Pupil Premium Plus is a grant for schools to support them to put things in place to help overcome barriers that can be faced by looked after children in terms of making good academic progress.
It is not a personal budget for individual children but the school may choose to allocate an amount of funding to an individual to support their needs. This must be outlined on the young person’s Personal Educational Plan.
Schools must allocate the grant according to the needs of the whole cohort, and may for example, allocate an amount to ensure that all staff in the school understand and can meet the needs of looked after children. This could be via investment in training, or in additional staff to work with and support looked after children in their school. They may spend it on individual interventions or bespoke emotional or academic support. However it is spent, the school must make sure that they use evidence based interventions and practice to support looked after children to make good progress. They must also report on how they spend the PPP to the Virtual School Headteacher (VSH) via the PEP process and via an annual report.
The majority of the grant is devolved to schools on a termly basis on completion of a satisfactory PEP. The amount which is devolved to schools during the financial year 2022 to 2023 will equate to £1,650 for each looked after child, divided over three terms. For early years settings, the sum is £300 per year. Independent special schools and post-16 providers do not receive PPP.
The Virtual School centrally retains a percentage of the grant to centrally commission additional staff and services to support the whole cohort and to ensure complex individual children without an EHCP are supported to continue in statutory education. The Virtual School commissions additional educational psychology for looked after children with this money.
The Education Endowment Foundation have carried out research into what works well in schools to improve attainment, you can see their evidence summaries here.
If you are unable to view documents of these types, our downloads page provides links to viewing software.
This page was last updated on 31 October 2023