To receive the above report.

Kevin McDaniel, Director of Children's Services, and Clive Haines, School Leadership Development Manager, provided Members with a brief overview of the Pupil Premium Report for the academic year 2016-17. Members note that the Royal Borough had commissioned a Pupil Premium lead for the academic year from September 2016 to July 2017. Between those dates, all schools across all phases were offered one day support, from their core allocation, which aimed to improve academic outcomes across the curriculum and also improve the life chances for those children from families on a low income or from a disadvantaged background.

In addition, the role encompassed developing cross school working to share good practice, analyse common barriers, develop workable and sustainable strategies to overcome, eradicate or reduce those barriers, develop workable and sustainable strategies to overcome and to eradicate or reduce those barriers using available expertise from within the local authority and the school themselves. Training was held to raise awareness of the Borough’s academic situation to help understand the characteristics of pupils who were financially impoverished, and their subsequent life chances, and to provide practical ideas were taken up; and training took place in a number of schools across the Borough. The training was also made available to new teachers and School Direct trainees.

Whilst the outcomes for the Borough’s most vulnerable pupils at an Age Related Expectation (ARE) was well below their peers, the fact was that good or favourable outcomes for the more able disadvantaged was exceedingly low. The figures for combined reading, writing and maths at greater depth in both key stage one and two was below 2%, which was dramatically less than their peers. It appeared that there had been a drive to improve standards to attain ARE; however, that drive had not been extended beyond that to attain at the higher levels. Data analysis for groups of schools in the Windsor and maidenhead areas showed that was a common issue.

Many of the children who were eligible for Pupil Premium funding were from homes with less than £17k per year income. Often, because of that, they were less likely to experience opportunities that enrich their lives, which limited the experiences they could draw from which, in turn, limited the knowledge and understanding they could bring to some aspects of the curriculum notably, writing. Activities such as the summer camp event and an Aspiration event were organised in the summer term for those judged to be the most in need of enrichment by their schools.

The School Leadership Development Manager stated that the team had been analysing school websites for data and with the school leadership teams. A lot of schools were working on their pupil premium strategy and were looking at gap analysis; moving forward schools needed to recognise the need to keep their focus on pupil premium. The School Leadership Development Manager added it had been decided it was best to apply for funding through the School Improvement Fund which targeted pupil premium children and looked at how the borough assessed them within the curriculum.

Kevin McDaniel, Director of Children's Services stated in the past. Local authorities had been responsible for school improvement. However, with academies, they were responsible for their own school improvement. In 2017, central government had removed funding for school improvement so the Borough had kept a small fund to continue the ongoing work and a bid could be submitted to the School Improvement Fund.

A bid could only be submitted to the School improvement Fund for schools that were in need of improvement. Local Authorities were not able to apply for the funding, schools had to submit the bids themselves. Therefore, the School Leadership Development Manager was working with teaching schools to produce a bid which was additional to resources they already had to help continue the work with pupil premium children. The School Leadership Development Manager was expecting a decision on the submitted bid to be made between November and December 2017.

The School Leadership Development Manager stated that Link Advisors were carrying out head teacher reviews and pupil premium was an objective they would have to complete as part of that. He stated he had to go out to other Boroughs to help strengthen the submitted bid as that grouped three local authorities together. That would give the bid its best chance of receiving funding and that money would then be distributed between teaching schools who would then feed it into other schools to help pupil premium children.

The Director of Children’s Services stated at the end of 2017, 81% of schools had appointed a Pupil Premium Champion which equated to almost all schools connected with the pupil premium agenda. Mishmash and Connections were carrying out work and had set objectives for 2018 where the targets would move from awareness to embedding initiatives. Data analysis was expected to show the areas that needed to be focused on such as maths.

The School Leadership Development Manager confirmed that transition workers had the relationship with schools to start work on transitioning children and to monitor those transitions more closely. Transition Workers were also Link Advisors so they had a close relationship with the Borough and cluster schools. the Director of Children’s Services stated the primary curriculum had changed three years ago and schools were now getting more consistent with their results.

The Chairman stated the table of schools changing showed that most school that had not engaged were in Ascot and had their own programme but, there were 13 other academies that were doing their own imitative. When he subtracted those 13 in Ascot from those that had their own programme in place, it left eight schools that had no plan, support or programme in place for pupil premium. The Direct of children’s Services stated there were three or four that did not respond to the questionnaire and the team knew which schools they were and they were in contact with them to find out why.

The Chairman said he liked to have targets to aim for and one of those was to run the summer camp again in 2018. The Director of Children’s Services responded the obvious measure was academic performance; a summer camp showed there was something in it. Googler were staging events and the Borough had offered to pay for tickets for pupil premium children. He added the team were making sure Pupil Premium Champions kept networking and that had shown how they were working to drive momentum on the ground. The Chairman said networking was critical as they were dispersed within schools so they should have had targets around how well their networking was going. The Director of Children’s confirmed there was some really good practice out there so it would be an idea to invite those Champions to the Forum to discuss their best practice and what worked for them.

The Chairman enquired as to whether or not the Aspiration Day could take place more often. The Director of Children’s Services stated it was not something that was actively being planned as yet but, individual schools could still be running them. He added the pupil premium programme was in the very early stages. At Cabinet in march 2017, the Borough measured how well pupil premium children were doing compared to all children in the Borough. RBWM was the top 20% Borough overall but, came out very low for pupil premium children so, the Borough set a three year target to improve. New data had since been received and the national good level of development had raised by 2%. The Borough had raised their level by 8% in disadvantaged children. However, until the national statistics were published, the Borough did not know how it fared compared to the national figures.

The Director of Children’s Services explained that gaps had been narrowed in key stage one and two for disadvantaged children. Windsor and Maidenhead were in the first year of measures so figures would not be confirmed until January 2018. Indications showed the Borough’s disadvantaged children were doing better than the national average.

Members noted the progress made and looked forward to an update at a future meeting.