initiatives. When setting up our new nurture provision to support pupils with social, emotional and mental health needs, we collaborated with local schools, visited other settings for advice and requested an inclusion review from the local authority.

We value local partnerships, welcoming opportunities to work with external visitors ranging from the Essex Inclusion Review team, specialist SEND support, independent advisors, the LA and diocese to help support monitor our vision and improvement plan.

We work collaboratively with other schools to enhance our curriculum with a focus on widening opportunities. We welcome parents in to value their child’s achievements through showcases and informal meetings. This has been a journey for us resulting in higher attendance and support year on year.

Monitoring our impact

As described in the EEF Guide to Pupil Premium, ​‘an integral part of delivery is the continual monitoring of the progress of the strategy so that the approach can be adapted when and where appropriate. This process of reflection enables a strategy to be embedded and improved within the reality of the context in which it is taking place.’ To this end our strategy includes regular opportunities for capturing a range of data. This helps us respond to what we find out, and tailor our next steps.

We track academic progress half-termly and meet termly as leaders to discuss pupil progress:

• we use the six core strengths assessment tool for children with SEMH needs and the Wellcomm assessment for children on our speech and language register.
• subject leaders closely monitor and evaluate provision and pupil progress, and staff development in their subject and make termly improvements.
• interventions are implemented with fidelity, and as response to our informed understanding of pupil needs and progress – they are utilised within an approach which seeks to ensure a ​‘keep up’ attitude to learning.
• we act on feedback from specialists, formal and informal and report findings regularly to governors.

Professional development is integral to our delivery and is informed by our evaluations of implementation data – we are committed to providing high quality training for our staff team, growing expertise, investing in people not resources.

Impact, results and future plans

Our outcomes are consistently above average when compared against national average expectations. Our phonics screening results are consistently above the national average and 68% of our disadvantaged pupils met the expected standard in reading, writing and maths at the end of Key Stage 2.

When surveyed, over 90% of families with children at St Clare’s stated that their children liked school, and that teaching was good. Our recent Ofsted inspection stated that the personal development of our pupils was outstanding.

Our nurture provision has enabled pupils with social, emotional and mental health needs to access a bespoke curriculum. This has resulted in the children reintegrating back into class, increased well-being and accessing core learning.

The EEF research into arts participation is an area that we want to further develop to improve our creative curriculum offer. We are collaborating with other schools to train our staff to become ​“Cultural champions” who can support and lead this initiative.

Everyone should be given the opportunity to succeed regardless of their circumstances. Their circumstances may change over time, and so might our approach and strategies, but our principles will remain the same: be consistent, monitor accurately and be reflective.

An often used phrase at St Clare’s is ​‘find a solution, not a problem’.

Further reading: 

The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium | EEF 
Teaching and Learning Toolkit | EEF 
Using Pupil Premium: Guidance for School Leaders 
Pupil premium – GOV.UK 
Pupil premium: overview – GOV.UK 
Pupil premium: allocations and conditions of grant 2024 to 2025 – GOV.UK