Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will take steps to ensure that Pupil Premium Plus is not absorbed into school budgets but is spent spent specifically on adopted the children that qualified for the payment.

The pupil premium grant provides funding to schools to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils. ‘Pupil premium plus’ (PP+) refers to the portion of the pupil premium grant for children who are looked after by the local authority or were previously looked after by a local authority or other state care.

Pupil premium funding, including PP+, is not a personal budget for individual pupils. It is for schools to decide how to allocate the funding after assessing the needs of their disadvantaged cohort, including looked after and previously looked after children. Statutory guidance is clear that the school’s designated teacher should ensure the specific needs of the PP+ cohort are understood by the school’s staff and reflected in how the school uses PP+ to support these children. They should encourage parents and guardians’ involvement in deciding how the PP+ is used.

Maintained schools and academies must publish strategy statements setting out their planned use of pupil premium.