The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium

Published

Step 1

Diagnose your pupils' needs

It’s important to know and understand your whole school context – including individual pupil and family needs.

Build a shared understanding of the strengths and needs of your socio-economically disadvantaged children. It’s only when you know your context well that you can make a positive difference to pupils.

Step 1 can support you in developing the ‘challenges’ section of DfE’s Pupil Premium strategy template.

We need to educate ourselves and our school communities and what disadvantage and living on low incomelorem ipsum means. What causes it? What does it look like and feel like for our pupils? We need to explore this reality without assumption or judgement.

Jenn Sills and Marc Rowland

Deputy Director of Gloucestershire Research School and Assistant Director of Unity Research School

Put it into practice

Gather and reflect on a wide range of data to build a rich picture.

Gaining a thorough knowledge of your disadvantaged pupils’ levels of attainment and engagement with learning is the first step to develop an effective Pupil Premium strategy. This may include exploring:

  • attendance data and levels of persistent absence, including internal absence from lessons;
  • attainment data and reviews of pupil learning;
  • teacher feedback on pupils’ levels of engagement and participation;
  • behaviour and exclusions data;
  • pupil and family feedback: identify strengths and challenges;
  • information on wellbeing, mental health, and safeguarding; and
  • information on access to technology and curricular materials
Analysing our outcome data is incredibly important when starting to plan our Pupil Premium strategy. We look closely at the progress of pupils who are socio-economically disadvantaged compared against national benchmarks. We use other vital internal data, including attendance rates, SEND needs as well as information on wellbeing and safeguarding. This helps build a picture of the current needs of our most vulnerable children.

Mari Palmer

Diocesan Director for Education for the Diocese of York, North Yorkshire Coast Research School.

Delve deeply beyond the data headlines.

Once you’ve assessed the performance of your disadvantaged pupils against national benchmarks, you should examine what could be hindering the attainment of those pupils who are below age-related expectations or are eligible higher attainers who are underachieving.

The crux of the matter lies in assessing the actual needs of disadvantaged pupils rather than labelling them. Labels, such as ​‘disadvantaged,’ can unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes and isolate pupils and families who may be experiencing disadvantage…Schools that focus on effective assessment, thorough analysis of needs, and not assumptions, can tailor their strategies more effectively.

Karl Rogerson

Director of Billesley Research School

Spend sufficient time building a shared understanding.

Sharing values around the unique strengths and needs of your pupils will unite your school community around what is being put in place to support the children in your setting.

We can’t be naive about the barriers we identify, but have to challenge deficit narratives, where we might see the majority of barriers as brick walls rather than hurdles. Any blanket statement that begins ​“Our staff can’t…”, ​“Our parents don’t…”, ​“Our pupils will never be able to…” is doing this. Not to say that there won’t be barriers, but that they are not insurmountable.

Mark Miller

Director of Bradford Research School

Take action

Do adopt a detailed approach to identifying your pupils’ needs. Our Explore framework tool—which accompanies the School’s Guide to Implementation guidance report—can support.

Don’t cherry pick data that confirms ‘hunches’ you may already have.

Do consider the strengths and needs of your socio-economically disadvantaged children, including those pupils who are exceeding age-related expectations.

Don’t focus solely on pupils who are working below age-related expectations.

Do examine the data carefully to work out the root causes – e.g. school attendance.

Don’t confuse the observable effects of a problem with its root causes.