Pupil Premium
Pupil Premium Strategy
At the Harmony Trust our overarching aim is to ensure that all children regardless of their need or circumstance experience the best educational provision. We believe that school should be a place where every child achieves and makes progress in their learning across the whole curriculum over time. Every child has the entitlement to an inclusive curriculum, and we strive to ensure that disadvantage and additional needs do not act as barriers to learning and achievement. We aim for all our children to succeed both academically and socially, ready for the next phase of their learning and beyond as responsible and respectful citizens.
We know that the biggest influences on pupil attainment are the quality of the teacher within the classroom, the curriculum that they access and the support that they receive. All pupils, and in particularly those who are identified as disadvantaged, need to access high quality provision at all times so that progress can be accelerated. This begins with excellence in the Early Years Foundation Stage and we will continue to invest in early intervention. Our evidence base shows that disadvantaged pupils who are supported appropriately to meet the Early Learning Goals remain at Age Related Expectation throughout the primary phase.
At The Harmony Trust we believe that the key to succeeding in later life to develop confident communicators who are skilled in Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing. Language and vocabulary are essential for success at all stages of our lives. This is particularly important for the significant proportion of disadvantaged and EAL learners in our trust. However, purposeful vocabulary acquisition, applied across a range of contexts, is necessary skill for all: ‘Being in a word-poor context at a young age can have far-reaching negative consequences for our children. A restricted vocabulary as a young child goes on to correlate with factors in later life such as employment, pay and even health and well-being as an adult.’1 Therefore every lesson is and will be a language lesson across the whole curriculum.
Reading remains our highest priority. Attainment in reading is a key indicator for success in other curriculum areas and associated with positive child and adult outcomes, particularly for children identified as disadvantaged. Every member of staff should promote and model reading as a lifelong skill for learning and engender a culture of reading for pleasure. Through the Read Achieve Succeed Strategy, we will enable teachers to become expert in the teaching of reading and children to develop as confident, skilled and fluent readers who read for both pleasure and purpose.
Attendance at school is key to achievement. We know that children identified as disadvantaged usually have lower rates of attendance than those who are not. We know that the way to change these trends over time is to work with families to unpick the barriers to attendance so that children can attend well and therefore learn and achieve more.
Parents have a vital role to play in securing and improving outcomes for their child. Research tells us that the greatest impact is seen when pupils see that home and school are working closely together. The remote learning period enabled us to see the stark difference for those children who have families with the capacity and skills to support and those who do not. We now need to prioritise even further the need to support parents to support their children’s education.
Our key strategies of Great Place 2 Learn and Great Place 2 Work are aspirational in their aims. We know that where children have an excellent curriculum offer including first hand experiences for learning and staff are well supported through high quality professional development then pupils attain the very best outcomes. All Professional Development must be rooted in research and the evidence base from our own academies. All CPD will be designed and delivered by our own Development Team so that CPD is carefully matched to our strategic plan and aligned with the frameworks that have been developed to support the quality of provision within the trust. We know that evidence combined with professional expertise is what creates effective evidence informed practice.
