The Pupil Premium Strategy at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic High School reflects the whole school strategy.
Our main aim is to develop the self-esteem, dignity and respect of all members of the community by concentrating on each person’s infinite worth in the eyes of God. Together we celebrate our faith, our diversity and our uniqueness in the eyes of God.
SPHS is “an inclusive school that embraces tolerance, respect and kindness. The school’s culture provides it with a ‘beating heart.’” (Ofsted 2017)
Our philosophy
We are committed to equity and social mobility, ensuring that all students have access to the best of school experiences whatever their starting points and circumstances. We aim to develop in our students a sense of social responsibility as citizens, confidence as individuals and strive to ensure that they are happy and successful learners both at school and in their future working environment.
We want our students to be ready to learn and ready for work.
Our context
St. Peter’s serves the Catholic community in Gloucester, Forest of Dean, Cheltenham and Stroud districts. There are 1535 students on roll. Over 24% of our students qualify for the Pupil Premium. In the past few years, we have seen the attainment gap widen between our disadvantaged students and their non-disadvantaged peers. This has prompted a rigorous review of our Pupil Premium strategy.
Our focus
To support our students, we focus on developing positive relationships in order to personalise their learning experience. Following extensive research (for example from the EEF), sharing good practice with other schools and two Pupil Premium reviews conducted in October 2019 and in November 2019 by Marc Rowland from the Rosendale Research School, we have continued to monitor closely ‘interventions’ in school and focus on the individual needs of our students. We will follow this up by inviting Marc to revisit our school to conduct another review in March 2022.
This academic year has started with challenges like no other due to the pandemic. A key focus is to promote students’ safety and wellbeing, both mental as well as physical, while ensuring that all students have equity of access to the curriculum and wider life of the school.
These actions have helped us consider their barriers to learning. As a result, our Pupil Premium strategy will focus on the following key areas:
Priority 1: Teaching and learning
Good teaching is especially important for pupils with disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Targeting pupil need in the classroom
- Identifying the characteristics of less successful learners and how best teachers can support them to be more successful in their learning
- Helping students plan, monitor and evaluate their learning
- Helping develop students’ language for learning
- Ensuring teaching leads to progress, students are confident about acting on feedback and that expectations are high.
- Supporting students in their developing mastery of literacy, numeracy, technical language
Priority 2: Partnerships – community, home and school
Strong relationships between pupils and adults are fundamental to success in tackling the causes of educational disadvantage.
- Building on the relational strengths of the school
- Building and maintaining positive and inclusive partnerships with the families of our disadvantaged students
- Improving communication
- Improving attendance
- Improving behaviour
- Supporting students by putting their welfare first and providing a Student Support Service
- Encouraging young people to see the relevance of school to the world of work by introducing a range of initiatives designed to introduce them to local employers and course providers
Priority 3: Cultural capital, confidence and careers
We have a responsibility to ensure equity of experience for all our students.
- Ensuring access to opportunities for our disadvantaged students to ensure equity of experience at school
- Providing access to opportunities for our HPA students so they can aspire and fulfil their potential for example through schemes such as the Scholars’ Programme and the Brilliant Club
- Helping students develop resilience, a belief in their capacity for success and learn organisational skills
- Using the expertise in our careers team to help prepare our young people for the demands of the workplace and make choices based on impartial and personalised advice and appoint an external Enterprise Advisor to work with them
- Developing a robust impact evaluation framework and a clear audit trail to ensure all students access relevant, purposeful and personalised ‘additional and extra’
