Pupil Premium
Pupil Premium Spending
At St Mary Queen of Martyrs, our Catholic ethos permeates our school community. We have a strong belief that every child is created as a unique individual with an abundance of talents. They all have the potential to flourish in these gifts if given the right opportunities. As such, our vision is to instill in all children, regardless of abilities or background, a drive to succeed, achieve and believe-we have high aspirations for all. The strong, positive and respectful relationships between all staff and children are at the heart of our school. The holistic needs of our children are paramount and our drive is to meet these, in whatever way we can, in order for them to truly realise their full potential.
Pupil Premium Spending
Pupil Premium funding facilitates our beliefs and visions by enabling us to provide the highest quality education for all. We are committed to raising standards for all our pupils with the aim that they complete their primary education journey with confidence, resilience, pride and above all, having reached their full potential. We want them to be equipped for a continuous and fruitful life-long education and remove any barriers. We have used the Pupil Premium funding to provide a wide range of support programmes for our pupils and these have had a positive impact on raising standards.
As a result of the commitment, passion and hard work of all our staff, our recent end of Key Stage One and Key Stage Two results were above National Average in almost every area. Working in close partnership with Governors and parents, we have high ambitions for the year ahead and a clear focus to ensure that every child succeeds. Narrowing the gap in achievement of pupil premium funded children and their peers is at the top of our spending agenda. We aim for all pupils to make accelerated progress in core subjects. As a school, we have a proven track record of ensuring that pupils make good progress and in recent years the gap between Pupil Premium funded children and Non-Pupil Premium has narrowed. This was recognised in 2012 by the State Minster of Education, stating that we were in the top 250 schools in the country for progress of disadvantaged pupils.
We set high aspirational targets for all so that all children are expected to master their end of year expectations (regardless of particular circumstances), with many exceeding these. We aim to facilitate this through the delivery of high quality teaching and using our outstanding teachers to support and mentor others. In line with the New National Curriculum, we are focused on ensuring all teachers and teaching assistants are confident and competent in their delivery of objectives through extra training opportunities and regular in-house training.
Through changing the structure to lessons, we aim to raise standards in maths, reading and in particular, writing across the school. Using Pie Corbett Talk for Writing programme, we will continue to inspire children to write and apply this in other subjects through cross-curricular writing. We have a strong focus in ensuring pupils are successful in their application of grammar, spelling and punctuation-in particular, to have this as an emphasis in Key Stage One. We have invested in a range of online resources to facilitate this.
Increasing parental/carer engagement has been a key priority as we recognise that working in partnership with parents/carers produces the best results for children. The school has worked hard to engage parents in their child/ren’s learning. We provide parents with a range of opportunities to experience their children performing in school along with offering informative sessions on ‘How to help your child in Maths and English’. Parents are actively encouraged to support children at home with homework and to partake in online resources to enhance their learning. Our school website is used as an information tool to parents/carers and is regularly updated. We are consistent in updating and sharing information, including blogs to inform parents/carers of pupils’ learning.
We aim to closely monitor and improve the attainment of all our children, including vulnerable groups, to ensure that they are given the best opportunities to ‘be the best they can be’.
