Report Overview

The Sutton Trust has surveyed 1,607 teachers on their use of the Pupil Premium, through the National Foundation for Educational Research Teachers’ Voice Omnibus survey.

Key Findings

A small, but growing, number of schools are using their funding for disadvantaged pupils to offset budget cuts elsewhere – 6% of teachers reported this as the main priority for their school’s pupil premium spending, an increase from 2% in 2015.

One in five teachers didn’t know what the main spending priorities for their pupil premium funding were.

The most common priority for spending, identified by over a quarter of teachers (28%), was on early intervention schemes. 13% said that more 1:1 tuition was a priority and 10% said teaching assistants.

When asked how their school decide what approaches and programmes to adopt to improve pupil learning, 63% of secondary senior leaders said they considered research evidence on the impact of different approaches and programmes; six out of 10 secondary senior leaders said that they used the Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit too, an increase from 48% in 2015.

Recommendations
  • Extension of pupil premium awards so that schools that successfully and consistently improve results for all while narrowing the attainment gap are properly rewarded.
  • Continued support for the pupil premium, backed by strong accountability, to improve attainment for disadvantaged pupils.
  • A strong commitment to the promotion of rigorous evidence, particularly where it has been tested in randomised control trials, by education ministers and policymakers. Ofsted should look at schools’ use of evidence in their inspections and schools should be supported to evaluate approaches themselves.