The main emphasis of any successful Pupil Premium strategy should be about identifying individual barriers to learning for each pupil, and then providing a bespoke support package to break them down.
From experience of stearing our pupil premium cohort over the last two years, there is one thing that has become very apparent to me which is ...... Your targeted interventions and support package for DP’s must reach beyond the four walls of the classroom.
In simple terms, the support you offer must permeate and impact on home life, improve well-being, make them discover self-worth and raise self-esteem, address 2/3 generations of low aspiration and unemployment, break sometimes negative parental stigma of school developed from their own experiences of education, identity and combat issues in their local community and more importantly ........ provide colleagues with a honest understanding of the chaotic daily battle and challenges these young people face. Once this is established for each pupil, you then can be razor sharp with your approach and pin point the support.
Development of the process
So some time ago I travelled from deep inner city Manchester to the wonderful north east to attend a CPD event called ‘sprials line of enquiry’, which was facilitated by Whole Education. I must say that this was one of the best training days for school improvement that I have been to in the last few years, and the underlying principle was very simple. In summary, spirals is about developing a ‘hunch’, when an area of the school needs improving. Your ‘hunch’ hypothesis is then tested and cross referenced with pupil voice, therefore you plan intervention, support or change teaching dependent on what the pupils tell you. The pupils voice then becomes the catalyst for change and they become central to everything you do. Now this idea
Is not revolutionary, it is just good old common sense. If there is a problem, what is your gut feeling that is causing it? Speak to the pupils who the problem is linked to, then plan the support.(Identify, plan, do, review - cyclical process).
So driving home reflecting on the day, I thought this would be a good process to build into the provision for our disadvantaged pupils. My inital hunch was that we didn’t fully understand the individuals of the cohort enough and teaching, differentiation and support wasn’t pertinent to the individual pupils. This left me pondering on what to do next ......
360 Profile
The idea I came up with was to interview every single DP in our cohort and ask them a set of probing questions about their school and home life. The findings of these interviews I then collated together and built into a profile which was shared with all teaching and support staff in the school. The 360 profiles are used alongside our whole school assertive mentoring programme for DP’s (details of this will be shared in a later blog). The 360 Profile consists of:
KS2 scaled score average
KS2 scaled score Math
KS2 scaled score English
Form tutor
Assertive mentor
House leader
CAT4 data
Self perception of what helps the pupil learn
CAT4 teaching and learning recommendations
turbulance factors
behaviour triggers
hobbies and interests outside of school
Post 16 and career aspirations
who believes in them at school
who they have the best relationship with
FFT alert indicator and flags
who they listen to the most
subjects they feel they do well in
subjecta they need more support in
SEN information and recommendations
KS1 to present attendance tracker
Happiness score
half termly pastoral / academic data
records of assertive mentoring meetings
PASS assessment and interventions
half termly tracker of P8, conduct score, attendance and exclusions.
Individual support package
QA - How will you make sure that staff use the profiles?
Firstly I have linked each Individual profile to each pupil on SIMS so they are easy to access for all members of staff.
As part of the assertive mentoring programme we run for DP, we have a half termly capture. We provide the mentors with pastoral and academic data on a physical report, but they have to also manually input the KPI’s onto the 360 profiles.
Our house leaders and SLT links conduct learning moderations every two weeks and track DP’s in lessons to see if what is written in the profiles then translates into the classroom and is acted upon.
Of course we also ask the pupils!
The 360 profiles went out to staff consultation and were shared with primary partern headteachers and they have been greatly recieved. Below is an annomised example.
I have the questions I used to create the profiles on a google form and the 360 profile template. I am happy to share if you drop me an email.
(Link on my website)
Yes