Research School Network: Supporting disadvantaged pupils to thrive: Part 1 Marc Rowland (Unity Research School) and Jon Eaton (Devon Research School) on leading an effective Pupil Premium strategy
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Supporting disadvantaged pupils to thrive: Part 1
Marc Rowland (Unity Research School) and Jon Eaton (Devon Research School) on leading an effective Pupil Premium strategy
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by Unity Research School
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Addressing disadvantage is about people, place and provision. It involves coordinating the actions of the multiple people involved in designing and delivering an effective Pupil Premium strategy, and ensuring that it is perceived as everyone’s responsibility. It is about getting culture and expectations right, and ensuring that classroom and extracurricular practices are evidence-based and inclusive by design. Underpinning all this is careful implementation, dispassionate impact evaluation and effective use of research evidence.
This series of mini-blogs pulls together some of our headline advice about running an effective Pupil Premium strategy, organised the following way:
- Blog one: Principles for supporting disadvantaged pupils; Leadership
- Blog two: Assessment not assumption; Pupils and families
- Blog three: Addressing challenges in the classroom and wider school life
To dig deeper into how to lead and manage your school’s strategy, please see the Education Endowment Foundation’s updated, digital guide to the pupil premium here.
The new guide walks school leaders through a five-step process for developing and sustaining a strong strategy, aligned to the Department for Education’s requirements. Highlights include:
• An evidence brief linking to high-quality research aligned with the DfE’s menu of approaches.
• A discussion tool for governors.
• Case studies from schools across the country including the Research School Network.
• The guide is designed to be clear, accessible, and usable on any device.
Principles for supporting disadvantaged pupils
1. Remember that our disadvantaged pupils lack opportunity, not potential. Poverty (and all it brings) puts pupils at risk of underachievement
.2. Ensure staff know that pupils are not at risk of underachievement because they are eligible for the Pupil Premium – they are at risk of underachievement because of the impact of disadvantage on their lives and opportunity. Focus on needs, not labels.
4. Don’t ever lower expectations or support for what a child might achieve based on family capacity to support learning outside of school.
5. Successful schools are defined by all pupils experiencing person excellence. Not most, or some, but all. It is particularly important for us to champion the voices of pupils whose families might find it more difficult to engage with education and school life.
6. Hold families and local communities in high regard. Where families struggle to advocate and support their child, ensure that we are the champions, the voice that challenges, support and expects much.
7. Develop a strength-based discourse about place and local communities. Don’t judge families for their socio-economic situation. Support pupils to experience meaningful success, early.
8. Focus on empowering young people to be contributors to their local communities, including the school community. Focus on empowering young people with choice, agency and opportunity.
Leadership
1. Use the EEF implementation framework with discipline: Engaging, Uniting and Reflecting are HARD, but they are essential for success – and they let pupils, families, staff and other stakeholders know that the school values and harnesses the collective insights of the people it’s supposed to serve.
2. Look at any implementation effort through the lens of disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils. How can we ensure it will have a positive impact on these learners? How will we monitor that?
3. Supporting disadvantaged pupils also requires effective systems and structures. They enable people to perform their roles well. They enable good communication. Systems and structures enable people to be successful and for relationships to thrive.
4. Ensure that decisions about what to implement are based on robust research evidence and a nuanced understanding of pupil needs and current practice.
5. Focus on developing expert leadership and collective responsibility for addressing disadvantage at ALL levels.
6. Ensure that governors focus on the effective enactment of strategy, rather than just outcomes.
7. Don’t do different things for particular groups of pupils. Integrate, don’t fracture. Pupils need a strong focus on social and academic inclusion. Poverty and social exclusion put pupils at risk of underachievement, not labels.
8. Ensure lower attainers are working with high quality, expert staff, from early years onwards.
9. Give staff the expertise, knowledge, support and professional development to help pupils to thrive, rooted in the needs of pupils. Empowered teachers = empowered pupils = empowered families.
10. Where pupils are working with non-subject specialists, it is crucial that those staff get the appropriate, high quality professional development relevant to the subject that they are teaching. It is crucial that subject leaders carry out appropriate quality assurance and support to ensure pupils are thriving and feel valued. Further, where non-subject specialists are used, it is important to communicate to pupils and families why this is the case, and how leaders will ensure pupils will experience high quality learning.
