Pupil Premium
The Pupil Premium is additional funding provided by the Department for Education (DfE) to help schools improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and ensure that every child has the opportunity to achieve their full potential.
The funding is intended to help address barriers to learning, raise attainment and improve pupils' wider educational experiences.
Who is eligible for Pupil Premium?
Pupil Premium funding is allocated to schools based on the number of pupils who meet the DfE's funding criteria:
- Pupils eligible for Targeted Free School Meals, including those who have been eligible at any point during the previous six years (Ever 6 FSM).
- Children who are previously looked after, including children adopted from local authority care or other state care, and children who left care through a special guardianship order or child arrangements order.
- Service children who meet the separate Service Pupil Premium eligibility criteria.
Children who are currently looked after are funded separately through the local authority, with funding managed by the Virtual School Head.
Children who qualify for the expanded Free School Meals provision solely because their household receives Universal Credit, but whose household earnings exceed the £7,400 threshold, are entitled to free school meals but do not attract Pupil Premium funding.
At Icknield High School we have on average around 29% of our cohort are classed as Pupil Premium. This is above the national average of 26%. Ward data published by the Luton Borough Council in April 2023 also highlights high levels of deprivation in the local community.
Free School Meal funding is provided directly to schools from the government. Luton Borough Council is responsible for processing Free School Meal requests and the school cannot do this directly. For more information about Free School Meals and/or to check your eligibility, please visit the Luton Borough Council website:
How to apply for free school meals | Free school meals and activities | Luton Borough Council
What is the purpose of the Pupil Premium grant?
Nationally, Pupil Premium students are shown to be more likely to underachieve, have social and emotional difficulties and lack access to cultural capital. While some Pupil Premium students don’t fall into these groups, the Education Endowment Foundation’s Guide to Pupil Premium (2024), acknowledges that ‘closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers is one of the greatest challenges facing schools’. This challenge is great as the reasons many Pupil Premium students underachieve are ‘complex and often entrenched from an early age.’
Whilst the gap in England has closed between Pupil Premium students and their non-Pupil Premium peers since the introduction of the grant in 2011, disadvantaged students in 2024/25 still achieved 1.2 grades less than their non-Pupil Premium peers nationally. At current rates, research shows it will take over seventy years to close the disadvantage gap completely. This challenge have also been compounded by the pandemic with a Government commissioned report suggesting the gap between Pupil Premium students and their non disadvantaged growing by a median of 36% as a result of school closures.
As a result, the government continues to make the achievement of Pupil Premium students a top priority, and they provide schools with the additional funding outlined above to help address these inequalities.
However, as the EEF’s report rightly states, the Pupil Premium grant represents much more than money. It ‘ensures there is an ongoing focus of raising the achievement of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in our education system’.
How do we spend the grant money at Icknield High School?
The Pupil Premium allocation for Icknield High School is projected to be approximately £452.100 for 2025-2026.
At Icknield High School we ensure that the grant money we receive for our Pupil Premium students is used strategically to support their learning and development, rather than spent on a series of ad hoc or bolt-on measures.
Pupil Premium is not an individual budget for eligible pupils. Funding is allocated strategically according to the needs of our disadvantaged pupils and may also support wider whole-school approaches that benefit other pupils.
The allocation is spent using a three-tier approach focused around quality first teaching, targeted intervention and behaviour and welfare. For the full list of strategies used and an evaluation of their effectiveness can be found in the three-year strategy document available on the school’s website here.