Deliver and monitor your strategy

Practical considerations include preparing people, the approach, and school systems and structures.  Social support might mean creating opportunities for teachers to discuss problems, share insights, and provide peer support and assistance.

See ‘A School’s Guide to Implementation’ guidance report for more information.

NEAT Academy Trust is a mixed MAT of 6 primary and 2 secondary schools in North East England serving communities in areas of high deprivation. As a Trust we prioritise attendance through implementing a consistent approach, working with our school leaders and staff to ensure we are all champions of this vital work. 

Our attendance strategy centres around key systems and processes at a Trust level. Working together we have developed key monitoring practices to ensure our approach is implemented well and improving attendance. These include systems to share information as a Trust, at school leader level as well as wider school staff.

Monitoring approaches used in school include:

• Daily monitoring of attendance with identified pupils prioritised for further support
• Effective / strategic use of data at weekly attendance meetings where a senior, leader, SENDCo and attendance lead is present to review each pupil,
• Early identification of trends through weekly attendance meetings where each pupil discussed and any patterns are identified with clear actions on ways forward and who is responsible.

To support monitoring, a Trust wide infrastructure has been developed to communicate daily attendance data drops to all schools with the systems in place to respond and allocate resources to support pupils and families.

Strategic Attendance Leads across the Trust meet half-termly with attendance champions to share impact, themes and priorities as well as best practice to further improve attendance.

Question for reflection

What practical and social support for staff involved in your Pupil Premium activity is in place? How do you know it is working well?

Seacroft Grange Primary School is a one-form entry school serving a community with high levels of socio-economic disadvantage in Leeds, around 53% of pupils are eligible for Pupil Premium.

Leaders identified social and emotional learning (SEL) as a significant barrier for many disadvantaged pupils. The school has prioritised SEL, helping pupils understand and manage their feelings as part of everyday classroom practice, alongside existing targeted support such as Emotional Literacy Support Assistant (ELSA) provision.

Teachers use the CASEL five core competencies progression framework to social and emotional development. This supports teachers to adapt their approach, helping pupils develop self-regulationSelf-regulated learners apply metacognitive strategies to their learning. They demonstrate self-regulation by managing their motivation, thoughts and behaviour to set goals, monitor working, reflect and review progress., resilience and the language to talk about their feelings. SEL is taught through short, regular sessions and integrated opportunities across the week, with a consistent approach and shared language across the school, supporting pupils to feel safe and able to engage. Leaders began introducing the approach in the summer term by sharing research with staff, before launching the work in September. Since then, teachers have taken part in regular review sessions to discuss pupil needs, reflect on classroom practice and refine approaches together.

Through careful monitoring:

• teachers assess pupils’ development at key points across the year,
• structured review sessions enable staff to reflect on progress and identify next steps,
• leaders use focused observations, staff feedback and day-to-day interactions to understand how the approach is working in practice. This includes noticing changes in pupil engagement, behaviour and the quality of interactions across the school.

Use of the CASEL core competencies has led to more ‘dialogue-rich’ classrooms, where pupils are better able to express themselves, build relationships and manage their emotions. Monitoring has also informed ongoing refinement, including making SEL sessions more discussion-based and responsive to pupils’ needs, while strengthening consistency across classes. This work is still developing, with approaches being trialled across the school and staff building shared understanding.

Question for reflection

How do you understand what’s working, for whom, in which circumstances, and why when thinking about your Pupil Premium activity?

Monitoring is most effective when it follows a simple, repeatable process:

• Identifying what to look for
• Tracking what is happening in practice
• Deciding what, if anything, needs to change

This may include drawing on a small number of signs of progress related to whether an approach is being delivered as intended. Consider progress towards your final outcomes so you can target support and make improvements throughout the year. Adaptations should focus on how an approach is delivered rather than changes to its core components.

Easington Academy, a secondary school in County Durham, is part of the North East Learning Trust. The school identified reading fluency in key stage 3 as a priority based on standardised reading test data from year 7, in addition to more detailed one-to-one diagnostic assessments of selected pupils. Reading fluency was the most significant barrier for around 80% of struggling readers. The school decided to work with Shotton Hall, their local Research School, and adopt an evidence-based reading intervention and peer tutoring programme called ‘Fluency for All’ (FFA).

Quality assurance (QA) and monitoring are integral to the programme. Reading Leads (RLs) submit monitoring regularly which includes a range of data sources: attendance, punctuality and tri-weekly Word Count per Minute (WCPM) assessments. This includes Reading Leads’ observations of sessions, tutors and environment, which are tightly aligned to FFA's core components.

Reading Leads meet with a FFA representative every 3 weeks and synthesise their data sources, looking for signs of progress - or lack of it (i.e. correlating low WCPM with tutor observations) so they can intervene early.

This focus on monitoring informs future iterations or adaptations of programme improvement and, in the shorter term, tutor improvement. The school introduced an adaptation for their context in the form of the 'super tutor' as an outcome of regular, focused QA. Super tutors are allocated to tutoring pairs who they work with during sessions to model great practice. The role of the super tutor is to coach and model, giving granular feedback based on moving their tutee's reading forward and encouraging tutees to engage in repeated reading.

The programme is now considered to be the backbone of the school’s reading, intervention and personal development offer.

Question for reflection

How do you ensure you know whether an approach to support Pupil Premium activity should be sustained, adapted, scaled, or stopped?