Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of whether the Pupil Premium is being used to supplement core funding.

The pupil premium is additional funding that schools are allocated to help support pupils from financially disadvantaged family backgrounds and those who are currently looked after or who have left care through adoption or other routes. We give schools flexibility over how they spend this funding, as they are best placed to determine how to use it most effectively to support those pupils who it is intended to benefit. We hold schools to account for their use of the pupil premium through a specific focus in Ofsted inspections and through analysis of school performance tables on the progress and attainment of disadvantaged pupils.

While it is for schools to decide how to use the totality of their funding to support the education of their pupils, we require all local authority maintained schools to publish details online about how much pupil premium funding they have been allocated, the ways in which that funding has been spent and the impact this has had on eligible pupils.

We also encourage schools, when planning their strategy for use of the pupil premium, to draw on high quality research evidence about effective and cost effective approaches to increasing the progress and attainment of eligible pupils. This is reflected in the work of the Education Endowment Foundation, which has received £137 million of Government funding to identify what works to improve disadvantaged pupils’ academic progress.