Pupil Premium Plus (PP+)
Article source: The Adopt South West Co-Production Group and FASD South West
How do I make sure my child’s school claims Pupil Premium Plus+ (PP+)?
£2,410 for adopted primary and secondary school age children
PAC-UK Pupil Premium Plus Service Guide suggests schools focus the funding on the following key areas:
- Nurture and relationships
- Social skills and peer relationships
- Emotional literacy and emotion regulation
- Coping with transitions and change
- Developing a child’s executive functioning skills
- Addressing barriers to information sharing and joint working
Research by Adoption UK found that adopted pupils could be up to 20 times more likely to be excluded. Inclusion should, therefore, play a significant part in any PP+ support.
According to Adoption UK, successful interventions have included:
- Using PP+ to pay for a child’s therapist to come into school and train members of staff
- Providing training in attachment and trauma for all school staff
- Funding a key person to ‘meet and greet’ a child with severe separation anxiety at the start of the school day
- Enabling a teenager to participate in extra-curricular sporting activities that boosts self-esteem
- Putting ‘drawing and talking’ in place for an adopted 6-year-old who carries a lot of anxiety
- Instead of trying to provide blanket solutions, small individual interventions can be incredibly effective. For example, maybe a child needs a quieter place to eat their lunch as the hall is too noisy and overstimulating.
How should I speak to my school about how they spend Pupil Premium Plus on my child?
When meeting with your School Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo), Designated Teacher or Class Teacher discuss what your child needs additional support with.
How to make a claim?
Funding for adopted children was originally covered by the ‘Pupil Premium’, but it was soon recognised that children and young people have additional needs due to gaps in learning and life experiences impacting their ability to learn. Children aged 5-16 who have been adopted from care from England and Wales attract PP+ funding for their schools. Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) is available for children of pre-school age.
You will need to make sure that you have declared your child’s adoption status to the school where they can then claim £2,410 for adopted primary and secondary age children.
In the January census, the school should enter a specific code to indicate that your child is eligible for PP+ as an adopted child. The school should retain this information to ensure that this process is repeated each year but, if your child changes school you will need to declare your child’s status again at the new school as there is no guarantee that this information will be passed on.
If your child has only recently moved into your family, they may still be legally a ‘looked after child’. Looked after children are also eligible for PP+, so ensure that the school is aware of this.
However, unlike PP+ for adopted children, PP+ for looked after children is paid to the local Virtual School.
For adopted children, PP+ goes directly to the school so, once the adoption is finalised, inform the school of the change to your child’s legal adoption status and provide evidence of the change as above to ensure that their information is correct on the census.
Adoption UK can provide further useful information on Pupil Premium +, or your local Virtual School.
Accountability: Schools must now show how they’re using their pupil premium funding by publishing a statement on their own website about how they use their funding and the impact it has on the attainment of pupils through inspections by Ofsted through published performance tables
Virtual School Heads demonstrate to Ofsted how they’re managing pupil premium for looked-after children in the Virtual School Annual Report.
More information
https://www.adoptionuk.org/blog/pupil-premium-plus-the-lowdown
Source: PAC-UK, Adoption Uk, insidegovernment.co.uk